SONIC CITY
by Future Applications Lab- Viktoria Institute: Lalya Gaye, Margot Jacobs, Ramia Mazé, Daniel Skoglund
http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/soniccity/
Here is a piece that translates location into sound. The technical aspects sound very complex. The person experiencing the piece wears a jacket of various sensor devices which senses things like ”heart rate, arm motion, speed, pace, compass heading, ascension/descent, proximity to others/objects, stopping and starting” and ”light level, noise level, pollution level, temperature, electromagnetic activity, enclosure, slope, presence of metal” as they walk through their environment. These factors get translated into sound which is played through headphones.
It is interesting to think of one’s environment as becoming a musical experience. We may be used to ambient noises in our daily lives, but for things like pollution, metal, and slope to give us sound information is a new experience altogether. The experiencer becomes truely integrated into the environment through music.
This is a very interesting project. I like the many different types of input that the unit receives. I wonder if it might help us realize unseen factors in our environment, and how many other layers of inputs can we extract from our environment: radio, cell phone signal, motion from objects…
Comment by dstrand — February 12, 2008 @ 8:44 pm