Sonic Fragments: Narrative and Mediation in Sound Art - A two-day festival and symposium :: March 28-29, 2008 :: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ :: Free and open to the public.

Please join us as we host an international group of scholars and practitioners who are gathering to explore the roles of narrative and mediation in art practices that engage sound as a material. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions as well as an exhibition of audio-works for portable music players made expressly for the geography, architecture, and social spaces of the Princeton University campus. Continue reading

Just Play - Musik as Social Praxis :: Artists: Cory Arcangel / Beige, Johanna Billing, Jeremy Deller, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Kristin Lucas, Hadley + Maxwell, Elke Marhöfer / Anne-Marie Schleiner, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Abe Linkoln / Marisa Olson :: March 8 – May 18, 2008 :: Opening: March 7, 2008; 7 pm :: Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Katharinenstra_e 23, D-26121 Oldenburg.

Music plays a pivotal role in many people’s lives as part of everyday popular culture because it is so unmediated. At times as a real world, at others as a reflecting surface for one’s own and others’ projections, music provides scope for manifold liberating, activist or subversive strategies at a far remove from consumption or glamour. Continue reading

The Digital Artists Handbook [see Working with Sound] is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies. Continue reading

Echologue, by Orkan Telhan, is a public interface for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic features. The goal is to build a medium that can reflect its surroundings like a smart mirror, highlight the salient details and patterns in the environment and contribute to our understanding of the perception of social places. The interface senses ambient sound, records deliberate user input and displays a visualization of the activity in that space as its output.

The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings. Continue reading

The Significance of Music in Second Life - This post to the empyre list was co-written John von Seggern with J. LeRoy: Music has always been a social art form, created and enjoyed by people in groups. Some argue that music was one of the primary means by which early groups of humans communicated and maintained the social bonds that held their communities together.

Since the invention of music recording however, about a century ago, technological developments have made the experience of music a more and more private activity. Once music could be purchased for listening at home, the possibility of enjoying music in private by yourself became a more and more popular alternative to attending performances. Continue reading

Social Mobile Music Navigation Using The Compass by Atau Tanaka, Guillaume Valadon, and Christophe Berger - ABSTRACT: During a regular day while on the move, most people interact with multiple portable devices: a personal music player, mobile phone, and digital camera. People driving cars in addition may also use navigation systems. Whereas each of these devices are getting more and more sophisticated, and packed with numerous functionalities, they are each optimized for specific usages. Modern mobile phones for example, claim to function as digital cameras and music players, but these are features that are more often than not added on almost as an afterthought, and are not integrated with the connectivity that the mobile phone represents. From an engineering point of view, the goal of this project is to push mass-market mobile phones to their limits in networked musical exchange by implementing The Compass. Specifically, we are targeting phones embedded with WiFi, music player and location1 capabilities. The idea was to build a true convergence application that integrated localization, mobile networking, and music listening. Mobile Music Workshop Proceedings, page 34 [PDF] Continue reading

Splice Re-Mixes the Music Mashup.

A new social music mixing site is re-thinking interactive audio. Splice, which is still in beta, is a community site that encourages users to submit raw sounds. Users can then build songs out of each other’s sounds. Each creation can be remixed, rearranged, deconstructed and completely re-worked by anyone else in the Splice community.

Splice’s coolest feature is the browser-based sequencer. Songs are assembled and mixed without ever leaving the browser. You can also see details about the users who contributed each track as you mix. Continue reading