Sonic Inhabitation: An Interactive Study of Embodied Sound Cognition in Indoor Spaces

Abstract

Sound is a constant presence in everyday life, yet indoor environments still tend to treat it as background, a by-product of architecture rather than something that actively shapes how people move and behave. This dissertation investigates how humans experience and inhabit indoor spaces through an interactive 3D audio experience. This work challenges that view by examining the reciprocal interaction between a moving body and a responsive acoustic field, conducted at the fourMs Lab of the RITMO research centre (University of Oslo). To this end, Sonic Inhabitation was developed, a fully auditory installation in which a participant's own movement is the exclusive means of accessing an otherwise invisible room. The system combines a Qualisys motion-capture array, a 24-speaker ambisonic loudspeaker setup, and a Max/MSP patch that maps the participant's position and velocity onto sound parameters, joining real-time synthesis and sample manipulation. A set of ambisonic recordings of rooms from different countries, the Intercontinental Dataset, is presented to the participant through a three-phase narrative structure, progressing from a single stationary zone to four overlapping rooms and, finally high interactive environment. Thirteen participants completed the experience: their kinematic data were analysed through Quantity of Motion (QoM), and each session was followed by a semi-structured interview on presence, embodiment, and narrative comprehension. The results are exploratory but point to a common direction: movement in the acoustic overlap zone between rooms was significantly higher than in the rest of the space, independently corroborated by participants, who spontaneously describe boundary-seeking as their dominant exploratory strategy. Movement significantly decreased in the seconds immediately following a sound-trigger event, running against the initial hypothesis that sound would invite more movement rather than a brief pause and the qualitative reading of the interviews, extended by Lena Bauer-Wolf's formal thematic analysis, surfaces recurring themes of cultural resonance, a head-and-neck-centred locus of embodiment, and a tension between acoustic overwhelm and silence as a place of recovery. Together, these results support the claim that the sonic characteristics of an indoor space measurably shape human behaviour, even in the complete absence of visual information. These findings open a fairly direct path forward. The next steps are to bring the full-body motion-capture data (currently unanalysed) into the picture alongside the head-tracking data already used here, to test whether the drop in movement after a sound trigger holds across all sound types or only some, and, longer term, to move the system off a fixed, expensive motion-capture rig and onto more portable tracking, so that a version of this installation could be deployed and tested in other spaces and configurations.