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April 03, 2003
Ramia Maze, Lalya Gaye, and Margot Jacobs Present Sonic City
Lalya Gaye, Margot Jacobs, and Ramia Maze discuss their work on the project 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. The system is wearable that 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. Paths are considered as musical compositions and mobility through the shifting contexts of a city as a large-scale musical gesture. 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 crossroad 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.
During this [fringe] evening, we presented the design and implementation of our prototype.
This project is a collaboration between Future Applications Lab (Viktoria Institute), PLAY studio (Interactive Institute) and 8Tunnel2.
Project team:
Lalya Gaye (FAL), Margot Jacobs (PLAY), Ramia Mazé (PLAY) and Daniel Skoglund (8Tunnel2). Participating master students: Magnus Johansson and Sara Lerén (IT-University).
Websites:
@ FAL: http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/soniccity,
@ PLAY: http://www.tii.se/sonic-city
Bios
Lalya Gaye
Lalya is an engineer and researcher working in multidisciplinary projects at the convergence of art, technology, and design. Her research focus is on exploring how Ubiquitous Computing can trigger new aesthetic practices, by enabling people to transform their everyday life into a raw material for creation and personal expression. She has a BSc in physics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, a MScEng in electroacoustics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and is a PhD candidate in informatics at the University of Göteborg, Sweden. She currently works at the Future Applications Lab (Viktoria Institute) in Göteborg and is a member of the sound-art collective Goutte d'Or.
Margot Jacobs
Margot is a designer and artist. Her work focuses on the interplay between people in both public and private settings incorporating game and user-based methods. Projects include: 'Breathe', honorable mention from the LIFE Artificial Life competition, 'Front', accepted at SIGGRAPH 2002, and ‘FARAWAY’ completed during her research fellowship at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy. Margot studied industrial design at the Georgia Institute of Technology and interaction design and installation art at ITP/NYU. She is currently a researcher at PLAY, Interactive Institute.
Ramia Mazé
Ramia is a designer focusing on user-centred methods and strategies for prototyping new systems, products, and concepts. Currently director of the PLAY studio of the Interactive Institute, she is involved in EU and interdisciplinary collaborations exploring mobile audio expression and technology interfaces embedded in environments. Previously, she worked at MetaDesign in San Francisco and Philips Research Lab in the UK. She has a master's degree from the Royal College of Art, London, and a background in architecture.
Daniel Skoglund
Daniel is a sound-artist exploring the possibilities of sound, rhythm, electronics, mechanics, material, space, chaos, and order in music technology. His work is un-hierarchical, very visual and often expending outside the world of art. He is one half of the experimental sound-art duo 8Tunnel2 in Göteborg, Sweden.
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