Designing Sisters: Creating Audio-Based Narratives to Generate Affective Connections and Material Story Worlds

In this paper, we reflect on the design of an interactive audio-based digital narrative experience called Sisters. This work is designed for a single interactor, constructed as a mobile AR experience using graphic illustrations on a deck of player cards in connection with abstract audio activated by trigger images on the cards. An interactor is asked to cluster series of cards together into different abstract environments, based on sounds associated with each card, meant to represent spaces in an interior/exterior domestic site, a house and its immediate surroundings. The work conveys experiences of 4 family members in a complex abusive household, mediating between scenes of normalcy, love, companionship, and violence. The core focus of the work is to explore fragmented and very personal states of being and memories derived from an outsider’s perspective (the interactor), who co-experiences the complexities of the domestic spaces at a ‘safe’ distance, while also gaining empathy and affective connections to the characters. Connecting the content of the work and its fragmentary and elusive material audio and narrative design to our design model, the New Material/Spectral Morphology Model, we share how it may be used for aesthetic composition. Our model is based on feminist new material perspectives and foundational work from electroacoustic production and audio experimentation. Sisters extends our previous work with sound-based narrative, and we demonstrate how this work affirms our design strategies for novel interactive audio experiences.