Interactive Soundscapes in Mobile Contexts

Abstract

The following document presents all the work and study performed by Luís Miguel Carreira Marques on his Informatics Engineering Master’s dissertation, at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra. This dissertation builds up on several subjects related to Sound Design, and how sound can be actively explored through a soundscape composition. Therefore, the direction of this project is to incorporate and develop a structured and meaningful soundscape composition in a mobile context (smartphones/tablets), to be tested in an urban environment by the user in an interactive scenario. The desired interaction is provided by the user, with the player’s movement input of the mobile application being the user’s real movement, while he is walking through urban scenarios and being engaged by the soundscape composition that is played, leading him to a real live sound experience. This acts as an audio exploration in an Augmented Reality context. Through this document is presented each step of the project, from its elaboration stages to the state of the art and architecture, and the detailed evolution of the prototype implementation as well as the tests performed to validate the defined research goals.