Florian Grond, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor for Design, Interaction Design, and Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. His research interests are participatory design in the context of disability, the arts, immersive media, and assistive technology. He has published in the fields of sound studies, auditory display, assistive technology design, immersive sound recording, sonic ethnographies and art and disability. He has been an independent media artist for many years, exhibiting his works at several venues (Europe, North America, and Japan). When connecting design and disability, he draws from his creative practice as an artist and technologist. Over the last years, he has started collaborations with colleagues with disabilities from academia and the arts, resulting in research output, artistic creations, and exhibition curating. He held a post-doctoral appointment at Concordia and was part of the Critical Disability Studies Working Group. He received a post-doctoral research creation scholarship B5 from FRQSC, which he held at CIRMMT, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, McGill. Grond has supervised various engineering capstone projects and taught a course on sonic boundary objects, a method using immersive sound recording techniques for blind ethnographies, developed with blind literary scholar Dr. Piet Devos, a post-doctoral fellow at Concordia University at that time. Grond was a research associate in the Shared Reality Lab at McGill after spending two years in the Sound Recording Department of the Schulich School of Music. He was the first to record with a 6-degrees-of-freedom sound recording system in several projects at McGill University and later in independent productions. Grond has several years of experience and published in 3D sound recording (microphone arrays) and immersive sound reproduction. He has been a creative sound engineer for ZYLIA, a company that produces microphone arrays for sound recording in AR and VR applications. In 2022, he and Melissa Park received an SSHRC Insight Development Grant for a research-creation project in which they will apply immersive sound recording and narrative phenomenology to study neurodiverse multisensory experiences. In 2023, he received an Insight Development Grant as PI to study atmospheres with David Howes, Matthew Unger, and Melissa Park through a research-creation approach using immersive audio technology, including a neurodiversity angle.
https://explore.concordia.ca/expertise/research-creation
Performing the Monument, a collaboration with Piet Devos
Mediation Culturel: Montreal Invisible, a collaboration with Chantal Dumas, the Regroupememnt de Aveugles et Amblyope de Montreal Metropolitaine et L’Autre Montreal
Musician’s auditory perception project
Sonic boundary objects: negotiating disability, technology and simulation, a collaboration with Piet Devos
Immersive sound recording and mixing for Christophe Papadimitriou
Audiovisual interpretation of a painting with Mary Sherman
Remote Feelings: On Blind-Sighted Collaborations and Long-Distance Art Making
