Ambient Addition – Mobile Music #1

I’m taking a break from my series on open source controllers for a while to write about Mobile and Locative Audio. At the moment I’m working on creating a mobile music composition and wanted to share some of the interesting projects that I’ve come across in the process. The first project I’m going to cover is Ambient Addition. This was the work that got me interested in mobile music originally and started me thinking about mobile devices as a compositional medium.

Ambient Addition is a hardware device that augments the sounds your hear around you by synthesising an augmented version in real time. The goal of the Ambient Addition is to change the dynamic of personal stereo use. It mediates environmental sound so that people can still remaining connected to their environment while listening to something musical. Shifting the listening experience from a passive isolating one to a one that allows you to actively engage with your environment. It was created by Noah Vawter for a masters thesis at the Media Lab.

The technology

The project is a custom piece of hardware with DSP programable chip.  A pair of microphones attached are a headset which is connected to a chip. The chip analyses the environment sound and generates the music. The audio entering the microphone is analysed to be used for two musical characteristics, pitch and rhythm. A Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) constantly monitors the ambient sound for a fundamental pitch. The chordal pattern of the music is linked to this pitch. Transient sounds are captured by the microphones and used as percussive material to create rhythms within the music.

The hardware for the project was largely custom made. In his thesis Vawter speculated about using an iPod for the project, but dismisses it due to its limitations at the time. Since then the iPod and smartphone technology has come on in leaps and bounds. One area that I am looking at with my own work is using a smartphone as the hardware for a mobile music composition. Taking advantage of the inbuilt sensors and the headset microphone to create a meaningful mobile music experience.

The Experience

Ambient Addition provides an augmented version of the environmental sound by phase vocoding sound coming into the microphone with a chord progression. The fact that this resynthesis draws your attention to everyday sounds that you might otherwise ignore is really interesting. By mediating the environmental sound it makes it unfamiliar enough that you start to take notice to the sounds that are happening around you. By overlaying a chord progression that is linked to the ambient sounds you get a musically interesting experience that is linked to the environment. Here’s a video of the Ambient Addition in action showing what the it might be like to use it:

To sum up

Ambient Addition is a really interesting project that brings the listening environment into the musical experience. The project is more sound art than composition, but it has  some concepts about the listening environment and the musical experience. The main factor that drew me to this project was that it moves the listening experience from being a linear passive one to a more active one that is environmentally influenced. This project was created before the prevalence of smartphones and had to be built using custom hardware. It would be interesting to see how Vawter might have dealt with the experience if all of the hardware was ready made and what avenues could have been explored as a result.

Learning about Ambient Addition was a massive awakening for me. It made me start thinking about using smartphones as a composition medium. Composing a piece of music that could be aware of the listening environment and the user and which would behave differently depending on those factors. My current research focuses on developing a compositional approach for mobile music and composing a piece of music for the medium.

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I’ll be covering other more historic works in the coming weeks and also looking at some current app based mobile music applications. In my next post I’ll be looking Sonic City by Layla Gaye, one of the earliest mobile music works.

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