random access music

Japanese artist Yuri Suzuki thinks that graffiti and pirate radio are very much alike. “Both of these art expressions hack into public facilities. In the case of graffiti, the hacker uses the wall. In case of pirate radio, the hacker uses public radio waves illegally.

It can be said that pirate radio is sound graffiti and I would like to propose to combine these two methods of graffiti; the artist can spray a QR code (two-dimensional bar-code) in the street with a stencil. Then when people who find the graffiti take a snapshot of the code with a mobile phone they can find the radio station through the internet.

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It reminds me in some way of Paik’s Random Access Music. “Since the early 1950s, avant-garde composers have been using magnetic tape to obtain a spectrum of sounds far exceeding the canon of conventional instruments. Obviously, musical notation was worthless in such cases, and Cage developed randomly determined, graphical scores allowing various noises to be assembled into complex tape compositions. In this tape installation, Paik went one step further: the visitor can use the sound head, which has been detached from the tape recorder, to interactively run through the tapes glued to the wall, and constantly vary the sound sequence according to location and speed. This random access to the musical raw material enabled visitors to produce compositions of their own.” - from Media Art Net

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Another similar project is The Swipe Wall. A site-specific interactive media architecture for New York City subway stations that creates music and lights when people swipe their Metrocards through it. The large metallic plane is modeled with an intricate series of thin canals running the length of the corridor, most of them within hand’s reach. By inserting the card in these slits and swiping, sounds and lights are triggered.

Originally designed for the ramps of the West 4th and Union Square stations, the Swipe Wall could be deployed in any hallway of the subway network. These stations occupy large extents of space which serve no other purpose than traffic: this project transforms these transitory areas into places that provides commuters a creative outlet while on the go.

The second design goal was to subvert the functional role of the Metrocard as an utilitarian object, re-imagining it as a tool for expressive interactions within the original context of a public transportation environment.

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A few years ago Troika from UK gave a presentation on their work at the Artefact festival. An interesting one is the Tool for Armchair Activists, a device that speaks your txt’s out aloud. Troika teamed-up with Moritz Waldemeyer to create ‘The Tool For Armchair Activists’ - a machine for remote rants and protests. Designed to be strapped to lampposts in front of prominent buildings like the house of parliament, or other institutional buildings in front of which many protests occur ‘The Tool For Armchair Activists’ brings the voice of the people to The Man, all from the comfort of your living room. The concept offers a modern alternative to the speaker corner, and saves you the hassle of sitting in the rain waiting for your favourite MP to pass by.

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The ‘Sound Graffiti‘ is a simple electronic gadget you can build for yourself using old electronics and cheap kits. Connect the components, protect them with polyurethane foam and install them in the street. Record a message and let others record their own message. //// Vox Populi is an open source project based in DIY interaction designs to fight advertisement and corporate branding in our streets.////

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Some other musical / sound graffiti projects found on Regine Debatty’s blog we make money not art:

Audio Bombing, by Mike Fleming, Kang Chang and Kyle Millns from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses magnetic audio tape as its medium. Here’s how the system should work: after having recorded on a cassette any information you want, you remove the tape and cut out the segments to be used. Then take your tape segments and go tag whatever you want in urban space. You can listen to the tag by running an augmented playhead spray over the magnetic tape.

Since the graffiti is less visually obstrusive (a thin black strip), it can infiltrate spaces traditional graffiti can not such as office buildings, under tables, elevators, schools, coffee shops, etc.

The prototype consists of a hacked cassette player. The casing was removed, the play head dismantled from the circuit board to allow it to function externally.

The second project dealing with graffiti and sound is Chia-Ying Lee’s Sonic Graffiti: Spraying and Remixing Music on the Street. The system enables artists to create and geo-tag music in the urban space with real spray cans. A sound cap has to be snapped on the top of spray cans to spray out sounds and manipulate sound with gestures. A controller is used for listening to the music with earphones when creating, and positioning sounds. A recording part collects sound samples from the city, or records vocal performances.The guys from Audio Bombing were not arrived at STEIM yesterday when i looked for them so i don’t know how far they are in the implementation of their project. Chia-Ying Lee was there and explained me that she is going to do a trial of her tagging system at the end of June in Taipei.

- Regine / we make money not art

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one found on youtube:

This is a piece I installed in the bathroom at Parsons. I hacked the IR sensor on the faucet so that every time someone washed their hands, they got a light show and a sound clip played. I also left a record button under the sink so people could record new stuff.