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 a focal point for them.
During my 4 week stay in Porto I performed a 24/7-like gathering of urban signals in typical settings of my life as a research-artist. Equipped with a portabel MP3-recorder to record urban sound, a smartband to collect physiological data (heart rate, skin conductance response) as well as locative data (GPS) and a commodity device to scan „electronic smog“ (signals of GHz networks) I documented the multimodal input of urban signals encountered over the course of an hour, a day, a week .
In contrast to existing work I plan to analyse, visualize and sonify the large-scale amount of data in a post-processing mode. The required devices are non-instrusive and it is possible to document experiences over large intervals of time. If we find some interesting correlates or aesthetic mashups of these data for interactive exploration we could imagine to develop a device allowing for realtime interfacing the urban playground in future projects.