Investigating Artistic potential of the Dream Interface: the Aural Painting

Discrete REconfigurable Aural Matrix (DREAM) is a multi-speaker array technology designed for sonifying spatial visual data using human anterior discrete spatial aural perception potential. DREAM treats each individual speaker as an aural counterpart to a pixel or a pixel cluster of an anterior visual display surface, such as an LCD screen. The pilot study was conducted to assess DREAM’s ability to sonify geometric shapes ranging from simple static objects to more complex layered compositions and consequently to ascertain its potential as a complementing technology in a number of interaction scenarios, most notably as a foundation for the arguably novel art genre, the aural painting. Apart from spawning new creative and research vectors, the preliminary study has also yielded promising results with 73% users being capable of perceiving geometric shape, 78% shape location, and 56% shape size, thus warranting additional studies with larger speaker arrays and additional applied scenarios.