Various versions of this project have been bouncing around in my head for around six years, but I haven’t had the time to make happen. I’m so excited to finally focus on it, and I get to work with Chiara!

More details to come.

Have you ever dreamt of giving a speech at the White House, or perhaps addressing a television audience with your own State of the Nation? Do you think you could help solve the world’s problems, if only you could get your voice heard in the mainstream media?

By re-purposing a technology originally developed in the nineteen-twenties to encrypt voices for secure radio communications – and later used to funky effect by Kraftwerk, Peter Frampton and Afrika Bamabaataa, we are building a machine that channels the voice of the common person, and amplifies it in an authoritative medium.

The Soapbox Vocoder works by breaking down and analyzing the speaker’s voice and reconstituting it in a powerful way. Participants are placed at a news desk or podium where they deliver a speech into a microphone. The Soapbox Vocoder then recreates the speech on a nearby screen as a television broadcast by a famous politician or celebrity.

We will invite participants to choose from a selection of (in)famous speeches. They will be able to share their views and create personal and social amplifications of their ideas, possibly even engaging in staged debates with politicians on video or with other participants.

The Soapbox Vocoder team consists of Chiara Bernasconi and Spencer Kiser, artists and researchers who met as colleagues in the Digitial Media Department at a large arts institution. Their aim is to build an apolitical tool for people to engage in critical, silly, and/or meaningful interpretations of world and local politics.

We will be presenting our concept at the next FEAST Brooklyn on January 21, 2012. Come by and check it out. Should be fun!

This all-in-one, multi-platform app and mobile website lets you take the MoMA experience with you in your pocket, whether you have an iPhone, an Android, or other Web-enabled phone. A staggering array of content is available at your fingertips, from the latest information on events and exhibits to a fully searchable collections database. Easy to use navigation allows you to make your own path through the dynamic and comprehensive content and is appropriate for onsite as well as offsite users. The app is impressive not only for its depth of content and ease-of-use but also for the way it smartly integrates various kinds of information—linking you from a collection record to an audio clip to an event happening now on the second floor. The MoMA Mobile app sets a high bar for mobile museum offerings.

MUSE Awards 2011

Cool! And thanks to Allegra, Amelle, Sas and Shawn!

Not sure why his photos never arrived, but we use the iPhone’s Mail application, so it’s difficult to determine. If he didn’t have a connection when he was attempting to send, his phone should have notified him.

Another option would be to handle the email with our server, and send it out with the message queue system we are building. It would be nice because it would give us a sense of what people are emailing, but would also introduce a couple of extra possible points of failure as well as privacy issues.

Overall, a nice intro to our app and other big museums’ offerings.

What

spinCycle is a synesthetic turntable that allows you to arrange and play colors visually and musically.

How

spinCycle is fitted with a camera that takes the place of tonearm on a normal turntable. Rather than a needle playing grooves in a record, spinCycle creates sounds based on colors that the camera sees. The DJ places brightly colored plexiglass circles on the spinning platter, creating beautiful color patterns that are then translated into sounds. The DJ can rearrange the discs at any time, thereby creating a new soundtrack on the fly.
spinCycle also captures the colors the camera sees and can either project them on a wall or display them on a computer monitor. This hypnotic display changes as the music changes, providing a fun synchronized multimedia experience.
Max/MSP/Jitter is used to do the color-tracking and sound reproduction. Future versions will use a color sensor rather than a web camera, and sound will be emitted from the built-in speaker using tones generated by a microcontroller. For more information, download the NIME paper.

Where

spinCycle was featured in a performance on May 4th, 2005 at Tonic in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. spinCycle was installed June – December 2005 at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program, at the Sony Wonder Technology Lab in November 2005 and was recently on display at IRCAM as part of the NIME 2006 / Festival Agora Résonances 2006. Click on the bottom picture for a demo video.

Press

• Create Digital Music
• Pixelsumo
• Experience Economist
• Neural.it

More Information

• Download the NIME paper
• spinCycle Video Montage

Cited

• The acoustics and performance of DJ scratching. KF Hansen – PhD dissertation, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2010
• Scratch-Off: A gesture based mobile music game with tactile feedback. N Gillian, S O’Modhrain,
  G Essl- Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, June 2009, Pittsburgh, PA
• Development of new visual musical instrument Phenakistoscope player. S Hirano, H Akayama, S Inoue – Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2007
• BeatJockey: A new tool for enhancing DJ skills. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 30 May – 1 June 2011, Oslo, Norway

“…the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans a ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines’; to the Aboriginals as the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’ or the ‘Way of the Law’.
Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic being who wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path- birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes- and so singing the world into existence.”

Bruce Chatwin – The Songlines

The Challenge

Today audio tends to be a neglected medium, but it hasn’t always been that way. In the days before writing, before the eye had achieved its current role as the dominant sensory organ, the world was probably perceived as a very different place. History and other narratives were passed down orally; in the night the ears warned of danger when the eyes were useless.

To cope with the constant barrage of noise in our urban environments, we filter out the soundscape by taking measures ranging from wearing headphones or earplugs to noise abatement legislation. As a result , we have begun to disregard most of the sounds we hear because we have forgotten how to use our ears for receiving information about our environment.

In response, I have produced a series of projects that reflect on the lost art of the ear as a tool for wayfinding.

Forest Hills Sound Map

Forest Hills Sound Map is a screen-based map application containing binaural field recordings made at specific points throughout Forest Hills. As you drag the mouse, you hear the characteristic sound of that location and reveal a satellite image map.

(Geo) Phone Tag

After making the Forest Hills Sound Map, I longed to find an easier method of producing sound maps. Preparation for the field recording was time-consuming. The binaural mics had to be mounted just so; the recording device had to have it’s levels and other parameters set. The type of recording that is made after a long preparation is different than one that is made with minimal effort, spontaneously. The former type will probably be of higher quality and perhaps more thought-out, but I found myself wondering what the results would be if the obstacles to recording were diminished. By making it easier to record, it would be easier to encourage and organize others to contribute to a field recording project. What if I created a map and let users add their own geotagged recordings to it?

(Geo) Phone Tag is a participatory sound map that uses the ubiquitous telephone as an input device. Focus is more on vocal recordings, because the telephone is not the best field recorder.

Guided By Voices / Sonic Window

Guided by Voices is an immersive audio installation that features a pair of wireless location-tracking headphones called the Sonic Window. Users explore a soundscape that stays in place as they walk through it. The goal is to renew the participant’s awareness of their daily soundscape by placing them in an environment that plays with the origins of sounds and the context in which they are perceived.

Depending on location, the content can be created by the users by leaving messages at locations using a telephone, or by mapping sounds from (Geo) Phone Tag.