Paper Session 9: Music & Health

Paper abstracts

Yunze Mu, Lorna Segall and Zhixin Xu: “Acoustic Interactive Sand Tray Therapy System: An Em-bodied Interface for Multisensory Sound Interaction”

Foundational work in computer music and gestural interface design has emphasized embodied and tangible interaction as a central component of expressive musical systems [1, 2]. This paper introduces the Acoustic Interactive Sand Tray System, an innovative interface that translates the continuous physical manipulation of sand into real-time auditory feedback. Utilizing an overhead depth-sensing camera and the YOLO v11 object detection model, the system captures complex surface geometries and identifies physical artifacts within the tray. We ex-tract perceptually salient features, such as surface flat-ness and regional elevation, which are transmitted via OSC to a hybrid sound engine implemented in Max/MSP, Unity, and RTcmix (RTcmix and WebRTcmix). While the system supports interdisciplinary applications, this paper focuses on its technical architecture, specifically the sensing pipeline and the many-to-many mapping strategies that link material deformation to sound synthesis. By prioritizing material affordances over symbolic control, the system facilitates exploratory, low-cognitive-load engagement, allowing users to intuitively shape ”sound worlds” through tactile interaction. The Acoustic Interactive Sand Tray System contributes a robust framework for material-based sound control, demonstrating the potential for non-rigid, natural inter-faces to foster immersive and embodied musical experiences.

CALM is a performance work and compositional system that translates bilateral, body-focused movement into sound behaviour and spatial form. Drawing on trauma-informed movement practices, the work treats somatic engagement as a generative compositional constraint rather than a representational or expressive metaphor. CALM deliberately subverts common assumptions that stillness and meditative movement are inherently calming. Instead, it externalizes bodily instability, fragmentation, and heightened internal noise that can arise for some trauma survivors during periods of stillness. Using wearable gestural interfaces, spatial audio, and voice-based synthesis, CALM maps movement rate, bilateral coordination, and physical effort to sonic density, timbre, and spatial distribution. Musical structure emerges through sustained bodily negotiation, constraint, and breakdown rather than through virtuosic control or symbolic gesture. The paper positions CALM as a practice-based methodological framework for translating somatic experience into sound behaviour, contributing to research in embodied computer music, trauma-informed creative practice, and participatory listening contexts.