Edinburgh Napier University

  This chapter explores the concept of Human–Sound Interaction (HSI) in music performance in the context of Aural Diversity. HSI focuses on human factors in experiencing sound and how this affects interaction with instruments. HSI looks at people’s diverse hearing profile sand what this means for the design process of interfaces for musical expression. The chapter briefly reviews Sonic Interaction Design (SID) and musical affordances, which are at the core of this research. It describes a collaboration with the harpist Eleonor Turner on The wood and the water (2017), a piece for harp and live electronics and lighting effects driven by bodily gestures and British Sign Language (BSL). Such auditory and visual cross-modal feedback made sound creation and appreciation accessible to a diverse audience. The final section explores the literature on signed music and current work on modelling signed-music performance that will inform the design of new digital musical instruments.