Glossary

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A

Audiocumentary — an audio documentary. A short recorded piece that captures the sonic character of a place or situation. The form used in Assignment 1.

Actuator — a device that converts an electrical signal into physical action. In this course: a speaker, a motor, an LED.

Amplitude — the magnitude of a sound wave’s displacement from equilibrium. Perceived as loudness.

Attack — the time it takes for a sound to reach its peak amplitude after onset. A piano has a sharp attack, a bowed string a slow one.

Behavior — the rule or logic that determines how a system responds to its environment.

C

Cross-modal description — the use of vocabulary from other sensory domains (visual, tactile) to describe sound. “Warm,” “sharp,” “dark,” and “rough” are all cross-modal. Common because sound lacks a dedicated descriptive vocabulary of its own.

D

Decentralized system — a system with no central controller, where global behavior emerges from local interactions between nodes.

Duration — how long a sound lasts. One of the primary physical dimensions of sound, alongside frequency, amplitude, timbre, and space.

E

Ecological event perception — the process by which listeners identify real-world sound sources and events from acoustic information alone. Central to how we make sense of our everyday soundscape.

Emergence — the appearance of complex, unpredictable behavior from the interaction of many simple components — none of which, alone, produces that behavior.

Envelope — the shape of a sound’s amplitude over time. Classically described as: attack, decay, sustain, release (ADSR).

Expressive sound — sound that communicates through its own qualities — texture, rhythm, dynamics, register — rather than through learned association. The meaning is felt, not decoded. See also Symbolic sound.

F

Field recording — the capture of sound in real environments. Used in this course as a listening practice: a way of attending to the sonic character of a space before designing within it.

Frequency — the number of oscillation cycles per second, measured in Hertz (Hz). Perceived as pitch.

Furniture music — musique d’ameublement. Erik Satie’s concept (1920) of music designed to be part of the environment — to be heard, not listened to. The conceptual frame for the Lucid.Bar final event.

H

Hearing — the passive physiological reception of sound waves by the auditory system.

Interaction — the exchange between a person and an object: action produces response.

L

Latency — the delay between an input event and its corresponding output. Critical in interactive and networked sound systems.

Listening — the active, intentional direction of attention toward sound.

M

Mapping — the design decision connecting sensor input parameters to sound output parameters.

Microcontroller — a small, self-contained programmable chip that reads sensors and controls outputs. In this course: the ESP32.

N

Node — in a decentralized system, an autonomous unit that acts on local information and communicates with its neighbours. Each Smart Thing in the Lucid.Bar is a node.

O

Object — a physical artifact with material properties, a history of use, and a position in space.

OSC — Open Sound Control. A network protocol for real-time communication between sound and multimedia devices.

P

Patch — in Max or Plugdata, a visual program made of connected objects. The basic unit of work.

Psychoacoustics — the study of the relationship between physical sound properties and subjective auditory perception.

R

Reduced listening — a mode of listening (Pierre Schaeffer) that attends to sound as pure sonic material, detached from its source or meaning.

Reverberation — the persistence of sound in a space after the source has stopped, caused by multiple reflections off surfaces. Shapes the perceived character of a space.

Rule set — the practical form of a behavior: if sensor reads X, output sound Y. The design space between sensing and sounding.

S

Sensor — a transducer that converts a physical phenomenon (motion, pressure, light, temperature…) into an electrical signal or digital data.

Smart Thing — an object augmented with a sensor and a sound behavior. The central artifact of this course.

Sound Design — the practice of designing and shaping sound purposefully for a given context.

Soundscape — the acoustic character of a place — all the sounds that constitute it, heard together in context.

Symbolic sound — sound that carries learned, agreed meaning: alarms, notifications, status tones. The meaning is decoded, not felt. See also Expressive sound.

T

Thing — an object that has been given presence beyond its function, through use, wear, and relationships with the people and space around it.

Thing-Centeredness — a design approach that takes the object as its starting point. Rather than asking what the user needs, it asks what the character of the object is, and what would extend — rather than overwrite — that character.

Timbre — the perceptual quality that distinguishes two sounds at the same pitch and loudness. Determined by harmonic spectrum and temporal envelope.

Transducer — any device that converts energy from one form to another. Microphones and speakers are both transducers.