Musical Cities

Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive 'book', it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music. Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ‘listener’ on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities

Musical Cities

Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive 'book', it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music. Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ‘listener’ on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities

Sonifying Urban Rhythms: Towards the spatio-temporal composition of the urban environment

This thesis is concerned with the composition of the urban rhythms generated by urban design and planning. It recognises the temporal limitations of the graphic urban masterplan, with its tendency of being static and singular in the composition of urban experience. Thus it proposes the integration of rhythm into the urban design and planning process, with the aim to improve the temporal quality of urban design. In order to represent these urban rhythms, as designed in the graphic masterplan, we propose their sonification. A Sonified Urban Masterplan (SUM) tool was developed, allowing the sonification of multiple layers of maps (raster or vector images) along a number of paths of interest. An urban sonic code was then developed in order to map the relevant graphic urban parameters into sound parameters. This sonification strategy was applied to the city of Paris as a case study, producing a sonified set of maps whose composition could be ‘listened’ to over time. Temporal issues concerning human movement, transport infrastructure, activity distribution, and the structuring of urban form and design elements could be represented and heard. We then investigated the potential of the SUM tool as a design and planning tool. We explored how sound could be used to inform the composition of urban form in both time and space, in order to generate the urban rhythms we may desire to experience. Thus through the integration of sonification in urban design and planning, this thesis permits the spatio-­‐temporal representation and composition of urban form. It allows urban designers and planners to compose future urban rhythms and improve the temporal quality of our urban environments. Furthermore, the potential of this tool in other fields has also be recognized, for example in music and the composition of multi-­‐layered open graphic scores

London bus tunes: Using sound to improve the safe navigation of London's bus system

Presented at the 25th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2019) 23-27 June 2019, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.This work-in-progress introduces a proposal to incorporate sound in the passenger navigation system of the London Bus. First, we present the problems of accessibility concerning Londonﾒs complex bus system. Then, we introduce our proposal of using sound and sonification in particular to aid in the navigation of Londonﾒs bus system. We explain our sonification strategy and describe a recent preliminary trial of our sonification prototype, implemented as an installation during an accessibility event held by Transport for London at the ExCel centre in London on 19 March 2019. We discuss the feedback obtained from this trial and conclude with proposed future work in terms of both the development of our sonification strategy as well as its implementation in Londonﾒs public transport system

SUM: de la sonification d’image à la composition graphique assistée par ordinateur

cote interne IRCAM: Adhitya12aNone / NoneNational audienceSUM: de la sonification d’image à la composition graphique assistée par ordinateu

The Sum Tool As A Visual Controller For Image-Based Sound Synthesis

cote interne IRCAM: Kuuskankare12aNone / NoneNational audienceThe Sum Tool As A Visual Controller For Image-Based Sound Synthesi

From Musical Score to Graphic Plan: The Development of SUM as a Design Tool

cote interne IRCAM: Adhitya13bNone / NoneNational audienceThis paper presents the latest developments of the SUM tool, aimed at the integration of image and sound. A user library within the PWGL visual programming environment, it allows both image sonification and graphical computer-aided composition. Initially developed for the sonification of graphic urban maps, in which MIDI data is generated from graphics, the SUM process can now be reversed, with MIDI being the generator of the graphics themselves. We present 3 new developments which allow this: the ability to import MIDI into SUM to generate spatio-temporal vector time-paths; the ability to access the temporal structure of these paths through its points; and the ability to draw freehand vector objects and develop an object library. These functions will allow us to generate visual graphics from music, which may form the basis of future works of ‘visual music’ as well as the musical-generation of graphical designs

The Sonified Urban Masterplan (Sum) Tool: Sonification for Urban Planning and Design

Presented at the 17th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2011), 20-23 June, 2011 in Budapest, Hungary.This paper describes the progress of an interdisciplinary project that explores the potential for sonification in urban planning and design. The project involves the translation of visual urban mapping techniques used in urban planning and design, into sound, through the development of the Sonified Urban Masterplan (SUM) tool. We will describe our sonification approach and outline the implementation of the SUM tool within the computer-aided composition environment PWGL. The tool will be applied to a selected urban data set to demonstrate its potential. The paper concludes with the advantages of such an approach in urban analysis, as well as introduces the possibility, within such CAC environments as PWGL and OpenMusic, to ‘compose’ urban plans and design using sound