SoniHED 2025

Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data

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

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

SoniHED Sound and Movement Panel


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.

Frédéric Bevilacqua, IRCAM, Paris, FRANCE

SoniHED Sound and Movement Panel


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. He co-authored more than 180 scientific publications (journals, book chapters and proceedings) and co-authored 5 patents. His research projects and installations were presented internationally, including at the Pompidou Center, MoMA (USA), ZKM (Allemagne), EMPAC (USA), YCAM (Japon). He was keynote or invited speaker at several international conferences such as the ACM TEI, Audio Mostly and EAI ArtsIT. As the coordinator of the “Interlude project”, he was awarded the 1st Prize of the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition (2011). He is the co-founder of the International Conference on Movement and Computing (MoCo).

Kira Vibe Jespersen, Aarhus University, Denmark

SoniHED 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.

Miriam Akkermann, FU Berlin, Germany

SoniHED Sound and Sleep Panel


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 20th and 21st 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.

Thomas Andrillon, Institute du Cerveau (ICM), Paris, France -

SoniHED Sound and Sleep Panel

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.

SoniHED2025 welcomes the support of the EU MSCA Lullabyte Project https://lullabyte.eu/

SoniHED2025 welcomes the support of the Sound-Driven Design DRS SIG

https://www.designresearchsociety.org/cpages/sdd-sig 

SoniHED2025 welcomes the support of DIGITAL FUTURES

https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/