Another early morning ! Firstly a quick sidestep around the corner to collect Mark and then towards the Ennis Road where we picked up Breege. Traveling companions assembled, we continued onto Shannon Airport. Our flight to London Heathrow was at XX:XX am. As we hadn't really too much time at Shannon we skipped the morning refreshments and just boarded the plane. A much needed Irish breakfast was served by the excellent Aer Lingus crew as we sped towards London.

Heathrow was as usual humming and also very humid. The great journey began as we trekked from terminal 1 to terminal 2 to check-in for the onward leg to Helsinki. Due to the excellent timing of connections by Anne, we only spent a short time browsing in the various shops in the departures lounge before being called to board our flight. The BA flight was perfect except for their new 'PC' attitude towards lunch's and as we found later on the return leg, breakfasts. The lunch was a strange vegetarian style rice and vegetable dish, methinks that the F&M disease has caused a price increase for some meats but surly not the simple chicken?

On arrival in Helsinki, we struck a bit of a snag. It seemed that Breege's luggage had been left behind in Heathrow and would not arrived until later that evening. After a short spell at the baggage counter in arrivals and the gift of a toilet bag for Breege, it was on to the Taxi's. Taking Mikael's advice we booked a fixed price taxi from the arrivals lounge and then waited at a Carrolls fast-food restaurant for it. The Yellow-Line taxi's are a special brand of taxi as taxi's in Finland survive moreso off tourists than natives due to their excellent public transport system. Arriving at our hostel, the Hostel Academica we prudently booked the taxi for a return trip to the airport. Again more mishaps as deposits had gone awry which we discovered when checking-in to the hostel but this was sorted eventually by us paying most of dues, the rest being paid later in the week.

That evening brought Mikael, Mark, Breege, another ICAD participant Peter Lennox and myself to the famous Zetor restaurant. Yes, that's Zetor as in farm tractor Zetor. Here one experiences authentic Finnish cuisine in a most unusual of settings. Dinner was however perfect as the dishes varied from Swedish Herring to Finnish Mousse and traditional Finnish flatbread, all washed down with liberal quantities of a sampling of the local brews.

Sunday started off with a little confusion as we hurriedly got ready for registration and tried to figure out what platform number 51 was at the central bus station. Having arrived at the HUT campus we had a little peek at some of the buildings as we trotted down to the Computer Science which would host the conference for the week. After registration, we took some time to check our e-mail and get oriented in our new surroundings. Punctually at one o'clock the conference started, leaping straight into Perry Cook's tutorial entitled "Physically Based Sound Synthesis" which was absolutely one of the best presentations of the week. After coffee, the HUT Acoustic boys then gave us their presentation entitled "Auditory Displays in Virtual Rooms" which provided another understandable introduction into the area.

As would become standard practice, we retired to the Radison Hotel (Mikael's Hotel) after the conference. This was due to the fact that we were staying in central Helsinki which was approximately 15 minutes away by bus from the conference, as this was the case there was generally not enough time to go back and return in time for the conference social events. The first major social event was the "Get Together Party" with the optional sauna for any who wished to partake. HUT's Student Union posses a very fine sauna building which was the venue. Here a cold plate selection with various alcoholic & nonalcoholic beverages were laid on. I really enjoyed this part as I had great conversations with Fredrico Fontona (SOb - Verona), Gregory Wakefield and the two troubadours ( Davide & Roberto - SOb Verona & SOb KTH). I had one really important conversation with George Tzanetakis from Princeton. His research is along practically the same path as my own so much so that by the end of the week we had a consensus on writing a paper together for ICAD 2002 in Japan.

By Monday morning, we had our routine down to pat and arrived ontime to the conference ready for the real kickoff of the conference, the first paper session. In the Sonification section we had Freddy Winberg and Sten-Olaf Hellstrom give a interesting paper on using audio within a game framework to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem. It was a interesting presentation which was later demoed during the week and I'll admit to having great fun trying the game. Davide Rocchesso presented the first SOb related paper in the second session "3D / Immersive Sound", it dealt with Uni. Verona's work on morphing sound between shapes.

Later in the afternoon session "Psycho-acoustics & perception" Greg Wakefield discussed stimulus sample discrimitation (SSD) as an objective physophysical procedure. Stephen Brewster of Uni. Glasgow gave us a talk regarding sound perception and mobile devices / PDA's. A interesting presentation by Bruce Walker was given on the perceptual difference of sonification mappings between sighted users and visual-impaired users in specific focusing on the use of non-speech audio.

The big day or at least so in my opinion as Mikael and myself had our presentation during the second morning session. The first session passed swiftly as my mind was more focused on our presentation but the paper by Nick Zacharov introduced an interesting method "Audio Descriptive Analysis and Mapping (ADAM)" for studying spatial surround displays. John Neuhoff gave a good presentation on "Perceiving Acoustic Orientation in 3-D Space". After this presentation, it was time for coffee, a quick view of HUT's cave and a maniac slash through the slides to ensure that they were all right.

The second session was entitled "Earcons, auditory icons and assistive technology" and this was our slot. Prior to our presentation there was two very interesting papers. The first was a study on how auditory icons and earcons in conjunction with pictures can affect categorization. The second was a presentation by Sami Ronkainen from Nokia on the creation of a musical language of earcons for events and the like in intelligent mobile devices and specifically in this study, mobile phones a la Nokia. A little before the beginning of the session we were told by Stephen Brewster (the session chair) that the paper after us was not going to be presented so that we did not have to strictly keep to our twenty minutes and that we had some extra leeway. This proved an great boon as we ended up with a successful presentation which lasted for about fifteen minutes and a demonstration of the Sonic Browser which lasted for nearly five minutes and about ten minutes Q&A. The extra time in front of such an audience was just priceless as with the extra time we were able to give a proper coverage to our research. The Q&A session was still a bit too short as we had too leave the audience wanting to ask somemore questions. I think that I could have brushed up a little on my presentation skills and I did drop the ball once as one of my slides had a important point which was below what could be seen on the projectors screen but other than that a excellent presentation as Mikael had no hassle with his part. The next session was lunch with posters and demos being held in some smaller classrooms. Three of these were really interesting to my research: Peter Rutherford ( Virtual Acoustic Techniques ), Roberto Bresin ( Expressive Musical Icons ), Peter Lennonx ( Cartooning Sound ). Other presentations of note were NASA's SLAB ( use of polhemus trackers ) and Bruce Walker's Sonification Mapping DB.

The afternoon sessions concentrated on 3D sound. The presentations of note were given by Renato Pellegini on Auditory Virtual Environments (AVE's), Barbara Shinn-Cunninghsm on Spatial Auditory Displays and Dean Waters on the use of echolocation in Virtual Reality. A really interesting keynote presentation was given by William Martens on psychophysical calibration for controlling the range of a virtual sound source.

The trip to one of the nearer Finnish national forest parks was a short bus ride of about thirty-five minutes or so to the north of Helsinki. Here we were guided by some local Finnish scouts who had been dragooned for the night to show us around. We first went to a nice lake side spot for a quiz after which we trailed back to a picnic spot where the scouts doled out soup and cordial. After this we were able to go with the guides for various walks around the park and then were treated to a campside fire where one could either roast a sausage or make a pancake over a blazing open fire. I enjoyed a gorgeous frankfurter which I managed to cook ! Tommi llmonen then really gave us some entertainment with firstly a traditional Finnish Ballad and then a story telling which would make some Irish seanachi jealous. Then to the singing of Tommi we arose from the campsite and followed him back to the buses where we were again dropped off in Helsinki and decided before retiring to go for a night cap. Again as with the previous night it was the usual suspects.

The last day of the conference started with a session on Sonification. The two most intriguing presentations from this session were from John Flowers on the sonification of Daily Weather Records. This was similar to Mikael's project except it focuses on one area and used set pitch and timbre for events such as pressure / rain fall. The presentation by Florian Dombois on "Audification in Planetery Seismology" was fascinating where you could hear the earthquake / tremor from the data as opposed to trying to visual the complex dataset. Then it was time for a short coffee break before the open-mic session. This was chaired by Perry Cook and shortly thereafter followed by the ICAD 2002 presentation on Kyoto, Japan. The next ICAD will be held at ATR in Japan and looks to be very promising. I think that next year I'll spent three weeks or so in Japan and catch the conference as well.

After lunch it was time for a session entitled "3D / Immersive Sound". It proved an interesting session with presentations from the Naval Research Lab, HUT and Chalmers. The HUT and Chalmers presentations were particularly interesting as with HUT we saw a prelude to Ville Pulkki's thesis defense on Friday and then how Chalmers have now taken the ecological acoustics approach. The last session was another of real particular importance for my own research. The first of these presentations was given by George Tzanetakis whose Marsyas3D shares many traits with the Sonic Browser. The menu sonification presentation from Nokia was interesting but the results showed that it was not really useful in the manner that they had implemented it, perhaps with a headset was their research outcome. The Electronic White Board from GMD was interesting and also presented in more detail at the SOb workshop on Thursday. The final presentation was very lacking and should really have only been a poster as they talked a lot but showed very little.

Another early morning greeted us ! As at six o'clock in the morning we jumped into our taxi to take us to Helsinki airport. It was a swift journey as the taxi was a prepaid taxi, he wasted no time in taking many shortcuts to get us to the airport as fast as possible. The check-in went smoothly as they had a brilliant system were a range of gates were available for each flight, our flight had ten or so check-in desks for a small flight. The last minute writing and posting of postcards then took place in the departures lounge as I tried to remember address at seven in the morning with no coffee !!!!!! An uneventful flight took us to Heathrow and barring BA's 'PC' breakfast everything went smashingly. A long distance hike as Mark and myself headed for Terminal 1 while Breege took the train to town as she had about six hours to kill before her connection. We had a relaxed breakfast roll in the last stop duty free area in Terminal 1 and after a read of that morning edition of the Irish Times wandered towards our gate.

Back to Shannon and then to a mad whirling confusion in the babbage reclaims area as the place was mobbed. Then onto the vending machine for the long term carpark and a £19.00 pound ticket later we walked to the car and headed for home. After a few hours of sleep, Mark and myself joined most of the lads (Colm, Krispin and Enda + some of our summer students) for the Comedy Club in Dolans Warehouse, thus ending our travels in typical IDC style with a pint in everybody's hand.

Photographs taken by mainly Breege, a couple from Mark and then as usual "Don't let Eoin near the camera or he'll never stop" Brazil.

Important Dates to remember are for the conference in Kyoto in Japan next year. I hope to be there, one way or another !

2002-07-02    ICAD 2002 - Kyoto, Japan. (02-07-2002 to 05-07-2002)