FFAME (Filtering Familiar Audio for Movement Exploration) is a novel sonification framework aiming to facilitate movement in individuals with chronic back pain. Our personalised, music-based approach contrasts and extends prior work with predetermined tonal sonification. FFAME progressively filters selected music based on angles of the trunk. Through a qualitative analysis of reported experience of 15 participants with chronic pain and 5 physiotherapists, we identify how sonification parameters and musical characteristics affect movement and meaning-making. Music-based movement sonification proved impactful across multiple dimensions: (1) encouraging movement, (2) escaping pain-related rumination, (3) externalizing pain experiences, and (4) scaffolding physical activities. Drawing on enactivism and related philosophies, the study highlights how the semantic indeterminacy of music, combined with real-time movement sonification, created a rich, open-ended environment that supported user agency and exploration. Sonification for pain management can be creative and expressive, enabling people with pain to extend challenging movements and build movement confidence.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713601
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)