This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2021) |
Realised between 2002 and 2004, the project Sonic City was pioneer projects in locative media, in particular the mobile music field which it contributed in establishing.
Sonic City was a form of interactive music instrument using the city as an interface. It enabled people to individually create a real-time personal soundscape of electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments. Paths turned into musical compositions and mobility through the shifting contexts of a city became a large scale musical gesture.
Worn on the body, Sonic City retrieved information about environmental context and user actions in real time, and mapped it to the live audio processing of urban sounds, resulting in music heard through headphones. One engaged into a musical duet with the city: urban atmospheres, nearby urban artefacts, random encounters, and everyday activities all participated in creating music as you were walking.
At the cross-road between urban exploration and experimental music making, Sonic City promoted the integration of everyday life settings and practices into personal forms of aesthetic expression with digital technology.
The Sonic City project was a collaboration between The Interactive Institute (Ramia Mazé and Margot Jacobs) and Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute (Lalya Gaye), together with established Swedish sound-artist Daniel Skoglund (8Tunnel2). [1] Lalya Gaye and Ramia Mazé initiated and managed the project. Magnus Johansson and Sara Lerén (University of Gothenburg) conducted their master's theses in the project.
Sonic City was partially funded through the Smart-Its project [2] (as part of the Disappearing Computer [3] FET-IST research programme) and the Mobile Life project (funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research) at the Viktoria Institute. At The Interactive Institute, Sonic City was included in the Public Play Spaces research platform. [4]
The project has been well-published and well-cited in academia, received a lot of attention in the new media arts scene, and has received extensive media and blog coverage. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Among other places, Sonic City was presented at e.g. NIME and Cybersonica, and was demoed EU’s IST 2004 event in The Hague as an example of innovative European research. It was featured in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac special issue on locative media, and discussed in a number of books [10] [11] [12] and leading publications about sound, technology and urban space as a "classic" [13] [14] in terms of digital technology and sound creatively redefining public space.
Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics is present in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.
Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically accessible to the public; it is installed in public space in both outdoor and indoor settings. Public art seeks to embody public or universal concepts rather than commercial, partisan or personal concepts or interests. Notably, public art is also the direct or indirect product of a public process of creation, procurement, and/or maintenance.
Nicolas Collins is a composer of mostly electronic music, a sound artist and writer. He received his BA and MA from Wesleyan University, and his PhD from the University of East Anglia. Upon graduating from Wesleyan, he was a Watson Fellow.
A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology to computer science. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources, natural and artificial, within a given area as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" is a song written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for Motown Records in 1966. The first recording of the song to be released was produced by Whitfield for Gladys Knight & the Pips and released as a single in September 1967. It went to number one on the Billboard R&B Singles chart and number two on the Billboard Pop Singles chart and shortly became the biggest selling Motown single to date.
Julian Bleecker is an artist and technologist with a history developing innovative mobile research projects.
Locative media or location-based media (LBM) are media of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media, however, is not bound to the same location to which the content refers.
Eduardo Reck Miranda is a Brazilian composer of chamber and electroacoustic pieces but is most notable in the United Kingdom for his scientific research into computer music, particularly in the field of human-machine interfaces where brain waves will replace keyboards and voice commands to permit the disabled to express themselves musically.
Hugh Seymour Davies was a musicologist, composer, and inventor of experimental musical instruments.
Peter Cusack is an English artist and musician who is a member of CRiSAP, and is a research staff member and founding member of the London College of Communication in the University of the Arts London. He was a founding member and director of the London Musicians' Collective.
Martin Rieser is Professor of Digital Creativity in the Institute of Creative Technologies, in De Montfort University, Leicester.
Pietro Grossi was an Italian composer pioneer of computer music, visual artist and hacker ahead of his time. He began experimenting with electronic techniques in Italy in the early sixties.
Sonic interaction design is the study and exploitation of sound as one of the principal channels conveying information, meaning, and aesthetic/emotional qualities in interactive contexts. Sonic interaction design is at the intersection of interaction design and sound and music computing. If interaction design is about designing objects people interact with, and such interactions are facilitated by computational means, in sonic interaction design, sound is mediating interaction either as a display of processes or as an input medium.
Sound and music computing (SMC) is a research field that studies the whole sound and music communication chain from a multidisciplinary point of view. By combining scientific, technological and artistic methodologies it aims at understanding, modeling and generating sound and music through computational approaches.
Elle Mehrmand is a new media performance artist and musician. Mehrmand's work combines the body and electronics. Her performance art work has been presented at museums, galleries and art festivals throughout the Americas. She is a member of the band Assembly of Mazes.
Juan Carlos Vasquez is a Colombian composer and sound artist.
Michael Bruce Odland, known as Bruce Odland, is a composer, sound artist and sonic thinker. He is known for large-scale sound installations in public spaces, creating unique instruments that reveal music inherent in natural and urban environments, and for his pioneering work in theater, film and interactive multi-media. He lives and works in Westchester County, New York. Odland's musical sculptures and sound installations have been shown in major cities such as New York, Berlin, and Zurich; in art museums including the Denver Art Museum, the Field Museum and Mass MoCA; and at the international documenta14, Ars Electronica, Edinburgh International and Salzburg Festivals. Many of his installations are collaborations with Austrian sound artist Sam Auinger, with whom he formed an artistic partnership O+A in 1989. Together they have created more than 50 sound installations in Europe, North America and Asia.
Lalya Gaye is a digital media artist and interaction designer whose early work was influential in the field of locative media. Currently based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, she is the founder and director of the international and interdisciplinary digital art practice Attaya Projects.
Marco Donnarumma is an Italian performance artist, new media artist and scholar based in Berlin. His work addresses the relationship between body, politics and technology. He is widely known for his performances fusing sound, computation and biotechnology. Ritual, shock and entrainment are key elements to his aesthetics. Donnarumma is often associated with cyborg and posthuman artists and is acknowledged for his contribution to human-machine interfacing through the unconventional use of muscle sound and biofeedback. From 2016 to 2018 he was a Research Fellow at Berlin University of the Arts in collaboration with the Neurorobotics Research Lab at Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin.
Eric Singer is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician, programmer and electrical, robotic and medical device engineer. He is known for his interactive art and technology works, electronic and robotic musical instruments, fire art and guerilla art.