Sonic City

Sonic City is a new form of interactive music instrument using the city as an interface. It enables users to create a real-time personal soundscape of electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments. Paths are considered as musical compositions and mobility through the shifting contexts of a city as a large scale musical gesture. We have designed, implemented and evaluated a wearable prototype. The system retrieves information about environmental context and user action, and maps it to the real-time audio processing of urban sounds, resulting in music heard through headphones. When wearing this system, one engages into a musical duet with the city: urban atmospheres, random encounters and everyday activities all participate in creating music as you are walking. At the cross-road between urban exploration and experimental music making, Sonic City promotes the integration of everyday life settings and practices into personal forms of aesthetic expression with the help of Ubiquitous Computing.

The Sonic City project was a collaboration between the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute (Lalya Gaye), the PLAY Studio at the Interactive Institute (Ramia Mazé, Margot Jacobs), and Daniel Skoglund from 8Tunnel2. Sonic City was part of the Mobile Life SSF project and the Public Play Spaces project.

External homepages:
Sonic City at the Viktoria Institute
Sonic City at the Interactive Institute