Syncwalk : a framework for locative audio composition

Abstract

The way we perceive everyday space-a room, a building, a city-is informed not just by our immediate sensory input: culture, history, and other contextual cues complete our experience. With the advent of sensor-rich, highly-connected objects, our ability to interpret and refine these contextual elements, and therefore our experience of space, grows ever sharper. Location-aware sound art has the potential to apply this new technology in groundbreaking ways, but at present such work is hampered by the lack of a widely-accessible composition platform. In this work, I survey prominent works in the locative-sound art field and propose a scale-independent software framework for composing sound in space. As a proof-of-concept and to encourage further dialogue, I use this framework to create a large-scale participatory project that will allow anyone to sound-design his or her neighborhood space.