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.

The exhibition will begin the festival on the morning of Friday, March 28th. Thirty iPods and corresponding maps will be made available for check-out from the Mendel Music Library Circulation desk in the Woolworth Center for Musical Studies. After participants have had time to explore the audio-works, opening comments and a panel comprised of artists and musicians will start the symposium. The first panel will consist of musician and sound artist William Basinski, whose melancholy minimal electronic music has achieved critical acclaim; artist Jon Brumit, whose Neighborhood Public Radio project is featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial; multimedia artist Brenda Hutchinson, who will lead sunrise and sunset bell-ringings throughout the festival; as well as sound artist Michael J. Schumacher, founder of New York’s Diapason Gallery for Sound Art.

After more time Saturday to explore the site-specific audio-works, the second panel will take up the notion of narrative as it relates to sound practices. Kristin Oppenheim’s spare and hypnotic sound installations invoke layers of personal memory, while Stephen Vitiello’s work transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. Mendi + Keith Obadike collaborate on interdisciplinary projects investigating race, history and identity, and Thomas Levin, a curator and cultural theorist, focuses on sound technologies and issues of surveillance in media practices.

The symposium’s third and final panel will address issues of mediation in sound art. Ruben Gallo will talk about Mexican sound artist Taniel Morales’s Pirate Radio. Ed Osborn will present his kinetic and audible sound installations, while Camille Norment will discuss her artistic practice, which extends the fine arts into extra-disciplinary realms such as scientific research, city planning, and interaction design. Tianna Kennedy, program director of Brooklyn’s free103point9 transmission arts network and a participating artist in the festival, will discuss issues related to transmission, participatory practice and social sculpture.

Sonic Fragments is sponsored by the Princeton University Department of Music, The Peter B. Lewis Center for the Performing Arts, The Graduate School, The Sound Lab research group in the Department of Computer Science, The Aesthetics and Media Track in the Department of German, The Program in Media and Modernity, The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

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.

Just Play – Music as Social Praxis discusses music as an open system, as a field for potential connections and dissociations, feedbacks and appropriations; as myth and the possibility of freedom and scope, of authenticity and commitment, of enthusiasm and alternative action. The works shown are about a social praxis that raises issues relevant to society as a whole rather than merely exposing the usual market mechanisms or deconstructing symbols and signs. Music becomes the vehicle for constructing identity and différance, orientation and dislocation, collectivity and individuality.

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.

When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free / Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating.

The digital artist handbook is brought to you by folly and has developed out of ongoing consultation with artists working with technology, which has shown a need for removing the barriers for artists to use digital tools. The project is supported by Arts Council England.

From August 2007 until January 2008, the editors of the Handbook were Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux of GOTO10.

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. This medium informs the audience by visualizing the different aspects of the crowd that is otherwise anonymous to each other. The audience listens to a sound collage made of the voices of people telling where they are from and if they can go back or not. As users of the system, we hear words as they are explicitly spoken to the system. The information is used to create a visual representation (based on audio analysis) for designing visuals that display patterns of activity at these location.

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. This has led to our current iPod era, where the most iconic image of a music listener is of a solitary individual dancing with mp3 player and earphones attached, rather than the more social concert or club audiences of earlier periods. More recently, networking and new online media technologies have reversed this trend to some extent, giving us new ways to form communities around music. Napster showed us all how badly we want to share our music, and in spite of the dogged resistance of the ‘mainstream’ music industry, technologies for sharing music and other media online continue to grow in sophistication.

Most recently, virtual world environments such as Second Life have introduced a
significant new development, creating a virtual 3d space in which groups of fans
can listen to and experience music together in real-time. Of course virtual reality tech like this has been around since the early 90s, but the last couple years mark the first time that they have been easily accessible by a large simultaneous user base.
We anticipate that virtual world technologies are likely to have a major impact on the world of music in the near future. We will focus on Second Life here as it currently has the most sophisticated in-world music scene.

Sharing the Experience of Music
People want to share music. This doesn’t only mean passing mp3 files back and forth, it means sharing the experience of music. It means sharing feelings about it, sharing opinions and reactions, and talking about it in real time. For example, we all spent time as teenagers lying on the floor listening to new music and talking about it, and for many of us our musical tastes were one of the main ways we identified with our friends.
While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene,
they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical experience: shared reception, whether of one’s own recent music purchases or of a live concert.

The Internet, the Web and related networking technologies have brought great
change to the music world in the past decade, from mp3 music distribution to the
profusion of indie bands and producers promoting themselves on a MySpace page or
through their own websites.

Last.fm is a great example of how Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, folksonomies, ratings and recommendations from users with similar tastes can be used to help listeners find new music they will enjoy. However, although Last.fm bills itself as the ’social music revolution’ and tries its best to connect you with other listeners, even going so far as to show you a page of images of other users whose tastes are similar to your own… …yet just seeing some names of people who like the same music you do is not
the same thing as actually being with them and hearing the music together. The 2d asynchronous nature of the Web does not allow for this level of interaction with others. Until now none of these online technologies could replicate the experience of going to see and hear a live musical performance in the company of other listeners.

Second Life provides an interesting and exciting extension to this. Through avatars, users can seek out not only social experiences to listen to new music in a shared context, but they can also search worldwide for the musical subculture that best meets their tastes. A Second Life user can experience a live performance from their dorm room in Ames, Iowa while the performer may be in Berlin and other listeners/clubgoers scattered around the world.

While the user’s avatar is dancing, the user can be speaking to fellow attendees from all over the world. Casual conversations can easily happen, even more easily than they could in a real life club. Add to this one very un-real element of Second Life — distance is never a barrier. Users can teleport from one club to another merely by using the search utility, finding another club with music they like, and clicking the teleport button. The barrier of time and space is utterly nullified. The only barrier to leaving would be social.

But, regardless of where the user ends up, she’ll be there with other people. They will experience the music at the same time, they will “share” the experience of the music in the truest sense of the word.

Are We Not (walk)Men? No!
As with iPods and the Walkmen before them, listening to music online has been largely a solo activity so far. The iPod advertisements were somewhat foreboding in this respect, the individual reduced to lone dancing silhouette — action without social interaction. In so many situations, we listen alone. However, Second Life is re-creating music online as a truly social event. The music played live and streamed through Second Life is simultaneously experienced by those gathered. This is a fundamental shift — with Second Life broadcast media and experiential media coalesce. In Second Life, individuals gather to listen to live music and DJ mixes from unknowns and mega-stars — all from their own homes. Clubs in Second Life are often hosts for after-hours parties. After clubbing in their home cities, people will log in to Second Life to wind down before bed, visiting their favorite virtual clubs and seeing their SL friends. As an artist is performing, so is the
audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his performance together. The artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become interactive, they become participatory.
Impact
Stay Tuned
In our opinion, the creation of virtual social spaces like Second Life where music can be shared and experienced together is a development of potentially huge import for the future of music, adding a major new dimension to what we’ve seen so far with music on the Internet. In particular, we see the online music sharing technologies that began with
Napster and mp3.com and leading to live virtual performances in Second Life starting to reverse the trend towards music listening as a private activity that we have seen ever since the birth of audio recording in the late 19th Century. From Napster to MySpace to last.fm to Second Life, increasingly sophisticated social networking technologies are creating a new space of shared musical experience online, and this trajectory will have a crucial influence on the directions of social and musical change we are likely to see in our world in the future.

J. LeRoy and I plan to continue looking at the Second Life music scene in future
and think about the impact of these developments in greater detail, stay
tuned…!

–
John von Seggern
Customer Support Manager

john.seggern@native-instruments.com

Floating Fabulousness: Representation, Performativity and Identity in Musical Ringtones by Isabella van Elferen and Imar de Vries - ABSTRACT: In this paper, we consider musical ringtones of mobile phones to act as virtual, communicative and cultural performances. They appear unpredictably, they communicate signs which are interpreted by a variegated and dynamic audience, and establish stages upon which cultural meanings are portrayed. We will argue that the musical ringtone functions as a musical madeleine in Marcel Proust’s sense, an involuntary mnemonic trigger of a complex web of individual and collective memories. Having this quality, the ringtone lends itself perfectly for the performative manifestation and display of (sub)cultural identities in the public sphere. Keywords: Performativity, ringtones, mobile phones, communication, representation, identity. Mobile Music Workshop Proceedings, page 38 [PDF]

URBAN SENSING: Urban Sensing systems research is a collaboration between CENS and the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP) that seeks to develop cultural and technological approaches for using embedded and mobile sensing to invigorate public space and enhance civic life.

Unlike scientific applications, many sensors for urban applications are already ‘out there,’ watching and listening. Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighborhoods, and the near ubiquity of wireless access in many future urban settings will allow us to publish or share data easily, immediately. Soon private citizens will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their communities. They will be able to cross-reference spatially and temporally tagged data they gather with publicly available data from private and municipal monitoring of the city—traffic, weather, air quality, pedestrian flow—the environment and rhythms of urban life.

At the edges of culture, lightweight web applications, built on this publicly available information and free web services, emerge already almost daily to explore new linkages among these varied data. Expanding on their approach, we are exploring how these intermittent georeferenced media records of everyday life can be coordinated to achieve ‘distributed documentation’ of the urban environment, as well as be fused with other sensed data about the city and fed back into the physical, collective experience in urban public spaces. Unlike scientific applications, the hardware is not owned and managed by a small number of central authorities. Citizens carry sensors and contribute data voluntarily. A single entity does not pose interesting ‘hypotheses,’ design experiments, force participation. Instead, the process of learning from an urban environment can be organic and decentralized, existing more in the realm of social networking software. However, the power of this network still comes from our ability to verify the context of shared data, to actuate (to filter, identify and respond to events); to aggregate data in space and time; and to allow individuals to coordinate activities.

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.

Once you log in (you have to register and build a profile to use the service) you can browse through sounds and completed songs, all submitted by users. People have posted beats, drones, piano loops and guitar arpeggios. There are even some truly odd recordings, like spoken poems and children babbling. Splice accepts all of the popular music formats: WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and even FLAC. Each sound is tagged and most are marked with a BPM value. Songs can be opened in the sequencer and tweaked. The mixer will also auto-adjust the BPMs of your sounds so that the beats match up. Add or subtract sounds, slide some faders, then publish your work.

Everything produced by the Splice community is released with an Attribution Creative Commons license. Any song on Splice can be downloaded as an MP3.

If you’re new to Splice, you might want to watch the short demo video, which will show you the basics. The site requires Flash Player 9 to use. Splice also runs best in Firefox.

Give it a whirl, make some noise.

Or, read on to see how it all works.