Electric Walks – Mobile Music #9

Electric Walks is an analog example of mobile audio sound art. The work was created by Christina Kubisch and follows on from her earlier experiments with electromagnetic installations. The installations used headphones that allowed the listener to hear the sounds of audio as it travelled through wires throughout the installation, with Kubisch determining the audio. Kubisch later moved away from these fixed installations towards a more aleatoric experience with Electric Walks. To achieve this she developed headphones that allowed the sound of the preexisting electrical devices to be heard. This allows the listener to experience the sound of things like ATMs, mobile phones and lighting and to hear the invisible world of electricity that exists in their lives. Read more

What is mobile music? – Mobile Music #5

While writing a post about the difference between mobile music and locative music I realised that I hadn’t defined what I meant by mobile music. I’ve been discussing different examples of what I’ve been calling mobile music but hadn’t been explicit about what this meant. I started thinking about it a bit and realised that I need to give a definition to avoid ambiguity.

Mobile Music is an ambiguous term. Do I mean music to move to or music that is mobile, like a marching band, or music for mobile phones? There are lots of ways the phrase could be interpreted. I did a quick search of mobile music which turned up a the Wikipedia Mobile Music entry. This describes mobile music as music streamed and listened to on mobile devices. This is not what I’ve been writing about, I looked to the top of the page and noticed “This article is about music on mobile devices, for the musical form see aleatoric music.” I clicked the link. Read more

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. Read more