The Interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop (iSAW) seeks to redefine the social role of music and sound-based art practices through a creative engagement with community. Rather than merely encouraging the familiar roles of music as entertainment or preservation of important cultural heritages alone, iSAW seeks to facilitate networks of interdisciplinary and creative socialization by emphasizing the unique, and often times, neglected auditory sensory perception of human beings. We actively facilitate an increase of awareness to the function that music making and sound perception have in organizing and maintaining culture and community, understanding our environment, and stimulating human communication, expression, and cognitive evolution. Ultimately our activities seek to answer the following question: How can we strengthen our aural sense within a visually dominant culture and what is gained by such a shift towards an aural perception of the world?
iSAW is also dedicated to exploring the potential for the creative imagination available through new conceptual and technological resources for manipulating sound and media. We actively encourage all facets of the electronic and digital arts as a creative domain for human thought and communication. Through understanding how these new resources have become predominant tools for many expressive art forms, iSAW maintains an active sound and digital media studio with access provided to individual artists, educational institutions and the general community.