The potential of spatial sound to immerse, guide, and affect humans is well-known, but has so far received little attention in the field of human-robot interaction. In this paper, we therefore explore how a robot emitting spatial sound affects a human’s impressions and behavior. Following a Research-through-Design (RtD) approach, we created two immersive robot sound designs which are emitted across the robot’s body and through speakers in the environment. In an evaluation study, participants interacted with the robot and shared their impressions through semi-structured interviews. Reactions showed that spatial robot sound had a notable effect on participant behavior and impressions, influencing, among others, how much attention they paid to the physical robot and how much animacy and agency they attributed to it. We report on our insights into how spatial sound may provide social robots with new ways to inform and engage the humans around them.

In this paper we describe a qualitative study investigating how artists work with a scalable and distributed audio-visual installation system that utilises IoT technology. With no prior experience of the system invited artists incorporated the new technology according to a creative brief for a public performance. We examined how they (i) built an understanding of the technology’s affordances, (ii) refined their creative goals, and (iii) deployed collaborative strategies to achieve creative outcomes. We examine how the artists worked from the examples we provided to integrate our audio-visual system and develop their creative work. We identify three distinct creative strategies and use these to suggest ways that the design of examples, presets and readymade configurations can be successfully integrated into interfaces for new creative technologies.

INTRODUCTION: Sound is an important interaction modality and a large part of human interaction happens in the aural domain. While research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has long explored spoken language for interacting with humans, sound as a broader-and, to a significant degree, nonlexical (i.e., without words)-medium has been given comparably less attention. Yet, the range of sounds that robots can produce is vast, encompassing, among others, mechanical noise, music, and utterances that mimic human and animal vocalizations with varying degrees of realism. The sound of a robot's machinery can shape our perceptions and expectations [11, 17], music serves as a medium for robots to engage and communicate [18], and shared musical experiences can strengthen the bond between humans and robots [5]. Sonifications may enhance the legibility of movement and gestures [4, 7, 15] and beep sounds may be used to communicate emotions [2, 14]. Getting closer to themargins of language, robotsmay take inspiration from non-lexical fillers such as "uh" [13, 16] and backchannels such as "mhmm" [8, 12]. More generally, pitch, intensity, and other human prosodic variations may be drawn on in robot sound design [3, 10]. The information that can be extracted from sound in a robot's environment is equally rich. Beyond the recognition of semantic content, robots use, for example, sound source localization to gain a better understanding of their environment [9], or analyze a human's voice timbre and tone to distinguish speakers [6] and detect emotion [1].

Can we influence how a robot is perceived by designing the sound of its movement? Drawing from practices in film sound, we overlaid a video depicting a robot's movement routine with three types of artificial movement sound. In a between-subject study design, participants saw either one of the three designs or a quiet control condition and rated the robot's movement quality, safety, capability, and attractiveness. We found that, compared to our control, the sound designs both increased and decreased perceived movement quality. Coupling the same robotic movement with different sounds lead to the motions being rated as more or less precise, elegant, jerky, or uncontrolled, among others. We further found that the sound conditions decreased perceived safety, and did not affect perceived capability and attractiveness. More unrealistic sound conditions led to larger differences in ratings, while the subtle addition of harmonic material was not rated differently to the control condition in any of the measures. Based on these findings, we discuss the challenges and opportunities regarding the use of artificial movement sound as an implicit channel of communication that may eventually be able to selectively target specific characteristics, helping designers in creating more refined and nuanced human-robot interactions.

Media multiplicities are media artworks that employ multiple networked digital devices to create holistic aesthetic effects. Examples include the networked light artworks of Squidsoup, the Spaxels drone-mounted light performances, DrawBots, Siftables and many others. In multiplicitous media artworks, each individual device is a programmable node connected to other nodes via a network connection, and may combine any number of sensors and actuators. A number of development technologies support artists and designers to configure and create media multiplicities, but this domain offers new challenges for creative practitioners. This workshop aims to bring together experts in creative coding and interaction design to discuss and conceptualise frameworks for the practice of media multiplicities. Open challenges include: speed of setup; ease of hardware configuration; speed of code deployment; ability to model and simulate works in VR; network connectivity and stability; and understanding network, computation and power constraints.

The project investigates how interactions with complex (biologically inspired swarming) behaviors of multiple robots are understood by human participants within a performative and dramaturgical system. Nonanthropomorphic robots in the form of roller skates are used in innovative ways by creating social formations from their movements, for example a leader and followers in a conga line. Synchronized audio signals and speech-like sonic structures are used in innovative ways by influencing and engaging the participant's interactions with the robots. Localization data of the robots in space is mapped to control the surround sound and lighting within the space. This is used to enhance audience immersion and engagement within the interactive performance work.

This workshop will introduce creative coding audio for the Raspberry Pi, using the 'beads' platform for audio programming, and the 'HappyBrackets' platform for inter-device communication and sensor data acquisition. We will demonstrate methods to allow each self-contained battery-powered device to acquire sensor data about its surroundings and the way it is being interacted with, as well as methods for designing systems where groups of these devices wirelessly communicate their state, allowing new interaction possibilities and approaches.

This paper describes the development of the hardware and software for Bloom, a light installation installed at Kew Gardens, London in December of 2016. The system is made up of a set of nearly 1000 distributed pixel devices each with LEDs, GPS sensor, and sound hardware, networked together with WiFi to form a display system. Media design for this system required consideration of the distributed nature of the devices. We outline the software and hardware designed for this system, and describe two approaches to the software and media design, one whereby we employ the distributed devices themselves for computation purposes (the approach we ultimately selected), and another whereby the devices are controlled from a central server that is performing most of the computation necessary. We then review these approaches and outline possibilities for future research.

This article reviews the development of computational models of creativity where social interactions are central. We refer to this area as computational social creativity. Its context is described, including the broader study of creativity, the computational modeling of other social phenomena, and computational models of individual creativity. Computational modeling has been applied to a number of areas of social creativity and has the potential to contribute to our understanding of creativity. A number of requirements for computational models of social creativity are common in artificial life and computational social science simulations. Three key themes are identified: (1) computational social creativity research has a critical role to play in understanding creativity as a social phenomenon and advancing computational creativity by making clear epistemological contributions in ways that would be challenging for other approaches; (2) the methodologies developed in artificial life and computational social science carry over directly to computational social creativity; and (3) the combination of computational social creativity with individual models of creativity presents significant opportunities and poses interesting challenges for the development of integrated models of creativity that have yet to be realized.

In this paper we describe the design of a large-scale interactive light and music intervention on a corporate high rise building and its surrounding urban area. Designing for interaction with media façades has traditionally posed challenges regarding proxemics, scale of the augmented architecture and placement of interactive spaces. With the increasing availability and affordability of interactive technologies, factors such as playability and tangibility are assumed not only to be present but also to enable richer collective experiences. We propose a new approach for interaction with large media façades employing embodied audio-visual interaction at the floor level. That way, the floor level serves as proxy for interacting with the media façade whilst facilitating social encounters. We discuss aspects considered during different phases of the project development and derive principles for connecting zones of proxemics, promoting encounters by distributing the performance, designing for urban activation and isolating implementation concerns.

The Agent Designer is software for designing virtual musical software agents that are capable of remotely controlling a musical composition, making decisions that are derived from previous human performances and additional creative input in the structuring of this example data. This composition, Backgammon, is a collaboration between the Agent Designer's creator Aengus Martin and musician Ollie Bown. In this performance, musical agents created with the Agent Designer control part of a dynamic composition in such a way that an improvising partner (Ollie Bown on live electronics) has partial control over what the system can do. In this way the boundary between the active and passive possibilities of software objects becomes the subject of a compositional process. The title refers to the game-like dynamics that arise, involving chance, choices and the ability to dramatically interrupt the other's course of action.

The Agent Designer Toolkit is the result of a study of methods for designing the behaviour of musical agents (i.e. autonomous systems) intended to perform high-level musical decision-making. It uses machine learning methods informed by a musician's knowledge and insights, to discover the salient musical patterns demonstrated in a set of example performances. Based on these patterns, it can produce agents with a variety of behaviours, corresponding to differing degrees of similarity to the demonstrated performance style. The agents can perform in real-time and respond to other musicians or external factors.

This paper examines how models from ecology and evolutionary multi-agent systems can be used for creative applications. We outline a minimal, general specification for an ecosystem to be applied to the production of creative artefacts, based on spaces, materials, features and actions. Using this specification, we consider how basic evolutionary principles based on niche construction can be used to establish the emergence of heterogeneous structures in the simplest imaginable cases to which our framework applies. We investigate the minimal conditions for the formation and maintenance of boundaries, and then apply the results of our initial models to the design of a creative artwork, contrasting differences between niche-constructing and neutral evolutionary models.