Home

GPS landscape music

15 april 2008

Three media artists explain how they have created music out of location and motion data. Yolande Harris demonstrates how she learned to establish where on earth she is, using a sextant on a small boat at sea. The camera peers through the lens with her and it is difficult to catch the sun on the horizon long enough to get the exact reading on a rule. Then she tells how she joined forces with colleagues to build, over a period of weeks, a walkman made of a gps device and a minimal sound generator. The gps data are not translated into landscape information and street names, but mapped to sound waves. Walking the street with this gps walkman, you hear the effect of your motion and location under the satellites moving swiftly high up in space.

Atao Tanaka works in a Sony lab in Paris, where technicians and artists collaborate on fundamental research, free of any product based obligation. He created siblings of the gps walkman. Three visitors of his art exhibition can take these and wander through Paris and their motions, speed and location are processed realtime in the exhibition room. Their relative locations and movements influence Atao’s music generator. Thus, the three wanderers create music together without any of them knowing where the others are. In the exhibit room, visitors can track them on a screen with a threedimensional map showing deformations where they move around. And their individual speed data is displayed in a graphic wave form.

David Dunn creates low budget sophisticated listening devices and recently he has built a sound composing device that talks back in a musical language related to the sounds it hears.
For instance, taking a piezo element out of a musical postcard and connecting it to the aft of a meat thermometer’s shaft, he creates a microphone enabling you to listen to ants underground, also hearing a crow fly by high overhead. His homebuilt versatile microphones have been perfected over time and some types outperform expensive lab grade counterparts. He gives away his diagrams and sends out microphones to colleagues all over the world. He makes ultrasonic sound audible as well, like bats, or the inaudible racket of medical devices in a hospital room. He explains how some of the high frequency noise we are not supposed to hear is heard anyway, due to the similarity of our skulls to the skulls of whales using sonar to locate themselves. We sense this noise as being of a much lower frequency and for the most part we remain unaware of its meaning.
David has built a musical device with clusters of circuits creating sounds ‘inspired’ by sounds picked up by his sensitive environment microphones. This device, when placed in a forest, interacts with the environment and transmits its own clicks, hums and whistles in a certain perceived harmony with the animals. These animals aren’t scared away but they seem to acknowledge the device as a part of creation. Birds come closer, listen, sing along and fly on.

We also hear what the composing circuitry does with its outside sensors shut off, running freely on its own inspiration. This proves exciting, a circuitry solo. Out comes a soundscape like a group of riders running up a hill, disappearing and continuing their flight as birds.

What if Atau and Yolande would reverse the direction of data and their compositions would be mapped into landscape, speed and motion? What images would be created then?

Yolande explains how you travel the world in a different way when equipped with gps. “You can't get lost anymore because you always know exactly where you are”, she says. Yes this is so. But while traveling from one saved waypoint to the next, I am always amazed by the world in between these points, as it is unraveled differently every time.

Do children still play the game of swapping trees? Running from one firmly located tree to the other, daring to go ever longer distances, hoping that way over there, there will be a tree, free to hold on to and to see further away.

Links:
[Thanks to Dr. John Scialli in Phoenix for spotting the reverse data flow concept]