Kai Tuuri

I am a postdoctoral researcher and a teacher in the Department of Music (University of Jyväskylä). I have a strong interest in sound-related issues of communication and interaction. The subjects of my recent research include epistemology of listening, embodied/gestural meanings of sound and music, and sound in multimodal human-technology interaction. Currently I am partaking in an interdisciplinary research project named CHORUS (Choreography of user-interfaces: Body, movement and space in interaction design). The project is funded by TEKES (Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation).

I hold a PhD in musicology and a MA in music education. In my PhD thesis I outlined a method for utilising embodied meanings of gestural communication in designing user interface sounds. My dissertation is very much cross-disciplinary and more related to the studies of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) than to the traditional music studies. I did this study while participating in research projects (GEAR2 & GEAR3, funded by TEKES) concerning user interface design from the perspectives of non-speech sounds and haptics. In these projects, research was done in the context of case studies – in close interaction with the industrial partners.

In case you are interested, you can find more information on my PhD thesis by [following this link]. You can also take a look at my other academic writings [see the list of publications].

I have over ten years of working experience at the University of Jyväskylä. During the past years (2007-2010), I have worked as a project-researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems. Earlier I have worked as a lecturer for multimedia studies and project-based learning in Departments of Computer Science and Information Systems (2000-2004) and Arts and Culture Studies (2004-2006).