Use of cold tooling is beneficial in the sheet metal forming. This paper presents simulations of the process with the objective of investigating issues associated with thermal management, and of providing thermo-mechanical data for future research.

Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed.

Based on previous work the proposal here is that spatial perception problems in artificial environments (e.g. spatial music displays) can be cast as a subset of the problems of cognitive mapping of the causal context that surrounds and supports the perceiver. The intuitively available distinctions in these contexts of foreground and background, previously couched in terms of perceptual significance exist as externally valid causal distinctions; the task of perception is to cognitively represent these distinctions sufficiently for appropriate interaction. Effectively, this means that some items will “naturally” occupy attention, whilst others should equally naturally appeal to background, inattentive processes. Hence, aspects of the causal context will be accorded differing cognitive resources according to their significance, and some may be very sparsely represented in cartoon form. That is, perception engages in sophisticated information reduction in cognitive representation in order to capitalise on available resources. This poster outlines how causal contexts (including spatial matters) can be physically cartoonified in reciprocal manner to the dedicated perceptual mechanisms’ operations, to economically and intuitively appeal to perception.

This paper describes large scale implementations of spatial audio systems which focus on the presentation of simplified spatial cues that appeal to auditory spatial perception. It reports a series of successful implementations of nested and multiple spatial audio fields to provide listeners with opportunities to explore complex sound fields, to receives cues pertaining to source behaviors within complex audio environments. This included systems designed as public sculptures capable of presenting engaging sound fields for ambulant listeners. The paper also considers questions of sound field perception and reception in relation to audio object scaling according to the dimensions of a sound reproduction system and proposes that a series of multiple, coordinated sound fields may provide better solutions to large auditorial surround sound than traditional reproduction fields which surround the audience. Particular attention is paid to the experiences since 2008 with the multi-spatial The Morning Line sound system, which has been exhibited as a public sculpture in a number of European cities.