About the project
Much focus has been devoted to understanding the "foreground" of human activities: things we say, actions we do, and sounds we hear. AMBIENT will study the sonic and visual "background" of indoor environments, such as the sound of a ventilation system in an office, the footsteps of people in a corridor, or people fidgeting in a classroom.
The project aims to study how such elements influence people's bodily behaviours and how they feel about the rhythms in an environment. This will be done by studying how different auditory and visual stimuli combine to create rhythms in various settings.
The hypothesis is that various types of rhythms influence people's bodily behavior through entrainment principles, that is, the process by which independent rhythmical systems interact.
Objectives
The primary objective of AMBIENT is to understand more about bodily entrainment to audiovisual rhythms in both local and telematic environments. This will be studied within everyday workspaces like offices and classrooms.
The primary objective can be broken down into three secondary goals:
- Understand more about the rhythms of indoor environments, and make a theoretical model of such rhythms that can be implemented in software.
- Understand more about how people interact with the rhythms of indoor environments, both when working alone – and together.
- Explore how such rhythms can be captured and (re)created in a different environment using state-of-the-art audiovisual technologies.
Work packages
The work in AMBIENT is divided into five work packages:
- WP1: Theoretical Development
- WP2: Observation study of individuals in their offices
- WP3: Observation study of physical-virtual workspaces
- WP4: Exploration of (re)creation of ambience in telematic classrooms
- WP5: Software development
The work packages overlap and feed into each other in various ways.
