From November 2005 - April 2006, the work was installed at a bus transit stop in Tempe, AZ located on the NW corner of the intersection of two major streets, Priest and Broadway.

MOTIVATING IDEAS: In conceiving this public work we have built upon the idea of the transit network as a metaphorical and practical sonic force. Topographically, the visual arrangement of speaker placement simulates a transit map that moves from a dense urban arrangement on the left, toward a widely spaced arrangement on the right. As sound moves across the wall, we have modeled the notion that transit paths will evolve and perhaps grow more sluggish with use. Thus, sound travels differently through each node of the network over time. This use of the network as a musical and visual presence, is intended to more broadly reference to role of networks in our lives. Transit networks physically link our communities, but networks of social, intellectual, and cultural connection span our world as well.

As this work is situated in the desert southwest, we also considered environmental issues in its conception. The propagation of sound across the surface of the wall simulates the way that the surface of water will ripple and expand when disturbed. In addition, all the electronics in this work are powered by a solar panel mounted above the work. The use of reusable energy is an important aspect of the work.

REALIZATION: At the heart of the piece is a 6′H x 10′W interactive wall that houses a network of sensors and sound producing elements. This wall is comprised of twenty-six modules that have the same basic design and function. There are two types of modules that, like in a real world transit network, serve as hubs or straight paths. Each module contains two proximity sensors, one light sensor, ten piezo speakers, and one microcontroller computer with supporting circuitry. Adjacent modules are connected to one another such that they form a fully connected network across the entire wall that allows sounds to wash across its surface.

This internal wall of sensor/speakers is enclosed on the back by a solid panel that keeps the elements out of sight and reach of the public. The wall is enclosed on the front side by a porous sheet of metal that provides protection and security, while allowing sound to easily emanate from the speakers, and providing visibility to the sensors and resonators embedded on the inner panels. The total depth of the structure is approximately 8 inches.

A large solar panel is mounted above the wall to generate electricity for the installation and provide protection from the elements. A battery is safely housed within the structure and is recharged by the solar panel to provide power to the electronics during the day and night. The structure is rooted in the ground behind the transit stop, facing, and in close proximity to the bench where transit users converge while waiting.

The program (Pure Data) runs on a mini PC which is plugged into the aux jack of the car HiFi. Information about the drive is captured by a Wiimote controller, fixed with a suction cup inside the windshield, which continuously sends data concerning the XYZ movements of the car. The Infra Red sensor has been adapted (the filter taken out), so that it detects position and size of any luminous objects (headlamps or tail lights of other cars, areas of sunlight or shade etc).

The vibrations from the Wii are continuously written into lookup tables (one for each axis), then read as audio (wavetable oscillators). This means that while pitch (the tune) is defined algorithmically within the program, the timbre of the sounds varies according to vibrations of the motor and other movements of the car. These movements are analyzed and categorized to distinguish bends, accelerations, decelerations, bumps in the road and standstill. These events are used to trigger variations on sequences which are automatically generated whenever the car stops.

AutoSync will soon be available for sale. The version of the program demonstrated in the video (scroll down) is progressing on a daily basis to provide more and more varied sounds and compositions. In the future, other composers and artists will be invited to work on different setups for the program so that eventually the user will be able to choose between musics generated from programs by these collaborators.

Peter Sinclair is a member of the research group Locus Sonus audio in art and professor at L’Ecole Superieur d’Art d’Aix-en Provence. The idea for the project AutoSync originated in a conversation with Lydwine Van der Hulst (at that time member of Locus Sonus).

With thanks to G. H. Hovagimyan.

The print journal, Acoustic Space is a forum for net.radio, sound art and creative explorations in the networked electro-acoustic environments. Now in its 7th edition, Acoustic Space - SPECTROPIA issue investigates the rapid transformation of the usage of the radio frequency spectrum that we are witnessing in the 21st century. It doesn’t refer only to a quantitative increase in mobile, satellite and wireless networks, locative and pervasive media, but also to a qualitative shift in the way people communicate and the way spectrum is used in arts, education, science and commerce. The recent scientific research and artistic explorations of electromagnetic (EM) spectrum will be published in this issue, in order to introduce which chances and risks this tranformation process bears for artists and the populations at large.

For the first time, Acoustic Space journal will come out as ‘peer review’ (refereeing) publication. It will be published by the MPLab (Art Research Lab) of Liepaja University in collaboration with the RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia.

Therefore, the publication will contain 2 main sections:

Section 1 - RESEARCH texts (’academic style’ writings with references, etc.)
Section 2 - ARTISTIC abstracts: ideas, concepts, pictures (this part will include mainly artists’ proposals for upcoming Spectropia festival exhibition - open-call is announced, deadline: April 21, 2008)

DEADLINES:

Deadline for submissions: May 19, 2008 - for completed research texts.
(For abstracts - April 21, 2007)

We encourage you to submit abstracts first. Proposals and inquiries regarding submissions should be made to Rasa Smite: rasa [at] rixc.lv

The RESEARCH texts should consist of 12000 - 15000 characters (i.e. 8 pages A4, 12 pt) + references.
(the ARTISTIC abstracts/texts - 2000-4000 characters)

Language: English (all texts will be also translated in to Latvian).

TOPICS:

The publication will cover wide range of topics under 4 main sections:

ELECTROMAGNETIC COSMOLOGY, SPECTRAL ECOLOGY AND EMF (ELECTRO-MAGNETIC FIELDS) RESEARCH: Modern cosmology constitutes the world we live in and our understanding about it by reducing ” the physical reality - galaxies, starts, planets, atoms - to electrical or electromagnetic configurations” - as stated by Bureau d’etudes (in their “Industrial dogma”). Could it be that “understanding the electromagnetic field is the only way to understand ourselves and our surroundings”? In such context the issue of “spectral ecology” will be investigated in the broadest sense possible. This section provides a critique of the industrial dogma and propaganda of electromagnetism, health and ‘green’ issues stemming from electrosmog and meriting more research, as well as sustainability and energy usage and other aspects in relation to communication and information technologies.

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: FROM IDEOLOGY AND CULTURE OF SPYING (AND SECURITY) TO CONVERSION OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGIES: This topic studies secret past of communication technologies of military origin. Espionage phenomenon is explored, tracing back to its origins in military history of ancient culture. This part also brings up an issue of “cultural intelligence” - contemporary conversion and culturalisation process of military technologies by exploring how former military facilities have been conversed to become important social and cultural centers and objects.

FREE SPECTRUM: WAVES AND ELECTROMAGNETIC POLITICS: This field looks at electromagnetic spectrum as a socio-political space, investigating political practices in spectrum and bringing up debate on “free waves” and “open spectrum”. The spectrum is regulated and divided: for commercial use, military, radio amateurs, etc., yet wireless community networks continue to explore the exempt part of the spectrum, making small parts of the spectrum available for all.

TECHNOLOGY MYTH, ARTISTIC INTERPRETATIONS AND CONTEMPORARY GHOST STORIES: Electromagnetic fields have become the ghosts of today - invisible and surrounding us, opening up the boundaries of our imagination and bringing technology myths to life. This topic explores the place of those myths and stories in the life of modern society.

Scientific editorial board:

Armin Medosch - PhD., Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
Rasa Smite - PhD., Riga Stradina University; researcher at MPLab of Liepaja University; director of the RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture, Riga, Latvia.
Inke Arns - Dr. phil., artistic director of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund, Germany.
Douglas Kahn - Prof. and Head of Technocultural Studies at University of California at Davis, USA.
Andrey Smirnov - Head of the Theremin Center for Electroacoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory, Russia.
Florian Dombois - Prof. and Head of the Institute for Transdisciplinarity (Y) at Berne University of the Arts, Switzerland.
Atau Tanaka - Prof., Culture Lab of Newcastle University, UK.

European Sound Delta is a mobile project on the Danube & Rhine Rivers focusing on radio-art using sounds of European cities. Two teams will be travelling on both rivers this summer, recording sounds, producing live performances and radio broadcasts with local sound-artists. A final exhibition is scheduled in Strasbourg by the end of September 2008 as part of Ososphere. International sound artists are invited to apply with a project meant to be created on one of the trans-European floating labs.

Main Objectives:

–> To give young people the experience of a professional mobile project
–> A documentary artistic research on cultural identities of European cities
–> Built a new european network in the field of sound art
–> Experiment ICT via innovative artistic practices

Participating countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Romania, Serbia & Slovakia

Associated curators: Valerie Vivancos and Joachim Montessuis.

Participating artists & residents (list not closed): Aymeric De Tapol, Tonic Train, Dinahbird, Jopo Stereo, SIC: Hori Cosmin Samol, Ewen Chardronnet, Alejandra Perez Nunez, Julien Ottavi, Chris Watson, Vincent Epplay, Alejandra & Aeron, Robert Hampson, Kassel Jaeger, AGF, Jorg Piringer, Yannick Dauby, Christian Zanesi, Phil Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine, Jean-Philippe Roux, Gael Segalen, Philip Griffiths, Joachim Montessuis.

The Mobile Music Workshop 2008 is the 5th in a series of annual international gatherings that explore the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. They are inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends. We are looking for new ideas and ground-breaking projects on sound in mobile contexts. What new forms of interaction with music and audio lie ahead as locative media, ubiquitous networks, and music access merge into new forms of experiences that shape the everyday? Can they change the way we think about our mobile devices and about walking through the city?

The emerging field of Mobile Music sits at the intersection of ubiquitous computing, portable audio technology and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). It goes beyond today’s personal music players to include creative practices of mobile music making, sharing and mixing. The mobile setting challenges existing notions of interfaces and interaction, stretching music to new creative limits. The workshop has been at the forefront of this innovative area since 2004. Past editions of the event have taken place in Amsterdam, Brighton, Vancouver and Göteborg in collaboration with the Viktoria Institute, STEIM, Waag Society, Futuresonic, NIME and others.

The 2008 edition of the workshop will be held in Vienna, one of the hotspots in the European for laptop, glitch, and electronic music. Hosted by the University of Applied Arts, it will feature three evenings of performances and installations, an exhibition in the heart of the city, invited speakers, paper presentations, posters and demo sessions as well as hands-on tutorials. Besides the workshop proceedings, we will publish a catalogue that will gather key contributions from the last 5 years. We invite artists, designers, academic researchers, hackers, industry professionals and practitioners from all areas, including music, technology development, new media, sound-art, music distribution, cultural/media studies and locative media and more to present and discuss projects, prototypes, applications, devices, performances, installations, theoretical and historical considerations.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES

Submission deadline: 17 February 2008
Notification of acceptance: 14 March 2008
Submission deadline for final papers: 14 April 2008
Registration deadline: 14 April 2008

PARTICIPATE

Please upload your submission in any of the three following categories at http://ocs.waag.org/. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by a committee of international specialists in the field.

Papers

We invite submissions of workshop papers presenting new projects, approaches or reflections exploring the topic of mobile music. Potential submissions could include but are not limited to mobile music systems or enabling technologies, interface design, legal issues, user studies, ethnographic fieldwork, social implications, art pieces and other areas relevant to mobile music. Accepted paper authors will be given a time slot during the workshop for presentation and discussion of their work. They are encouraged to bring a demo of their work if possible.

Format: 4 pages in ACM SIG publications format (for templates, see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html). More artistic submissions are free to pay less attention to the academic or technical detail of the format, and to include more media instead.

Posters and Demos

We also invite the contribution of posters and demos that document work-in-progress projects or ideas in similar areas of mobile music technology as the papers. There will be a poster and demo presentation session where attendees will be able to discuss work with the authors. The most robust of the demos will be offered the opportunity to exhibit to the general public during the open sessions (although this is not mandatory). Posters will be on display for the duration of the conference.

Format: 2 pages in ACM SIG publications format (for templates, see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html). More artistic submissions are free to pay less attention to the academic or technical detail of the format, and to include more media instead.

Installations and Performances

We invite mobile art installations and performances in the genres of mobile music and locative audio. There will be an exhibition space in central Vienna, and the possibility to show work in the city. There will also be a series of evening performances/concerts/parties.

Format: Please follow loosely the ACM SIG publications format (for templates, see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html) without too much academic or technical detail and include more media instead. Please indicate if your project would be suitable for indoor or outdoor, installation or performance.

REGISTRATION & FEE

The workshop will have both closed sessions for registered participants and sessions open to the general public. The number of participants for the closed sessions of the workshop is limited to 50 places. Accepted submitters are given priority, other participants are accepted on a first-come first-served basis. Registered participants will have automatic access to all sessions of the workshops.

Registrations fees for the closed sessions of the workshop have yet to be confirmed. However this will be in the region of 75 € at full rate and 45€ for concessions.

Deadline for Registration: 14th April 2007.

ORGANISERS&INFORMATION

The 2008 edition is hosted and co-organised by the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria (Nicolaj Kirisits). The Steering Committee is formed by Lalya Gaye (Dånk! Collective and IT-University of Göteborg, Sweden), Atau Tanaka (Culture Lab Newcastle, UK), Frauke Behrendt (University of Sussex, UK), Kristina Andersen (STEIM, The Netherlands).

Contact: info@mobilemusicworkshop.org
More information: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org

The following interview by Peter Traub focuses on the well-known 2001 work, Dialtones (A Telesymphony), a concert performed through the choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones, in which Levin collaborated with Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, and Joerg Lehner. Levin’s more recent work is primarily in the area of installations using computer vision and robotics (e.g. see this YouTube video), and unrelated to Dialtones. None-the-less, we felt this was an interesting interview and dealt with issues that are still relevant to new forms of interaction with music and sound, and raises such questions as: is this music or does it occur in the place of music?

Peter Traub: In reading some of your previous interviews, you stated that you didn’t really think of Dialtones as a musical work, but rather as a performance piece. In what way do you think the difference in thinking about the piece affected your compositional choices?

Golan Levin: Dialtones was always, to begin with, a kind of sound-art piece or conceptual performance artwork. I say this because the project originated from a pure concept (that of performing the audience’s mobile phones), and was motivated by a curiosity to discover what it would be like - sonically, visually, and socially - to experience such a concept. In this sense, I don’t think it’s too much to say that the project conformed well to John Cage’s definition of experimental music: as music that “initiates sonic processes the outcomes of which are not known in advance.” The problem with Cage’s definition, though, is that it suggests that it wouldn’t have mattered whether or not the results reflected any human patterning, or that we oughtn’t intervene in some way to ensure an interesting outcome. I think if Dialtones just sounded like a pile of 200 phones ringing on and off randomly for half an hour, people would have been really profoundly disappointed. For the project to succeed, it was necessary for us to demonstrate that we could actually tame this enormous and unruly beast - the mobile telephony network of Upper Austria - in order to bend it to more musically structured ends. For these reasons, I would say that Dialtones was a performance piece in its conceptualization, but ultimately a musical work in its realization.

It’s important to say that, in the end, it took three people to compose Dialtones. Apart from the concept itself and some very telescopic decisions about overall sequencing, I was really the least involved in the actual musical composition; my hands were already quite full with logistical issues and software programming. The greatest bulk of the concert was composed by Gregory Shakar, who developed most of the orchestra’s ringtones, and Scott Gibbons, who also composed ringtones as well as the central solo section of the performance. I think, for them, the compositional process was governed by very explicitly musical concerns - melody, rhythm, texture, drama. We all recognized that this piece had to function in a way that would be recognizably musical, or at least played with this concept by deliberately treading the fuzzy boundary between music and noise. As much as we all admired Cage’s practiced indifference to chaos, we felt that the days of purely random music were over, and that taking a completely hands-off aleatoric approach would have been a cop-out. And as it turns out, there really were a ton of aleatoric elements in its presentation that made it (perhaps pleasingly) difficult to listen to anyway. As I explain below, our job as music composers really came to focus on effectively managing the considerable randomness built into the situation.

Part 1: 15.4 M
Part 2: 13.2 M
Part 3: 18.8 M

Peter: You described one person’s experience with the work in which they entered their phone info in a kiosk, but then had to skip the performance, but kept getting dialed by your performance system. This seems to suggest an almost opposite event, in which people at the performance who had their phones turned on were called normally by someone outside the event. Do you know if there were any occurrences of this? Furthermore, if, hypothetically, a number of people were called from outside sources during perhaps the solo section of the piece, would you consider that an interruption or a serendipitous moment in the piece? I’m curious if you can speak to the idea of tapping into this phone network to produce an organized work, but in the act of doing so, also leaving yourself susceptible to the interruption and chaos that could be introduced into the network from outside of the performance.

Golan: The possibility that people could receive outside calls during the performance certainly occurred to us, when we cheekily instructed the audience to “please leave your cellphone ringers on.” If this event actually did occur, we had no technical tools for detecting it; we would have had to listen for unintended rings, and usually there were so many phones ringing at the same time that we wouldn’t have heard it. My feeling is that we would have only conceived such an event to be an undesirable interruption if the audience member actually answered their phone and started having a conversation in the middle of the performance. But we had also explicitly requested the audience not to answer their phones, and fortunately nobody did this.

More generally, your question brings up the topic of chance and unpredictable events in the Dialtones performance. We were able to count at least seven different sources of unpredictability that affected the concert. Some of these were due to properties of the network itself, while others could be attributed to specific audience members or to audiences generally. Chance elements in the performance included the following:

The telephone network imposed an unpredictable latency between the time that we dialed a phone, and the time that the requested phone would begin to ring. We did some experiments and determined that the average delay was 4.74 seconds, with a standard deviation of about a second or so. In some cases, particularly when we dialed international numbers, the delay could be as long as twelve or thirteen seconds. This fact had serious compositional consequences, musically speaking, since it meant that we couldn’t create precise synchronizations between rhythmic ringtones. It also meant that any chord progressions would have to play out over a fairly long timescale in order to be reliably perceived. We ended up composing ringtone melodies which all shared the same tonal center - I think it was A-880 - and adopted a more textural approach to compensate.

Peter: How many of these chance elements were you able to play with before the first concert? Were you able to conduct small experiments on a limited number of phones prior to the initial performance? If so, were there issues, such as the dial/ring delay you mention above, that you encountered before the first concert and then made compositional changes to deal with it?

Golan: That’s exactly what we did. One of our main logistical challenges in developing the project was actually getting enough phones to test the system. Through a variety of contacts and sources we managed to borrow about seventy phones. Nokia Austria loaned us ten, Ericsson loaned us ten, our main sponsor loaned us about twenty, and a local phone store in Linz provided another ten or so. Another ten were actually loaned to us from individuals! It was a real hodge-podge of different models, which turned out to be quite helpful for the purposes of testing and debugging. Computing the average delay-time was one of the first experiments we conducted once we got the dialing system to work. We only had a couple of days before the show in which everything was actually up and running, and that’s when most of the real composition got done - testing different combinations of ringtones, etcetera.

When we were first developing the concert, it was almost impossible for us to get enough phones to test and compose with. We were really desperate, and we were lucky to have the assistance of the Ars Electronica development office. The staff there called every conceivable sponsor trying to get phones for us, and most of the time they were turned down. It’s sad, but true: once the idea had been successfully demonstrated, it was an entirely different story. This is well-illustrated by the following two pictures. This photo shows our testing setup at Ars Electronica in 2001, while this one shows the 150 test phones that Swisscom Mobile loaned us one year later. They even built a custom charging station for us!

On rare occasions, a requested connection was dropped by the network. This happened less than 30 times (out of the approximately 5000 dialing requests that constituted the concert) and generally only when we were pushing close to the signaling capacity of the concert hall’s base station antenna. It’s impossible to know for certain, but I suspect that there may have been some extraneous phone activity outside the concert hall which, from time to time, ate up one or two channels on our antenna system. Theoretically we had 60 signaling channels, but I don’t think we ever got more than 58 of them going at once.


We were only technologically capable of specifying the ringtone melodies for roughly two-thirds of the audience’s phones. When Dialtones was performed, in late 2001, many people still did not own phones that could receive new ringtones via the Short Messaging Service - this feature was still just being introduced in the latest models by only a few manufacturers. As a result, we were unable to know exactly what sound would occur when we dialed those people with older phones - about a third of our orchestra, or 65 people. Fortunately, we had a good idea who they were, since we asked all of the participants to provide the exact make and model of their mobile phone when they registered their phones before the concert. With this in mind, we were able to use this fact compositionally: at the beginning of the performance, we dialed all the people with unknown ringtones. It turns out most of those people just had “regular phone” ring sounds, e.g. non-melodies.


Peter: How were the ‘unknown’ ringtones used later in the piece? Other than at the beginning, did they have a special use within the composition throughout, or did you try to always keep them at some limited percentage of the overall sound texture?

Golan: Generally speaking we tried to avoid clicking on the “unknown” phones except at designated times. This was done just to keep the different parts of the concert perceptually distinct. The alternative would have diluted the character of the different sections with an even blanket of off-color sound.

Some people deliberately (and probably mischievously) changed the ringtones on their phones, even though we transmitted one of our own ringtones to their phone. This happened on at least two occasions. One person, actually a good friend of mine, later confessed to me that he had replaced our ringtone with the theme song from the television show “Dallas.”


People could have deliberately, prematurely terminated the connection while their phone was ringing (or thoughtlessly attempted to answer their phone, out of habit). It is even possible that people could have turned their phone off altogether. I have no information about whether any of these things actually occurred.


People could have switched seats with another participant, or sat in one of the (few) empty seats. Their phones would still ring, but their personal spotlight would not hit them, and their sound would have a different spatialization than we intended. More drastically, a person could register for the event, and then not show up; their phone would still ring, but not be heard at all in the performance venue. This definitely happened at least once.


As you mentioned, it was possible for people to receive phone calls that originated externally. We were not aware of this happening, but it very likely could have.

Peter: The second possibility you describe above (of the person registering but not showing up), is quite interesting. Are you familiar with Thomson and Craighead’s Telephony [pictured right]? It’s a gallery-based cell phone piece that allows users to dial out from phones on a gallery wall, or dial into that network of phones from their own phones. Some people would dial their own phones from the gallery wall, thus leaving their numbers in the gallery phone’s register. On multiple occasions, people at later times would hit the send button twice on a gallery phone, thus redialing its last number, and this would end up calling some previous gallery visitor. I found this a very interesting phenomenon, as in some sense the visitor had left the real space of the gallery but had perhaps become trapped in the virtual space of the piece. This sounded very similar to me to your description of people who registered but then left before the performance and were called anyway by your software. Besides the fact that the person receiving the call might be annoyed, would you consider those events happy accidents of a sort, in that the network and the piece are perhaps extending themselves beyond the reach of the physical performance space? I’m not quite sure if that is the right question to ask, but there seems to be something important about this phenomenon and I’m wondering what you think of it?

Golan: I am familiar with Thomson and Craighead’s project (I’ve listed it, for example, in my Informal Catalogue of Mobile Phone Performances, Installations and Artworks), but I wasn’t aware that it enabled the particular behavior you mention. I do agree that this is one of the most interesting aspects of both projects. Speaking for the Dialtones concert, I can only say that this aspect emerged anecdotally, and not due to our explicit intention or on any significant scale.

As you can see, the telephone network itself was unpredictable in many ways. Our attitude was to embrace serendipity, as we really had no choice about it. In some sense, Scott Gibbons’ solo section (which he performed very carefully on 6 phones) became an even more significant contrast to the orchestral sections because of his high degree of control.

Peter: Several interview respondents have talked about the fallibility of networks or the imperfections in networks as being a point of interest for them artistically. In a piece I’m currently working on, the degradation of feedback through audio streaming is a focal point of the work. Why do you think there is such a great interest for many electronic artists and artists working with networks to exploit imperfections, artifacts, and failures within the medium? Did you have similar interests in creating Dialtones, and if not, how do your interests differ?

Golan: By coincidence, I’ve just been reading some essays on this topic, about musicians’ interest in their tools’ artifacts and imperfections. Kim Cascone has a nice article about ‘Glitch’ musics (”The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music“, in Cox & Warner’s Audio Culture reader), and Rob Young has written a related article, “Worship the Glitch: Digital Music, Electronic Disturbance” (in the new WIRE anthology, Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music). Most of their examples concern composers who are deliberately using vinyl crackling, digital clipping, and digital compression artifacts as foreground elements of their compositions, and these authors’ main conclusions, which I think are quite reasonable, are that (1) “failure is more interesting than success“, especially insofar as it is a progenitor to further discovery and evolution, and (2) artifacts reveal the true nature and limits of a medium. So I agree that it’s quite natural for artists to explore the imperfections and artifacts of a well-understood medium because it gives the listener a new appreciation for a system which is otherwise all-too-often assumed to be perfectly transparent.

As I suggest above, I think these sorts of preoccupations with the failure-points of a given medium presuppose, to some extent, the audience’s familiarity with that medium’s “normal” mode of operation. It’s a cheeky gag to include tape hiss or MP3 phasing in a new CD, because we all know from considerable experience with these media that they’re not “supposed” to sound that way. In the case of Dialtones, on the other hand, nobody knew what 200 simultaneous mobile phones would sound like, and we were just trying to get this telephone network to sound like something at all. So, to answer your question, no: as best as I can recollect, we were interested in overcoming the failure-points of the phone network (like dropped connections, etc.) rather than exploiting them. Of course, it’s sort of an odd glitch in the first place that the telephony network could be abused in order to produce a symphonic chorus of ringtones.

Peter: One of your primary interests in Dialtones was to create this grid of audiovisual pixels through using the audience as a canvas (or screen?). And perhaps that already answers this question, but I’m wondering how you thought about the large and complex phone network that you tapped into as a compositional tool? Did you think about it as a transmission medium for the work much like one thinks about a sound system (i.e., as a means to end) or did you think about it in some way more central to the idea of the work and its structuring?

Golan: Hmm.. I guess my answer partially derives from my experiences in high school, back in the late 1980’s, with keyboard synths. To some extent during its development, I began to think of the Dialtones telephone network as a very large polyphonic synthesizer, albeit one with a lot of unpredictable quirks (especially with regard to latency). And each of the audience’s phones were voices or individual oscillators in that large synth, and my job was to play the instrument by clicking on the right notes on its keyboard at the right time.

I say I “began” to think of the phone network as a polyphonic synth, but I certainly didn’t end that way. My concept of the instrument changed entirely on the night of the first performance, when we were finally able to bring a live audience into the situation. What you have to understand, which was a little weird, is that we were projecting the image of our grid like graphical interface onto the audience from above (as you mentioned). The logic of this was to project a spot of light onto the head of an audience member whenever his or her phone was ringing. What we didn’t quite foresee was that the audience was also able to witness my cursor as I hunted around for a person to click on. My whole concept of the instrument changed when I was performing the piece for the first time, and I looked up from my personal LCD screen just to double-check the location of my (projected) cursor in the crowd. My cursor had landed in the lap of this woman and I suddenly made eye-contact with her. I had been thinking, I’m going to click on this cell, but in her mind, she was waiting for a phone call from me. And when her phone started to ring she smiled at me, and I suddenly realized that I was actually able to address individual people in the crowd, and in a peculiarly personal way. I’m not sure what else to say about this, but it certainly yanked me back from conceiving of the phone network as an abstract sound-triggering system, and reminded me about what it really is, which is a communications medium that connects people. I guess that’s sort of sappy (”Reach out and touch someone”), but that’s exactly what the network/instrument became about, from my perspective as its performer.

Peter: I know you’re not sure what else to say about this, but that is a wonderfully illuminating story. With respect to the phenomenon of people seeing the mouse pointer as you looked for ‘pixels’ to activate, was that something you tried to get rid of for subsequent performances, or did you end up viewing it as an important part of the piece and as a phenomenon that was important in the audience/performer interaction?

Golan: Yes, we kept that. Among other things it was significantly helpful in communicating and illustrating what was going on.

Dialtones (A Telesymphony) - Ars Electronica 2001
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1G-YesiBB8

This interview was originally published in Contemporary Music Review.

Moving Forest of the PEOPLE’S FRONT is conspiring with KEIN.ORG and INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) in a call for an INSURGENCY act. The Russians took Moltke bridge. The prisoners took JVA Moabit. We take the prisoners. We are all 129a. The walls are blasted. The data are mined. The phones are tapped. The lives of others. We listen through walls. The cities of others. We walk through walls.

Moving Forest, conceived by Shu Lea Cheang (Plenum, nodeLondon06) and Martin Howse (xxxxx, nodeLondon06), is a 12 hour 5 act sonic performance operating with public wifi and mobile technology - an expandable citywide operatic manoeuvre / intervention. Derived from Kurosawa’s film version of Macbeth, Spider Web Castle, Moving Forest renders the film’s final sequences (12 minutes in length) into a 12-hour ’sonica’ of grand scale. Moving Forest reinvents a modern edition of a Castle Central (here: the House of World Cultures) and a city in revolt. Inside the castle, the downfall of the assumed power; outside in the city, the mobilised urbanites march with generated sounds of insurgence towards the imaginary Centre. Moving Forest collaborates with sound artists to compose acts and scores, at the same time, drafts a PD (pure data) conspiracy scheme, performing live with citywide performance transmitted by wifi.

[AKA the castle] is a temporal performance troop bringing together visual artists, writers, soundists, silk threaders, codedecoders,
macromikro, boombox mass, mobile agents, wifi fielders and urbanites to realize the 12 hour Moving Forest.

CALL for DS Revolt: go northwest 20 Allied Clearing House :: CALL for Radio Gun Revolt: Symphony of noise :: CALL for AIR: GAMEoverTAKEoverOVER :: CALL for transmission: autonomous transmitting units :: CALL for netstreams: Conspire and take remote control

CONSPIRE Transmediale08, Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
KEIN.TV is a virtual, adhoc video production unit with a mobile internet connection via satellite
INURA a network of people in action and research in urban environments.

Valve / Membrance - Naoyuki Arashi (jp), Keisuke Oki (jp), Minoru Sato (jp) :: January 31, 2008; 9 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium Nominee for the transmediale Award 2008 - Valve / Membrance is a series of electronic and non-electronic music pieces with traditional Japanese and Chinese valve instruments. The music bridges historical and regional differences of technological and musical forms. It focuses on cultural and technological elements from ancient Asia, the industrial revolution and the electronic age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e30xL1yiqoI

hystere - Satoshi Shiraishi (jp), Alo Allik (ee), Yota Morimoto (jp), ibitsu (pp/ee) :: February 3, 2008; 8 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium - hystere is an experiment in improvisation within premeditated boundaries in which the ‘e-Clambone’, a custom-made electronic wind instrument, provides the sole source for the ensuing multimodal environment. The visual aspect seeks moments of convergence and divergence with live video feed from the performance and is implemented as a library of OpenGL classes that listen to Open Sound Control messages over the ethernet.

10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid - Evelina Domnitch (by), Dmitry Gelfand (us), Andrey Smirnov (ru) :: January 30, 2008; 10:00 pm :: Zeiss-Planetarium, Prenzlauer Allee 80 - The performance 10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid visualises the fascinating surface structures of soap bubbles by using laser light. Dmitry Gelfand and his partner Evelina Domnitch create sensual immersive environments that bring together physics, chemistry and computer technology. The audio part of the performance is contributed by Andrey Smirnov, the director of the Theremin-Center in Moscow.

d.v.d. - Itoken (jp), Jimanica (jp), Takashi Yamaguchi (jp) :: January 29, 2008; 9:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global - The drums duo Itoken and Jimanica together with visual artist Yamaguchi Takashi are presenting their ‘interactive live installation’. With their drumsets the musicians are controlling game-like animations which are generating additional sounds. In turn their drum-play is dependent on the structure of the animation. The show at transmediale.08 is the kick-off event for d.v.d’s first europe tour.

DIGIT - Julien Maire (fr/de) :: January 31 and February 2, 2008; 1:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global - DIGIT is a living work of art – a writer sits at a table writing a text. The printed text appears through the mere gliding of his finger across a blank sheet of paper. Spectators can come very close to the writer and follow the emerging text. DIGIT is located between cinematographic process and the process of writing, while also making reference to the surrealist tradition of cutting and rearranging texts. His work DIGIT received an Honorary Mention in Ars Electronica 2007.

To travel on a train, watch the landscape and gain an audio experience. This is the basic concept of what we propose. In the first phase, we will work with sound artists to develop the audio experience, developing and testing the basic technology needed for execution, and delivering a final working concept that can be implemented on a train ride.

The LocoSound team is: ALAIN BELLET (Graphic & Interaction Designer), Leader of the project. Works in Zurich as Freelance Designer and is teaching since 2003 as regular Professor at the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (écal) in the Media&Interaction Design Department.

IRIS RENNERT (Sound Designer) Works in the sound design and scenography field. She recently worked for the sound design of the swiss Pavillon at the World Exhibition in Aichi, Japan.

FABIEN GIRARDIN (Software Engineer) Doing his Ph.D. thesis on collaborative work in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He worked on a lot of geo-localised projects.

HANSJAKOB FEHR (Graphic & Interaction Designer) Works as Grafic Designer between Berlin and Zurich and is also developing interactive installations (former Electronician). He worked on the project “signalpain” during expo.02

OLIVER FRIEDLI (Pianist, Composer & Coder) Independent musician, composer and sound designer, he also works for the University of Art in Bern as a lecturer in sound design and media integration. He is also a Max/MSP specialist.

We hear while we are in the womb, long before we see. For the rest of our lives, hearing essentially precedes the rest of the sensorium, as we move through a world of sonic fragments which affect us phenomenally and emotionally but of which we are often unaware. These fragments are mediated by our environment, our bodies, our individual and collective memories, and the technologies that pervade contemporary life: from books to radio to television to iPods. Through these mediations sounds give rise to stories, which though they might be as hazy as an aura, begin to narrate the world we move through as they themselves move through our bodies and minds.

Sonic Fragments is a sound art festival and symposium exploring how these mediations effect meaning in our lives, and how artists are actively engaging narrative and mediation in their work. We are hoping for a diverse and interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars and artists, between theory and practice.

Central to the festival will be the presentation of works written specifically for mobile mp3 players which engage the spaces, places, objects, and paths on or near the Princeton University campus. We are soliciting works of ten minutes or less. These works will be available on mp3 players at a kiosk throughout the festival, downloadable from the festival website, and may also be compiled onto a limited edition CD-R for later distribution.

Sound works may be created for any location on or near campus. We are hoping that people will engage Princeton’s weird nooks and crannies as well as its wonderful art collection, perhaps atop one of the many Neogothic towers, inside Henry Moore’s sculpture Oval with Points, or in front of Ellen Gallagher’s large-scale Blubber. We hope that each piece will exhibit a distinct relationship to its site. Existing works which are not site-specific will not be considered.

A few resources to help you find a site:

Most crucially, you must visit and just poke around. New Jersey Transit (about 1 hr, 15 minutes from NYC) http://www.njtransit.com.

But to get a taste of what the campus is like…

Princeton University
http://www.princeton.edu

Wikipedia Entry on Princeton University
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University

Campus Scenes
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/#scenes

Flickr Photos of Princeton
http://flickr.com/search/?q=princeton

Orange Key Virtual Tour
https://www.princeton.edu/oktour/virtualtour/index.htm

Princeton University Art Museum
http://www.princetonartmuseum.org

Putnam Collection of Sculpture
https://www.princeton.edu/oktour/virtualtour/Hist10-OvalPoints

Princeton University: An Interactive Campus History
http://etcweb.princeton.edu/Campus

Please send an email containing the following to sonicfragments[at]gmail.com by February 15:

1. A short (200-word max) description of your project as it relates to the site
2. A short (100-word max) bio
3. The completed piece (10 minutes or under)
4. A photo or graphic which can be used as your ‘album art’ – we suggest a photo of the site.

Deadline: February 15, 2008

For more information, please contact Betsey Biggs at sonicfragments[at]gmail.com