Mobile Sound
Sound, Mobile Media, Art & CultureArchive for Digital Culture
‘Bridging Sound’ event at the University of Sussex, 23-24 November
The ‘Bridging Sound’ event is of interest to the mobile sound community as it “launches an interdisciplinary research forum dealing with 21st century soundscapes and auditory environments, which have become an exciting focus for artistic, technological, and sociological research.” The focus on bridges puts mobility at the heart this sound studies event, as we tend to encounter bridges while in motion, and many artistic projects in the area have also explored our mobile interactions with bridges. It’s organised by Professor Sally-Jane Norman and Dr Michael Bull.
The event info continues:
“Our urban surroundings and the sites we frequent for work, leisure, consumption and transportation offer scaffolds for new kinds of acoustic architectures. Sonic designs employ and mix platforms ranging from public address systems to intimate messaging. Roles of artists, urban planners, commercial stakeholders, state authorities, and “local bodies” are mobilised by the steadily expanding, yet never-quite-real estate inhabited by sound. Bridging Sound promotes and debates this burgeoning area of contemporary practice. It convenes practitioners and theorists from a range of disciplines to investigate figuratively, metaphorically and theoretically the intersections between sound, architecture and culture.”
The event runs 23-24 November, and I’ll be chairing a session on the Saturday – so would be great to see some of you then!
Here is the program from their website:
A two day event consisting of an internal workshop on Friday followed at 4pm by a series of public lectures and presentations which continue all day Saturday.
Friday 23rd November
10:00-15:30: Internal Workshop (post-graduate students and staff)
Oeyvind Brandstegg, Will Schrimshaw, Rupert Cox/Angus Carlyle
16:00-18:00: Public Lectures followed by discussions
Salome Voegelin, Will Schrimshaw
Saturday 24th November
9:30-17:00: Public Symposium introduced by Michael Bull, Sally-Jane Norman
Presentations:
Oeyvind Brandstegg
Bridges Panel chaired by Frauke Behrendt (Brighton University)
School of Media, Film and Music:
School of History, Art History and Philosophy:
Synthesis, Future Bridges
Registration appreciated by mail to M.J.Knight@sussex.ac.uk.
iPhone Musical Instrument by Mouse on Mars
As you know I’ve been writing about Mobile Phone musical instruments for quite some years so it’s nice to see another Mobile Music iPhone app in the pipeline:
“WretchUp is a unique handheld effect and instrument for the iPhone that anyone can play. Developed by Mouse on Mars, it’s easy to learn, but also sophisticated enough that it’s heavily used in their live shows and new albums – on vocals, on drums, with feedback, and more. Now with your help, we want to bring it to everyone as an open source project.”
However, there have been quite a few mobile music apps around – you might want to check out Atau Tanaka’s iphone concert at tedX today or you can read up about many other examples in some of my publications on the topic over the last 8 years:
The chapter ‘Musical Telephones Old and New: A Media Archaeology’ in Mobile Sound. Media Art in Hybrid Spaces. (2010) PhD Thesis. University of Sussex.
Kirisits, Nicolaj., Behrendt, Frauke, Gaye, Lalya., & Tanaka, Atau. (eds.). (2008).Creative Interactions – The Mobile Music Workshops 2004-2008.Vienna: University of Applied Arts. Download pdf. See http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org/
Mobile Music Technology: Report on Emerging Community. Gaye, Layla, Holmquist, Lars Erik, Behrendt, Frauke, Tanaka, Atau. In Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-06). Paris, France: 22-25
Handymusik. Klangkunst und ‘mobile devices’, Osnabrück: Epos. 2005. Monograph.
Klingeltöne laden war gestern/Mobile Musik
in: de-bug. Zeitschrift für elektronische Lebensaspekte. November 2004
You can also click on “mobile phone“, “music” or “instrument” in the tag cloud on the right to find some more blog posts on this topic.
The sound of locative media: out now
My journal article The sound of locative media has now been published by Convergence. I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this article! The full reference is: Frauke Behrendt (2012) The sound of locative media, Convergence 18 (3): 283-295.
Screenshot from the video of The National Mall app
One of the case studies I discuss in the article is ‘The National Mall’, an iPhone app (released in 2011 by musicians Bluebrain) where users listen to specific music depending on their location.
Here’s the abstract:
This article develops an alternative perspective to the visual bias in locative media discourses by focusing on the role of sound in locative media and related discussions. This sonic perspective allows us to understand the temporal, situated and embodied aspects of locative media. Informed by debates from sound studies and mobile media studies, a locative smart phone application where users experience specific sounds depending on their locations, is discussed. The concept of ‘Placed Sounds’ is introduced for a more detailed analysis of locative sound experiences. A framework for analysis is developed to discuss how locative sound engages with the auditory aspects of our spatial perception, how immersion operates for locative media and sound, and also to consider the role of situated experience, the role of walking as remixing, and how agency and exclusion operate in locative sound. This framework explains how walking operates in terms of interacting with locative media, and how we experience being immersed in physical and media contexts at once via sound.
You can get the full article here.
Photos of Sounds Like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event
Photos from Sounds Like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event that took place at The Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) Research Institute, Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge) on 17th May 2011, organised by Frauke Behrendt, are now online (photos by Ann Evelin Lawford) and some by myself are here and there are more by Julio D’Escrivan. Please let us know if you also have pictures form the event to share!
A big thank you to all speakers, performers and chairs – Georgina Born, Atau Tanaka, John Williamson, Steve Symons, Julio D’Escrivan, Rachel O’ Dwyer, Lalya Gaye, Enrique Tomas, Adam Parkinson, Richard Hoadley, Ashley Elsdon, Nick Bryan-Kinns – for making this a great event!
Call: Sounds like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event’ on 17th May 2011 at CoDE, Cambridge
I’m organising ‘Sounds like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event’ on Tuesday 17th May 2011 at CoDE: The Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. It would be great if YOU as one of my blog readers might be interested to submit your work and/or attend the event!
Please find more information below and on the website www.anglia.ac.uk/soundslikemobility
I look forward to hearing back from you! It would also be great if you could circulate this email widely. Thank you!
Sounds like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event
Tuesday 17th May 2011, CoDE: The Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.
Sitting down motionless, staring at screens, and focusing on the task at hand are becoming much less common than using media on the go, touching and listening to a device, while also being involved in other activities. In mobile media contexts, alternative sensory modalities increasingly replace the largely visual paradigms of the (both physical and virtual) desktop era. This one-day event examines the role of sound in media interactions as an especially pertinent example of our post-desktop world. It features invited speakers, performances, demos, pecha-kuscha-style short presentations and poster presentations. It takes place in Cambridge (UK) and is organised by CoDE: The Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University.
There is much more to this than iPods and alert sounds. Interactions between various physical contexts, social networks, mobile bodies and networked devices can be mediated in an almost infinite number of ways by sound – and also Read the rest of this entry »
Symposium – Net Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks
Adriana de Souza e Silva and her colleagues at the Centre for Network Culture are organising an interesting event on ‘Net-Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks’ on the 29th of April 2011.
The program can be found here and includes a keynote by Mimi Sheller on Mobile Art – Locating Mobile Network Cultures. Let me know if anyone is going, I might be tempted…
This is more information from their website:
The symposium will address topics, such as:
- Mobile communication and location awareness in everyday life practices;
- New urban spatialities developed with mobile gaming and locative social media;
- Privacy and surveillance issues as they relate to location-based social networks;
- Identity and spatial construction through locative media art / performance design;
- Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and location-aware technologies;
- Learning and education Read the rest of this entry »
Call: ‘Online & Mobile Media, Everyday Creativity and DIY Culture’ – Transforming Audiences Conference in London in 09/11
This is the call from the website, the deadline is 21 April 2011:
After decades preoccupied with what people do when sitting down, media studies is suddenly on its feet. The rise of computers in our pockets – still called ‘phones’, but used more for accessing a world of online communication, information and entertainment than for making telephone calls – coincides with the growth of DIY culture and people making their own media. Video games are now about actually running and Read the rest of this entry »
Call: Sonic Futures: Soundscapes and the Languages of Screen Media
The European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) has just published their call for papers and panels for the 2011 conference (23. June 2011 – 26. June 2011
) that will take place in London, hosted by Birkbeck and King’s College, University of London. The theme is “Sonic Futures: Soundscapes and the Languages of Screen Media”, the deadline is the 31st of January, and here is some more detail from the website and the call for papers (see below):
Keynote speakers:
Richard Dyer (King’s College London)
Raphaëlle Moine (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3)
John Urry (University of Lancaster)
Why is it that in space no one can hear you scream but everyone seems to be speaking English?
Contemporary media culture is as much a sonic and acoustic culture as it is a visual culture. Perhaps more than ever, sound carries cultural meaning, and the spaces we inhabit are soundscapes as much as landscapes and cityscapes. In the design of Read the rest of this entry »
Sounding out the quantative & visual world of ‘Future Internet and Society’
I was attending the ESF-COST High-Level Research Conference ‘Future Internet and Society: A Complex Systems Perspective‘ last week I can tell you that I haven’t seen to many visualisations, graphs and algorithms in a very long time…
I gave a poster presentation on ‘Mobile Internet: The role of sound for interactions with networked and urban space’ and also represented ‘my’ COST IC0601 Action on Sonic Interaction Design (SID).
Despite the heavy visual and quantitative focus there were of course some interesting projects that I would love to see explored in the sonic context:
Ciro Cattuto from the Complex Networks and Systems Group and ISI Foundation in Italy presented ‘Weaving on-line connections on real-world interactions’,
Harith Alani from the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at The Open University (UK) talked about ‘Semantics, sensors, and the social web’,
Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University in the US gave a talk on ‘Network science meets web science: The emergence of multidimensional networks’,
Guenther Sagl (Research Studios Austria and Studio iSPACE in Austria) presented ‘Large-scale collective fluctuations: Human dynamics seen by a cellular network’,
Andrea Scharnhorst from the Virtual Knowledge Studio at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences talked about ‘Web science or Web research? Changing practices in the social sciences and humanities’
and Fabrizio Sestini from the European Commission presented the upcoming call ‘Internet Science’ that encourages interdisciplinary networks of excellence to apply.
I’ll share a few of my notes on each of these presentations in the following posts.
Some of the non-scientific highlights of the conference included iPads as torches for night walks to the beach (swimming and spotting star constellations); a walk around the interesting neighbourhood of Naples train station with newly-met colleagues (culminating in a well-deserved gelato); swimming, cliff-diving and caving around the local bay; a trip to Maratea; the sound of waves during the nights; the spectacular thunder storm; and of course the football match against the hotel staff. But rest assured – we spent most of the time in the ‘cave‘ of the hotel, ‘illuminated’ by a projector and listening to the many presentations.
Motion Capture Methodologies Workshop, 25th-26th June, University of Sussex
My Sussex colleagues Kirk Woolford and Sally Jane Norman are organising a very interesting interdisciplinary workshop on motion capture. I won’t be able to attend as I will be involved in producing a documentation of a GPS sound walk on exactly those days – capturing motion as well.
If other sound and music -interested people are interested, here is the workshop information – sign up quickly as this is a very popular event:
University of Sussex Motion Capture Methodologies Workshop
25th-26th June, Lighthouse, Brighton
The University of Sussex is delighted to host an interdisciplinary workshop on motion capture, as part of the methodologies workshop series organised by UK higher education bodies AHESSC (Arts & Humanities e-Science Support
Centre) and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), in collaboration with the Motion in Place Platform Project. These events share experience and interests across specific digital development sectors that are nurturing research in the
arts and humanities.
The workshop will take place on June 25th-26th at Lighthouse in central Brighton. It will consist of brief plenary presentations on projects and their technical environments interspersed with informal networking sessions and ample time for questions and
discussion. Motion capture resources and related software products will be available for demonstrations and project-oriented discussions. A reception organised in partnership with Lighthouse on the evening of Friday 25th will provide further networking opportunities with regional cultural representatives. Workshop presenters are as follows:
- Helen Bailey, Division of Performing Arts and English, University of Bedfordshire
- Stuart Dunn, AHeSSC, King’s College London
- Donald Glowinski, InFoMus Lab, Faculty of Engineering, University of Genoa
- David Green, Culture Lab, Newcastle University
- Carlos Guedes, Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espectáculo, Instituto Politécnico do Porto
- Iwona Hrynczenko, Department of Game Development, Gotland University
- Ali Kord, Animazoo, Brighton
- Sally Jane Norman, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex
- Matt Oughton, Vicon, Oxford
- David Pirro, Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz
- Gretchen Schiller, School of Arts, Brunel University
- Martin White, School of Informatics, University of Sussex
- Kirk Woolford, School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex
The workshop is free of charge and can accommodate Read the rest of this entry »
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