SoniHED 2025

Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data

REGISTRATION IS OPEN!

The registration to SoniHED 2025 on 29th January 2025 is OPEN!

Please note that registration is FREE, but MANDATORY!

You can participate ONLINE or IN PERSON in Stockholm at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

The precise (online and in person) address to be sent after registration.

Registration link:

https://www.kth.se/form/67619c0fde17f8408b1696c3

In collaboration with the Sound for Energy Project, the EU MSCA Lullabyte Doctoral Network and the DRS Special Interest Group in Sound-Driven Design, and the support of Digital Futures Centre, we are delighted to announce the 3rd Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data (SoniHED 2025), which will take place online and in person for those in Stockholm at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, on Wednesday 29 January 2025.

About SoniHED

The first SoniHED Conference was organized and chaired in 2014 by Sandra Pauletto and colleagues from the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York (https://www.york.ac.uk/c2d2/seminars/sonihed/). It brought together experts in the fields of sonification, sound design, health sciences and environmental science to evaluate and discuss novel sonic ways to engage with data from these fields. As a result, the Guest Issue on Data Sonification and Sound Design in Interactive Systems for the Journal of Human Computer Studies (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2015.08.005) was published.

The second edition of SoniHED took place in 2022 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. You can find the programme and proceedings of the previous edition of SoniHED 2022 HERE.

Sonification, and more generally sound design, sonic interaction design and sound-driven design, are concerned with using data and information in sonic form so that listeners (experts and/or non-experts) can perceive and engage with data structures, complex information and their meaning.

We are interested in short (max 4 pages) or long research papers (max 8 pages) at the intersection of sound, health and environmental science.

This year we especially, but not exclusively, welcome research addressing the theme: Sound and Sleep.

Sleep and relaxation play crucial roles in maintaining physical, mental, and emotional health. Many people use sound and music to aid their sleep. In this context, there is growing interest in interactive sonic designs and applications informed by sleep data that can embed in our lives and sleeping habits in a more sustainable and personal way.

The Conference will include guest speakers, peer-reviewed paper presentations, and more.

Guest Talks

Sound and Sleep Panel

Biography

Kira Vibe Jespersen, PhD, is MSc in psychology with an additional BA in Music Therapy. She holds a PhD in health sciences from Aarhus University, where she is currently Associate Professor at the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center of Excellence for Music in the Brain. Her research focuses on clinical applications of music with a particular interest in the effect of music on sleep and the use of music for insomnia. Using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods, she evaluates the effects of music for improving sleep as well as the potential neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these effects. In a related line of research, she is mapping the use of music as a sleep aid in the general population and use surveys and big data from Spotify and YouTube to investigate the universal and subgroup characteristics of sleep music.

The use of music as a sleep strategy: Who, when, why and what?

Music is often mentioned as a self-help tool for facilitating sleep. This leads to questions about how common this practice is, why people use music as a sleep aid, and which music they use? In a recent survey study among the Danish population, we shed light on the prevalence and frequency of using music for sleep as well as the characteristics of people using music compared to other sleep strategies. When looking at the type of music used for sleep, slow, soothing music is typically recommended. However, when analysing music tracks from Spotify sleep playlists, we find that people use a broad range of music genres. Even though sleep music is generally less energetic, more instrumental and acoustic than general music, we also see a large variation in the music characteristics. This variation may be explained by individual preferences and different motivations for using music as a sleep aid.

Kira Vibe Jespersen, Aarhus University, Denmark

Thomas Andrillon, Institute du Cerveau (ICM), France

Biography

I am a neuroscientist based in France, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. I am part of the Mov'It research group and the "Sleep, Dreams and Consciousness" team (DreamTeam).

I hold a Bachelor in Life Sciences and did my Cognitive Neuroscience Master thesis in the laboratory of Prof Giulio Tononi and Prof Chiara Cirelli (University of Wisconsin at Madison), under the supervision of Prof Yuval Nir. I graduated from a PhD in Cognitive Sciences at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, under the supervision of Sid Kouider. I then moved to Australia to do a post-doc with Prof Nao Tsuchiya (Monash University) and Prof Joel Pearson (University of New South Wales).
I moved back in Paris in February 2021.

Are you sleeping? Auditory processing during sleep

When we sleep, we are generally unable to respond to external stimuli, such as sounds. However, this state of unresponsiveness is not absolute. Even when sleepers do not visibly react to external sounds, it does not mean that these auditory inputs are not processed by the brain. In this presentation, I will discuss a series of studies demonstrating that our brain continues to monitor the environment during sleep and is capable of performing complex cognitive processes. For instance, salient stimuli, such as hearing one’s own name or the cry of one’s baby, are more likely to trigger an awakening. Even when we remain asleep, the auditory cortex can faithfully encode auditory information. Brain activity recordings during sleep reveal that the brain can process more complex auditory information, such as extracting the meaning of a word or allocating attention. However, certain processes, particularly predictive ones, seem to be significantly impaired during sleep. Additionally, sleep appears to inhibit the formation of new memories, rendering most of these processes implicit and ultimately forgotten. In conclusion, the sleeping brain is far from inactive. Instead, it flexibly monitors its surroundings while maintaining the unique constraints and limitations of the sleep state.

Miriam Akkermann, FU Berlin, Germany

Biography

Miriam Akkermann is musicologist and sound artist. She received a PhD in musicology from the Berlin University of the Arts, and completed her habilitation at Bayreuth University. Her research areas include music of the 20^th and 21^st century, computer music and music technology, digital musicology, musical performance practices and archiving music. A special emphasis lies on examining the intersection of music research and artistic practice. Within the framework of “Lullabyte,” the researches focus is set on the effect of music on sleep.
Since April 2024, she holds the Ernst-von-Siemens endowed professorship for new music at FU Berlin.

Lullabies. Evidences of an exciting relationship

Lullabies seem to have existed throughout all centuries and have been traced in many different cultures. However, not every song that is considered a Lullaby was written to sing children to sleep. The term subsumes – from a western music perspective – many love songs, Abendlieder and Christmas carols. In a broader sense, “sleep music” also includes sound scape compositions, ambient music, and drone or noise-based audio tracks including nature sounds. In contrary, not all music tracks used for going to sleep would be considered a Lullaby. From a musicological perspective, Lullabies are hence hard to define. At the same time, this very heterogeneous collection can provide some insights into how people have thought about the relationship between music and sleep.

Sound and Sustainability Panel

Cecilia Katzeff, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Biography

Cecilia Katzeff is an associate professor in human-computer interaction at the Dep. of Sustainable development, Environmental Science and Engineering, SEED, KTH and a faculty member of Digital Futures. Katzeff holds a PhD in psychology and her research focuses citizens’ role in the energy transition. It includes questions around how people relate to energy in their everyday life and how digital technology and policy development plays a role in this relationship. As the electricity system becomes more and more automated, Katzeff’s research also raises questions on how this affects our homes and the dynamics of households. Linked to this, the research explores the emerging phenomenon of energy communities as an engine in the energy transition, in urban as well as in rural areas of Sweden. Katzeff is on the board for the organization Sveriges Energigemenskaper and is the KTH project partner and part of the management group of Resistance and Power – Smart Grids for The Many People (Family Kamprad Foundation) – a research program collaboratively run by KTH, Chalmers, Lund University, Linköping University and Uppsala University. (Photo by D. Bederoff)

Abstract

My presentation focuses on the role of households in the transition to a sustainable energy system and the transformation of the electricity system into a smart grid. It will address people’s relationship to energy and how this is intertwined with technology development and the home environment.

As private households are often referred to an “untapped source of flexibility” I will speak a bit about how this is supposed to happen. What type of expectations are formulated? What type of technology is supposed to support the change of practices in the home and what is expected from households themselves? I will bring up the concept of the home and how it is affected by the digital change society is going through. In regarding the home as an intersection of streams such as policies, infrastructure, technologies, norms and everyday life it becomes an arena for research questions studying people’s participation in the energy system. The home forms a central part of people's lives. It is not just a residence or building, but also a social place. Does the implementation of smart grids in society lead to a digital revolution in the home? This is something we will probably be able to tell in the future. Right now, we may speculate and learn from history. How has the home been affected by past technological changes? During the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't just industry that was transformed by new technology. The transformation also occurred in the homes. Finally, I will talk about a returning type of organization of the energy system in Sweden – the energy community. At the end of 2024 the Swedish Energy Agency delivered a governmental inquiry specifying what type of actions need to taken to speed up the development of energy communities in Sweden. I will talk about some preliminary findings from our research in two ongoing projects on the role of households in this emerging type of actor in the energy system.

Katharina Groß-Vogt, Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik - IEM, Austria

Biography

Katharina Groß-Vogt researches and teaches sonification and sonic interaction design, i.e. two interdisciplines combining her backgrounds in music and science. She is senior scientist at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM), University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria. Sonification research projects covered, e.g., physics, climate science, or physiotherapy. For her thesis Sonification of Simulations in Computational Physics she received the Award of Excellence of the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research 2010. Groß-Vogt served as a board member at the International Community of Auditory Display (ICAD) 2012-16 and is part of the Steering Board of the Audio Mostly Conference (since 2020). She runs the SIDlab at IEM with a focus both on sound and sustainability, see https://sidlab.iem.sh.

Peripheral & persuasive sounds

In sonification, the objective representation of sound has long been sought, but no standards have yet been achieved. One reason for this is that sound is perceived very subjectively, based on our listening and music experiences. The most effective examples of sonification are based on its evocative, unconventional and affective character. In a world that relies ever less on objective truths, we can use this emotional nature of sound to move people towards preferred behavior, i.e. for persuasive design.

In our SIDlab, we have a focus on sustainability, so that even when teaching and researching sound, the content should work towards the UN SDGs. The projects presented athttps://sidlab.iem.sh/range from small seminar papers to Master's theses in sound engineering and sound design. We want to sensitize students to the climate crisis, for example, and challenge their skills and creativity to try out small solutions. While we adhere to a broad definition of sustainability that includes also social dimensions, in this talk I will focus on examples that are intended to support a more ecological lifestyle. On the one hand, sonifying data sets can leave a different impression than reading numbers or looking at a dry graph - as we can try out by listening to the “heartbeat of the Earth”. The effect of engagement is difficult to research, but is evident in the proliferation of sonification in the media. On the other hand, we have gained experience in augmenting interactions in the real world with informed sounds. In this case, the sounds need to be subtle and acceptable, which is a major design challenge. Ideally, additions to the soundscape are only peripheral to our attention, so do not interfere, but can come into our focus if we want them to. We conducted basic research to find out how much information can be conveyed at this periphery, and set up prototypes of peripheral and persuasive sound. In an earlier experiment, our colleagues were given feedback on the power consumption in the kitchen of our institute by changing the reverberation of the room in real time, making the abstract entity of energy perceptible. And recently, a Master thesis explored the effect of different interactive sounds for driving electric cars, with the aim of achieving a more relaxed and therefore more ecological driving style.

Mattias Höjer, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Reflections and transformation. On sustainable transport futures

I have no knowledge from before about sonification, so this is an exciting and unaccustomed context to me. I have been considering what parts of my work would be closest to what I would guess is relevant for sonification researchers, and I then thought about some work I have been doing with the artist Jens Evaldsson. We have made two movies where we explore ways of interacting with a receiver in a very different way than I do when communicating as a researcher. During the conference, I hope to show our latest 5 min movie “Reflections and transformations”, but we are cutting the movie only now. In case that is not ready in time, I will instead show the 6 min movie “Art of Rules” from 2021.

Before the movie, I will present work on car travel and greenhouse gas emissions. It will be based on a project with colleagues Jonas Åkerman and Hampus Berg Mårtensson. We have investigated how far electrification of the car fleet, biofuel and sharing of cars can take us towards a sustainable car transport system. We have also explored what would be required by the whole transport system to be in aligned with climate targets. In short, the results indicate that reduced car travel will be required and that electrification does bring down emissions from driving, but that there are large challenges with emissions from production of cars and from what to do with the fossil cars that should no longer be on the roads.

Biography

Mattias Höjer is professor in Environmental Strategic Analysis and Futures Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, since 2012. During 2008-2017 he was Director for a Vinnova Center of excellence, CESC, focusing on digitalization for sustainable development. He has been Program director for a doctoral program (Planning and decision analysis) the last ten years. Since beginning of his carrier he has been working on topics related to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. His main areas have been buildings and transport, coming from a planning department. The use of digitalization for supporting mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions through a more efficient use of buildings and transport, thus supporting lower total volumes of both buildings and transport, has been a thread that can be traced in his research back to by PhD thesis, called “What is the point of IT?”. Mattias was co-author of “Digital Reset” and member of the expert panel of D4S, Digitalization for Sustainability 2021-2022, who authored that reporthttps://digitalization-for-sustainability.com. Ha has also been involved in various groups for supporting policies striving for using digitalization for reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Sound and Movement Panel

Sofia Dahl, Aalborg University, Denmark

Biography

Sofia Dahl holds a PhD in Speech and Music communication from KTH, Royal Institute of Technology and currently affiliated with Aalborg University, where she is associate professor in music cognition.Originally with a background from electrical engineering and musicology, Dahl’s field of research has become increasingly transdisciplinary over time, spanning disciplines such as music psychology, music performance, movement and neuroscience, interaction design, and music acoustics. For the past five years she has collaborated with experts in neurorehabiltation to design sonification for motor learning.

Movement in music performance: lessons for movement sonification?

A beginner learning to play the violin can be demanding to listen to. A professional violinist, practicing a difficult passage over and over, can also test our patience despite producing a different quality of sound. In both cases, the novice and expert player engage in motor learning with real time sound feedback. A rough estimate is that 10 000 hours of deliberate practice is needed to achieve mastery, and sound feedback is an integral part of this process for musicians. Depending on the instrument and type of playing, the feedback may be continuous, such as the sustained sounds produced by bowing or singing, or discretely separated in time, such as the impulse like sounds for keyboards and percussion. In either case, sound feedback helps to develop highly specialized movement patterns resulting in differences in both sound and movement quality between novice and expert, easily distinguishable also for non-experts. During the past century, researchers have studied movement and sound production in music performance, documenting clear differences between skills and novices but also individual differences. These individual differences as well as other, random, variability make it challenging to quantify and describe the movements. When sonifying movements we may face a similar problem: what part of the movement is essential to reinforce and how to deal with individual differences? Should feedback be given continuously or discretely? I will present examples from the study of movement in music performance as well as sounds designed by our team during five years of developing real-time sound feedback to support motor learning for patients re-learning daily activities such as sit-to-stand transfers and gait.

Lanie Gutierrez-Farewik, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Biography

Lanie Gutierrez-Farewik is Professor of Biomechanics at KTH Engineering Mechanics, the director of the Promobilia MoveAbility Lab, and the president of Swedish Society of Biomechanics. She has a background in engineering and medical science and nearly a decade of clinical experience with children and adults with motion disorders. She and her research group aim to revolutionize how we understand and assist human movement.

Decoding, measuring and enhancing human movement

The ability to move is fundamental for humans.The quality and performance of one’s movement and walking reflect to a large amount their motor function and ability to synthesize it with perception, cognition and goals. It is important that this relationship is incorporated into techniques aimed to predict movement performance and into interventions and assistive devices aimed to improve movement performance.The KTH MoveAbility research group studies human movement over a range of scales and modalities, in order to decode the complex relationships that govern human movement, to predict the potential for improved mobility in individuals with motor impairment, and to develop active assistive devices. All with the aim to help people move beyond their current capabilities. Our various projects involve patient populations with a range of movement disorders, including stroke, spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy, Parkinsons, and even a normally aging population. Our goals include analyzing neuromuscular function, predicting movement performance, studying added value of various interventions on movement improvement, developing assistive devices that interact with the user to achieve improved walking function, predicting risk of developing shoulder injuries from wheelchair activities, understanding how sensorimotor interactions affect movement performance, and developing mobile systems to measure and monitor movement in everyday settings.

Frédéric Bevilacqua, IRCAM, Paris, FRANCE

Biography

Frédéric Bevilacqua is the head of the Sound Music Movement Interaction team at IRCAM in Paris, in the joint research lab on Science & Technology of Music and Sound between IRCAM – CNRS – Sorbonne Université. His research concerns the modelling and the design of interaction between human movement and sound, and the development of gesture-based digital musical systems. The applications range from artistic creation, education to health. Recent projects concerned learning processes, movement sonification and rehabilitation, and collective musical interactions.

Movement Sonification: from creative applications to rehabilitation

My research concerns the design and development of movement-sound interactive systems. Using various motion sensing, these systems allow for controlling or interacting with digital sounds. These systems can be either performed as musical instruments, with a focus on the sound produced (sound-oriented tasks), or be used as movement sonification devices (movement-oriented tasks). Precisely, in the latter case, the primary role for the sound is to act as auditory feedback for a given movement. Through different collaborations, we have been investigated movement sonification to facilitate sensori-motor learning or adaptation, to increase body awareness or to modify body schema in different applications, from walking to various sport exercises. We have also been working on movement sonification for rehabilitation for stroke patients and for people with acquired visual deficiency. In all cases, the sound design is primordial as the sound must be both informative as well as motivational. In a study we compared different movement sonification types (direct sound modulation, musical interaction, and soundscape) in upper-limb movement in hemiparetic and healthy participants. I will also present the system called como-rehabiltiation which is a portable movement sonification device using a Raspberry Pi and wireless inertial motion units. This system has been designed to be easily duplicable and adaptable to various rehabilitation exercises with a palette of choices for sounds and music. Targeted first toward supervised self-rehabilitation for stroke patients (an evaluation is currently carried on with therapists), we are currently modifying this device in support to visual impaired patients’ rehabilitation.