Audimance is an audio platform and iOS app which creates a flexible user-centered sonic experience which is designed to accompany live performance and installed artworks: the first app which centers and is designed in consultation with experienced users of audio description, allowing audience members to choose the content and complexity of their experience.
Access to dance, theatre, and film for non-visual audiences has traditionally been in the form of audio description. In 2016, blind and low vision artists and audiences shared their desire for a more encompassing, more aesthetic experience of verbal description. Their challenges to current best practice led us to imagine the future of audio description differently:
- What if your audio description experience offered you choices—different styles of description, soundscapes, poetry, prose?
- What if you could listen to dance intentionally created as a direct artistic experience and not just a secondhand description of the experience?
Audimance content is designed to be created by artists and may include:
- Audio of the performance program or other relevant content
- Description, navigation, or access information about the show or venue
- A menu of sound styles to create a personalized mix of descriptive and artistic audio description and sonic tracks
- An interactive interface which generates a spatialized sonic performance for exploration
While popular practice requires venues to supply specific listening devices, Audimance is delivered via audience members' personal devices: on iOS devices via an app, and on Android via a website, while connected to the performance venue's designated Audimance Wifi network. Audimance content is precisely synced to live performance through integration into your existing production software such as QLab.
Audimance makes it possible for attendees to access description at venues of all sizes, for venues to easily offer audio access to their performances, and for artists to create and deliver one or multiple tracks of audio description for their performance or installation. Audimance was initially developed in association with Kinetic Light's DESCENT and premiered with multi-track content to live audiences in early 2018.
To get involved in development or ask about using Audimance for your artistic works or at your venue, please email contact@audimance.org.