The UX of Birdsong (Week 1)

Brief: Design an urban birdsong experience.

Research Methods: Digital soundwalking and physical prototyping

Team: Jakob Prufer, Carlotta Montanari, Lingjia Fang, Roshni Suri

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As we were spread across London, we agreed to undertake solo sound walks to see if we could find vastly different results; mine were around the area of Sydenham Hill, Southeast London.

Pathway to an entrance of Sydenham Hill Woods. Photo by author.

During the walks, we each noted down the sounds heard, the time of day the walks were undertaken, and which part of London they were in, plus what we felt whilst hearing these sounds.

We then started pulling the themes from the various walks, noting overlapping, and developing trends. We found consistency in the layers of sound heard, the idea of being still vs moving around, and the diverse types of urban architecture/infrastructure we encountered. From this, we generated some ideas for the physical prototyping.

Analysing the research and generating ideas for prototyping.

One of the prototypes took the form of a 'birdsong sandwich'; physicalising the layers of sounds heard represented physically then laying over the top of each other.

Constructing and demonstrating the birdsong sandwich. Photos by author

We decided to compare our views on the sounds heard by drawing our interpretations of the bird sound by listening to our recordings and sketching out whatever came to us. Surprisingly, we ended up with remarkably similar interpretations of this audio.

Continuing with the prototyping task, we made these interpretations physical by finding varied materials that represented them.

Outcome of the drawing experiment, and turning this into 3D. Photo credits: Jakob Prufer

Our prototype became a development of this: a model of Southbank, which included the materials for the sounds we had heard.

This material choices were instinctive across the group - train sounds as metal pieces, spikes for shrieking gulls, little beads for the short twitter sounds from smaller birds.

Development of the final prototype. Photo credits: Jakob Prufer

For the presentation, we invited a participant (Qibin) to join us with the prototype, and listen to the sounds that we had used to create the physical display, he correctly identified nearly all the sound-material pairings.

For the presentation, we invited a participant to join us with the prototype and listen to the sounds that we had used to create the physical display; he correctly identified nearly all the sound-material pairings.

The feedback for our group noted that it appeared more as an experiment/piece of research to validate what we already thought, rather than producing an experience, which I agree with. We were also told that our model was not produced well enough as a true scale model.

Additionally, it was said it was 'too urban', a comment I disagree with, given the brief was very specifically for urban birdsong. Some something to consider we were given was to make it interactive, look at creating a sound city, and to investigate a diverse set of resources to inform the mapping of sound.

Overall, it is fair to say the group struggled with the physical prototyping, and once we had begun, we latched onto an idea without taking the time to evaluate the final outcome, partly due to fear of having nothing to present, and partly due to time constraints of building something.