sound art

Electric Walks – Mobile Music #9

Electric WalksElectric 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

Tactical Sound Garden – Mobile Music #8

I haven’t been posting in a while as I’ve been writing up a thesis on Mobile Music. I’m back posting now, and as well as writing about other people’s work I’m going to be posting about In Your Own Time–the composition I wrote for my thesis. Expect some posts about this project in the coming weeks. Today, though, I’m going to focus on Tactical Sound Garden–a community based project using locative audio techniques.

Tactical Sound Garden (TSG) is an open source platform that facilitates community ‘sound gardens’ created by Mark Shepard. The platform piggybacks on existing wireless networks to facilitate members of the community to ‘plant’ sounds by geotagging them to a location. Other members of the community can then experience these sounds by listening to them on a wireless device. The care of the garden is left to members of the community who are able to tend the garden by ‘planting’ or ‘pruning’ sounds or to simply enjoy the garden. It is an example of using GPS technologies to create a locative audio experience. Here’s a short video of Mark Shepard describing the project: Read more