Mobile Sound
Sound, Mobile Media, Art & CultureArchive for GPS
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 »
Sustainable Travel – Mobile Media Examples?
Can anyone recommend mobile media projects that encourage sustainable travel behaviour? I’m looking for examples where artists, designers or activists have used mobile phones (or any other mobile devices) to encourage people to walk/cycle/use public transport/share cars/etc.
(The photo is from a trip to Helsinki in the summer – liked the sound-mobile-media-cycling graffiti very much.)
Any creative or inspiring ideas welcome! I’m attending an interdisciplinary event on “how to change transport behaviours” this week, and would like to show some examples of how mobile media might be able to do this.
If any of these projects would use sound (in addition to images, maps and text maybe) that would be a bonus, obviously!
Thank you in advance for any suggestions (as comment or email to f dot behrendt at sussex dot ac dot uk)!
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 »
New CC Book: “Emotional Cartography – Technologies of the Self” by Nold
This publication is about data visualisation and not concerned with sound and music, but it is easy to make links to the sonification of biomedical data community from Sonic Interaction Design (SID). Also, some of the issues raised in this book are relevant for mobile music and sound projects, such as Sonic City, and others in the proceedings of the Mobile Music Workshops. I look forward to reading it in more detail soon.
Emotional Cartography – Technologies of the Self
Edited by Christian Nold, 2009
Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visulising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.
Essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van de Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van
Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford
This is the first section of the introduction:
”This book is a collection of essays from artists, psychogeographers, designers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising people’s intimate biometric data and emotions using technology. The book is the outcome of a research process which Read the rest of this entry »
Urban Sync
Stephan Baumann just finished his project Urban Sync. Check it out the great project blog. Stephan has been working on interesting mobile projects for a while and our paths have crossed several times.
He has been working on bluetuna with Arianna Bassolli and presented the project at the Mobile Music Workshop in 2006.
Stephan also participated in the Sonic Interaction Design workshop I organised with Lalya Gaye and Karmen Franinovic at ICAD at Ircam earlier this year.
Urban Sync by Stephan Bauman was one of those Sonic Interaction Design (SID) Short Term Scientific Missions (STSMs) I keep advertising on this blog. Great to see more mobile work in the SID community! Hope this inspires more of you to apply!
This is from his blog:
Urban Sync aims at finding the correlates which define personal well-being in an urban context. Since we live our lifes meanwhile in a world augmented by technical artefacts, the boundaries seem to blur between being always-on or completely-off. Knowledge workers, artists, Web2.0 aficionados define the quality of life and especially urban life by something in-between work and activities in private life, something in-between the office, the city, the countryside – the „third place“ – is Read the rest of this entry »
“Designing an Auditory Experience Using a Location-based Computer Game” by Kristiansen
Erik Kristiansen presented “Designing an Auditory Experience Using a Location-based Computer Game” at the “Sound, Art, Auditory Cultures” conference in Copenhagen (28.-30.11.07). These are personal notes I took of his paper – not a summary or review.
Didn’t manage to get Kristiansen’s card, but at least a picture of one – at the wine reception of the conference.
Erik Kristiansen’s interest is to go beyond audio as part of the game or supporting the game to audio-mostly games – and how they intersect with pervasive gaming or location-based games. Erik Kristiansen is designing a new audio-mostly pervasive game. It is “serious” game where the participants are supposed to learn something. It is called Klintespillet (I’m not 100% sure about the spelling here…it translates as “Cliff Game”). The exiting thing is that it works without maps or screens. The participants are depended on listening to find the 29 hotspots in the outdoor area. The outdoor players are guided by online players that have access to maps and the outdoor player’s location.
Picture of the cliffs on Mons by dacoba on flickr.
Kristiansen explains the game in his abstract:
‘In cooperation with a new geological museum (“Geocenter Møns Klint”) and the Danish Forest and Nature Agency (“Skov og Naturstyrelsen”), we wanted to Read the rest of this entry »
Varèse on a GPS sound walk
I was just re-reading some texts in Audio Culture (Cox&Warner 2005),
amongst others “The Liberation of Sound” by Varèse. It struck me how much Varèse’s thoughts resonate with today’s GPS sound walk and audio mapping projects when he uses metaphors of cartography to describe spatialisations of sound. Of course, he was not Read the rest of this entry »
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