New publication: Acoustic Interfaces
Interdisciplinary perspectives on the interfaces of technologies, sounds, and people
published by Christoph Borbach (University of Siegen, CRC 1187), Timo Kaerlein (Ruhr-University Bochum), Robert Stock (Humboldt University Berlin) and Sabine Wirth (Bauhaus University Weimar)
The anthology “Acoustic Interfaces: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Interfaces between Technologies, Sounds, and People” published by Springer as an open-access book, opens up new perspectives on the media history and practice of analog and digital interfaces.
About the book
In today’s media culture, acoustic interfaces are becoming increasingly important, as can be seen in many areas of everyday life such as work, mobility, and leisure. This volume takes this development as an opportunity to open up new perspectives on the media history and practice of analog and digital interfaces in order to highlight the significance of acoustics for the differentiation of contemporary interface cultures. The recent ubiquity of smart speakers, natural language processing, and voice user interfaces indicates a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction, whose media-cultural significance can only be adequately addressed through a comparative analysis from the perspectives of media and sound studies, ludomusicology, and dis/ability studies. Only digital infrastructures and machine learning algorithms make voice assistant technologies a social reality. This invites us to subject their cultural and technological history, media practice, affordances, and platformization to closer examination, combining aesthetic and technical as well as historical and computational approaches to analysis. In this way, the diverse and contradictory politics of acoustic interfaces are explored in depth and in their development in the 20th and 21st centuries. The analysis thus goes beyond a purely present-day diagnosis and at the same time formulates critical positions for the contextualization of future acoustic interface technologies.
The anthology includes contributions by Christoph Borbach, research assistant in project P04 “Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing” together with Benjamin Lindquist on “Bodies, Voices, Prostheses. A History of Talking Interfaces as Assistive Technologies“ and by Tim Hector, research assistant in project B06 ”Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households“ together with Benedikt Merkle on “Tools and Media Practices. Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Paradigm of Object-Oriented Programming”.