Course development

New for 2024 edition of the course: - Drop-in sessions for helping students who need support on tools for working with sound - For training the active listening of course participants, will be a weekly quiz about "Guess the sound of the week", after the suggestion from a student of the 2023 edition of the course.

A new non-compulsory SuperCollider question-based module (OLI) was integrated in the Canvas pages of the course.

The 2021 edition of the course has followed basically the same structure of the 2020 edition: 11 lectures (given by 6 different researchers), 1 study visit at Europa Foley and Adr (because of the pandemic situation, this year the study visit was in the form of a video-recorded keynote by Ulf Olausson), 1 sound walk (for the second time, following the success of this activity in the 2020 edition of the course), 3 laboratory sessions, 1 project, and 5 assignments. Also in 2021 (as in 2020), the course project had a general theme: "soundscape of the future". This has been proved to help students in their project design and implementation in 2020 and this has happened also for the 2021 student projects. Compared to the 2020 edition of the course, we make lab sessions 1 hour longer (from 3 hours to 4 hours) so that students felt less stress to finish in time and this worked well. We added in some lectures content related to the theme of the project, "soundscape of the future", as asked by some students in the 2020 evaluation of the course. Because of the pandemic situation, it was not possible to have all students working on their project in our labs and/or coming to KTH. For this reason we introduced several project suggestions, mainly based on sonification, which could be implemented by working at home and/or online. As suggested by some students at the end of the 2020 edition of the course, we added two non-compulsory modules about two software tools that can be used in laboratory sessions and projects. One module about SuperCollider and one about Pure Data. The modules were based on a short video lecture, a PDF file with text instructions and suggestions, and some useful code examples which could be used in the final project. This was done for students who were not familiar with these tools.

We will make lab sessions 1 hour longer: from 3 hours to 4 hours so that students feel less stress to finish in time (This can be necessary for some of the students. Anyway, in the 2020 edition of the course most of the students finished the labs within 3 hours.) We will have some of the content in the lectures more clearly related to the theme of the projects, "soundscape of the future". We will introduce more video examples. Several lecture have them already but there is room for more examples in other lectures. We will add some non-compulsory modules about software tools that are used in laboratory sessions and project (Max 8, superCollider, Pure Data, Audacity, VCV, etc.). This is for students who are not familiar with these tools. Students who would like to, will have the possibility to take these modules.

No changes have been made compared to the version of the course in year 2018.

1. The schedule of the project start, that was further anticipated by some working days for giving students more time to dedicate to the project as emerged in previous year course evaluations. In 2018, students had about 35 working days between the project workshop (January 29, 2018) and the final presentation (March 16, 2018), compared with 31 working days in 2017 (and 30 days in 2015-2016, 25 in 2014, and 20 in 2013). This has allowed a less stressed completion of the project and the development of much complex projects. 2. A new lecture dedicated to sound design mixing both theory and a hands-on session, used as preparation to the laboratory sessions. 3. New laboratory sessions in which students were adding sonic tracks to both concrete and abstract short movies. Sonic tracks were developed using three different techniques for each of the three labs: (1) sample sounds found in internet repository, (2) synthesized sounds realized by using different available softwares, (3) sound synthesized by using body /hand gestures tracked by sensors (such as Leap Motion). Each lab session was introduced with a crit session in which solutions of the students were discussed ny all participants. 4. We reduced the paper reviews from 3 to 2 as suggested by students in previous years.