Using Real-Time Data Flux In Art – The Mediation Of A Situation As It Unfolds: RoadMusic – An Experimental Case Study.

The practice driving this research is called RoadMusic. The project uses a small computer based system installed in a car that composes music from the flux of information it captures about the journey as it unfolds. It uses a technique known as sonification that consists of mapping data to sound. In the case of RoadMusic, this data capture is realtime, external to the computer and mobilised with the user. This dissertation investigates ways in which such a sonification can become an artistic form. To interrogate the specificity of an art of real-time it considers philosophical theories of the fundamental nature of time and immediacy and the ways in which the human mind ‘makes sense’ of this flux. After extending this scrutiny via theories of system and environment, it proceeds to extract concepts and principles leading to a possible art of real-time flux. Time, immediacy and the everyday are recurring questions in art and music, this study reviews practices that address these questions, essentially through three landmark composers of the twentieth century: Iannis Xenakis, John Cage and Murray Schafer. To gain precision in regards to the nature of musical listening it then probes theories of audio cognition and reflects on ways in which these can apply to real-time composing. The art of sonifying data extracted from the environment is arguably only as recent as the computer programs it depends on. This study reviews different practices that contribute towards a corpus of sonification-art, paying special attention to those practices where this process takes place in real-time. This is extended by an interrogation of the effect that mobility has on our listening experience. RoadMusic is now a fully functional device generating multi-timbral music from immediate data about its surroundings. This dissertation argues that this process can be an alternative to mainstream media systems; it describes how RoadMusic’s programs function and the ways in which they have evolved to incorporate the ideas developed in this thesis. It shows how RoadMusic is now developing beyond my own personal practice and how it intends to reach a wider audience

RoadMusic: Music for your Ride from your Ride

RoadMusic is an artistic project, which generates music for in-car listening, from information gathered while driving. We will describe in detail how the system works, and briefly define our intentions in initiating this project. We will demonstrate how, through the musical format that is generated from the data, there is a possible subliminal perception of the situation. We will suggest ways in which this can be regulated to respond to criteria of security and usefulness. We will describe future research using RoadMusic in electric vehicles

Composing for Cars

The authors report on composing a piece for RoadMusic, an interactive music project which generates and manipulates music for the passengers and driver in a car, using sensor information gathered from the surroundings and from the movements of the car. We present a literature review which brings together related works in the diverse fields of Automotive UI, musical mappings, generative music and sonification. We then describe our strategies for composing for this novel system, and the unique challenges it presented. We describe how the process of constructing mappings is an essential part of composing a piece of this nature, and we discuss the crucial role of mapping in defining RoadMusic as either a new musical instrument, a sonification system or generative music. We then consider briefly the extent to which the Road-Music performance was as we anticipated, and the relative success of our composition strategies, along with suggestions for future adaptations when composing for such an environment

As Time Goes By: Car Radio and the Travel Experience in Twentieth-Century America

Since its invention nearly a century ago, the car radio has found its way into over ninety-five percent of vehicles on the road. Modern day radio programming is tailored to suit a mobile audience, and many listeners view car radios as an essential part of the driving experience. Yet within the scope of scholarly studies on this subject, the questions addressed are so focused on the mechanical problems of how radios were integrated into automobiles that there is substantially less research examining why radios were first imported into the car. What was the inspiration for such a combination? And how did it affect the travel experience for car users? Expanding upon current scholarship related to mobile sound technologies and their influence on the experience of mechanized travel, I argue that the conditions individually brought about by the radio and the automobile mutually reinforced one another: both worked together to alter the perceived passage of time and space for their users. Given that these developments directly reflect similar shifts in the perception of space and time occurring with the invention of older travel technologies such as the railroad half a century earlier, the application of radio to the car can be understood as just one more manifestation of the new spatiotemporal paradigm gripping the post-industrial West in the first half of the twentieth century

Une époque circuitée

Pourquoi faut-il penser une organologie des arts en réseau ? Les pratiques artistiques peuvent-elles proposer des reconstructions et des « re-programmations » de circuits de réception et d’émission, là où les choses semblent socialement, juridiquement et techniquement dissociées et désajustées dans notre quotidien technologisé ? Programmer, c’est « construire » des circuits, des associations d’organes, des circulations d’actions, et des espaces de connexions dans lesquels les oeuvres, prises au sens large comme productions humaines, prennent forme et créent des situations appropriables, de manière critique, à la fois individuellement et collectivement. Le terme de « musique étendue » avancé dans cet article, en supplément de son extension à des systèmes télématiques de transport et d’interprétation à distance, annonce sans doute le passage du réseau à son état musical (ses dimensions agogique et organologique). Ceci relève, d’une part, de nos capacités à moduler et ralentir les flux pour échapper au temps asservi de nos technologies, et, d’autre part, de nos potentiels d’attention et d’écriture à tracer nos parcours, à émettre nos annotations sur les choses reçues et à « assembler » des perceptions et des fabrications, c’est-à-dire à programmer, composer et recomposer des circuits, des espaces critiques et des différends, et donc ainsi des liaisons et des reconnaissances sociales.Why is it necessary to elaborate an organology of network arts? Can artistic practices put forth reconstructions and “re-programmings” of circuits, where things are out of tune ? Programming involves manufacturing circuits, grids and spaces of connections where artworks take form and create a wide range of situations. The concept of extended music that is proposed in this article relates to the nascent musical state of electronic networks (the Internet) in the development of its agogical and organological dimensions. This shift concerns our capacities to slow down and decelerate the fluxes by condensing and “interpreting” them, as well as our ability to compose our courses and navigations through networks by marking and leaving traces of our passages in spaces and on telematic surfaces. This embodiment related to our experiments with social, technical and legal contexts and controversies, asks to assemble our perceptions and manufactures by programming, composing and re-composing circuits

Stag - Vol. 07, No. 06 - December 15, 1955

The Stag, the official student newspaper of Fairfield University, was published weekly during the academic year (September - June) and ran from September 23, 1949 (Vol. 1, No. 1) to May 6, 1970 (Vol. 21, No. 20).https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/archives-stag/1093/thumbnail.jp