This post offers an idiosyncratic assessment of:
Michael Frishkopf and Scott Smallwood, “Auditory Augmented Reality for Well-Being,” in Augmented Reality: Situated Spatial Synergy, edited by Michael Cohen (London: IntechOpen, 2026), DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.1011786
Listening to things does us good. AR could, therefore, usefully migrate away from its visual obsession and consider the “technologically simpler and lower cost” option of sound-based “auditory augmented reality.”
This is the claim of Michael Frishkopf and Scott Smallwood in their recent chapter, “Auditory Augmented Reality for Well-Being.” It caught my attention in three ways.
First, they mention EARLIDS, and earlids are a quirky rabbit-hole of mine.
Second, they are talking in specific and measurable ways about how to develop useful, healthful sounds – that is, soundscapes that enhance well-being. I like that, it fits into my worldview!
Third, they’re talking about AR, Augmented Reality, instead of AI, Artificial Intelligence (a misnomer), and I am very much there with that! Plus, the added bonus that they’re essentially saying: the AR community is getting it wrong, investing heavily in a tool which distracts, visually, rather than one that soothes, “mixing harmoniously” with the background. Yes, yes, YES.
They are interested as well in exploring lower-tech interventions – they mention headphones, loudspeakers, and personal listening devices, not just mega-gajillion dollar systems that block out the world around you. Now, add in some tech gear so the system can adapt to the subject’s location, actions, and motions and the costs go up. But not as much as their visual counterparts!
What do they claim? Well, one of the important observations is that
the auditory channel is widely regarded as far more potent … generating an affective response by indexing environment features, carrying paralinguistic emotion, evoking affective memory, or setting a mood via musical properties like timbre, melody, and harmony.
In other words, sounds move moods. Plus, and here is where the earlids come in, sound suffuses the environment; as they put it, “There is no auditory counterpart to “looking away” (“hearing away”?).” No earlids, no blocking the input.
If soundscapes change our moods, then, we can use them as a force for good. They are interested in deploying soundscapes to support wellness. To do so, they argue for a mixed-modality sound mixture, one that is a “steady-state, nonperiodic admixture of natural, musical, and synthetic” sounds. I’ve talked about the intermingling of nature noises and created ones before – and to this they add the notion of soundwalking – moving through a landscape with a directed acoustical accompaniment. They draw on the composed installations, particularly in their techno-mediated forms.
In all, they propose three kinds of interventions.
place-based augmentation: take a place, add sound to it so that listeners experience the place differently. In Sounding the Garden, for instance, GPS-triggered poetry and music overlays a physical garden. Sound installations and soundwalks fit this category.
individual adaptive soundscapes: intervene more directly with the individual listener using biosignals and machine learning to select and mix calming sounds for thee different than those for me. This makes ALL kinds of sense; musak gives me hives, but some of the chants I find calming my partner thinks are a bore. Let technology help figure it out.
shared adaptation: musical (well, sound-based) experiences as a social practice. Bringing the power of joint experience to bear on music’s infiltrative powers to allow a group of people to experience and inform the sonic environment. From this, you can get calm, concentration, and social connection.
See, doing good!
If you want a single take-away, it’s that sound should be treated as environmental design: something that can be deliberately composed to support well-being, individually or collectively, rather than simply as entertainment. Think about countering the all of the crisis-noise in a hospital (one of the examples that landed the hardest with me): sound intervention can be a solution to the sound problems that surround us.
Because, at the end of the day, sound can be something that changes the meaning and experience of a place rather than merely adding a soundtrack.
Pretty good observation!
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:
Manipulations of Reality’s
Sounds — on the intermingling of natural and
constructed
soundscapes
Mapping Soundscapes —
another way of thinking spatially about what we
hear
Soundscape Compositions, Chicago
Style — sound treated as something composed into and
through
place
And, of course, there are always the various explorations of earlids: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/p/earlids.html
