I co-taught a Public School class this week — part of the series On Time put together by Jonathan Basile. The imitable Jackson Moore discussed how music may have a biological basis as a faculty for synchronizing actions within groups of people, and he broke down the theories of James Tenney and Fred Lerdahl. I went from there to discuss some of Lefebvre’s structural approaches to examining rhythm in everyday life. We had a great discussion — my favorite points from the group included the idea that musical drones refocus attention on the body as a source of meter, and the suspicion that the CIA assassinated Coltrane because he was spreading subversive rhythms with his tunes.
I’m working on a new rhythmanalysis project for Eyebeam — working title is Forty-eight by Sixteen, it will be a video that is algorithmically edited with data that I generate while biking to work. Cadence, heartrate, respiration, GPS … this graph is looking at cadence (blue) vs heartrate (red) over the course of 30 minutes and 7.5 miles.
Familiarity is … enriched by an appreciation of seasonal changes, such as the changing light, foliage and wildlife, inducing an apprehension of our enfolding within the larger temporal rhythms of a space of the changing same and the momentarily surprising.
— Tim Edensor
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The end of ‘Tiger’ from our set last Saturday at a basement show. Killer crowd.
More from Multitudes.
Cutting records, literally, with favorite new collaborator and artist Ted Riederer. We’re working on my new sonification piece, coming to Eyebeam in June.
HISTORICAL DATA FROM PACHUBE
[code] Python (2.6), GPL
Pulling historical data from Pachube is not entirely straightforward. I appreciate the design of their API, which is designed primarily to ingest live feeds, and otherwise encourages sampling data feeds at larger, regular intervals. However, for signal processing exercises, you really do want all the samples within a time range, and that necessitates a lot of requests (every 6 hours, paginated).
This script will pull the last week of data given a datastream identifier.
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For the Sound Research Summit at Eyebeam last Saturday, I wanted to develop a concept of sonification. Or musicalization. Or something having to do with some manner of legible sound that has a structural relationship to data.
It’s something I’ve been resistant to exploring in the past, because it is so easy to lose any perception of the source (ie, what the data is actually about) in the audible result. One-to-one mappings threaten to be too naive (stock market goes up, pitch goes up), and complex mappings might as well be driven by a random number generator. Nonetheless, sonification is a potentially important rhythmanalysis strategy, so I wanted to try.
I am interested in primarily time-domain signals, so I think the key point of departure is to use sources that have inherent periodicity and to tease that out. I cant believe I havent done a project with pachube.com before — it’s a clearinghouse of open data for Internet-of-things enthusiasts, with DIY feeds of everything from the temperature of some guy’s fish tank to radiation level at Fukushima. Through the Pachube API, I downloaded historical samples of arbitrary feeds (code here). I wanted the sound to reveal any periodicity and highlight variations from it — to check for periodicity, I applied autocorrelation to the signal (getting comfortable with this technique and assembling a set of python functions was a super useful part of this exercise). What I discovered, unsurprisingly, is that many of these data streams cycle diurnally, and so for the purposes of this event I decided to just apply a 24-hour cycle across the board.
I downloaded a weeks worth of data for each feed, and chunked each one into 24-hour segments — each segment essentially becomes a measure. After smoothing and normalizing the signal, I resampled it to a musical pulse of 12hz. So the result is basically a single parameter that changes in musical time with a high and low value in each measure.
To give that substance, I opted for hardware. I am enamored of the Meeblip synth for its inherent limitations, hackability, and lo-fi sound (and price). Running it through my pedal board offers some nice possibilities, and hews closer to a more punk/noise sound which is more my thing rather than clean electronic aesthetic that screams futurism. I’m running everything in python and sending MIDI to the synth. I mapped the changing parameter to filter width to give a sense of pitch variation without actual tonal change. Each data source drones on a random fundamental.
For the purposes of the event, I fell upon the concept of using an old CRT display to show a visualization of what was being sonified. In building a display for Mary Mattingly’s Flock House (which I haven’t yet posted about), I was a little dismayed at having made a shiny touchable thing on a nice flat monitor, as it points too much toward screen-based interaction — this time, I wanted to invoke an old radar display, and I made a spiral which arrays the data with a turn for each day. Again, animated in python.
Artistically, this isn’t satisfying as a complete piece. I’ve created this sculptural display, which makes me somewhat uncomfortable, as I’d like it to have a greater relational component. In the context of the summit, that came for free — the piece became a focus of roving improvisers, and established a nice counterpoint with Ben Houge’s sonification work 10-ft over (he tuned his work to fit harmonically with mine).
But the next iteration of this idea will have to feature some sort of comparison between multiple sources to make it work. It’s about the inherent relative musicality of phenomena and the participation of the viewer in that relationship. I’m brainstorming ideas.
I regret that my documentation for this sucks, though it’s motivation to produce a followup.
I had the privilege of participating in an advisory summit for StoryCorps today — it was a fantastic conversation about the possibilities an innovative oral history archive might fulfill in the shifting media and research landscapes. You may have heard some of StoryCorps inspiring content in edited form on NPR. What people may not realize is that each interview is 40 minutes long, and to date there are 41,000+ recorded stories in the database. That makes StoryCorps an audio repository of singular importance, and not just from a content perspective. It’s both a corpus of speech data spanning geography and demographics of immeasurable interest to linguists and computer scientists, and it’s a source of reference material that I think warrants mention in the same breath as NYT or Wikipedia. The trick, of course, is making that content accessible — there is currently no externally exposed search capabilities, let alone a programmatic interface that would make mash-ups with NYT or NYPL or innovative apps readily possible (my personal priority was to push deep linking of audio segments with canonical urls, to enable StoryCorps references in things like Wikipedia articles). All that is going to change as their amazing team plans the future of the platform. They are looking for ideas and collaborators, so get in touch.
image credit WXXI.org
Last weekend I participated in the Sound Research Summit @ Eyebeam, a bazaar of sound-works in progress and experiments in listening curated by Jackson Moore. I thought the event was successful in juxtaposing a diversity of vocabularies through which we might approach sound, from Kyle Kessler directly manipulating a plate reverb (shown) to Ben Houge’s abstracted sonification of data from sensors at MIT. The result both embodied the spirit of research by challenging any particular framework as well as served as a collective performance in which the audible and conceptual boundaries between the works were continually renegotiated.
Particularly rewarding for me was the chance to work with Christine Sun Kim. Christine has been deaf from birth, but works with sound as her primary medium. She employs various strategies (such as transducers, piano wire, and feedback at the summit) to emphasize the tactile nature of sound and make it perceptible to her. However, I think that to suggest that she is simply transposing between senses is incorrect — it’s also the semantic and cultural components of sound, how and why we encode it, that comes across in what she does, and which for her I imagine is in many ways more readily approachable. Assisting her with her piece brought this into relief as we debated the qualities of sound it produced and I stumbled over my vocabulary.
More on my work for the summit next post.
56k RINGTONE
I end up talking about the aesthetics of obsolete technology more than I’m comfortable with as it is, but somehow the other day it suddenly seemed really imperative to have a 56k modem handshake as a ringtone. @akamediasystem made me do it. This is already everywhere online, but I’m posting my version here anyway.
modem.m4r.zip
I am incredibly excited to announce that I’ve joined Eyebeam Art and Technology Center as a resident artist for the spring / summer cycle. it’s been a blast meeting everyone, and I’m intimidated and inspired by my new colleagues. The residency will complement my work in personal data and sensor networks at the Times — I’ll be exploring similar themes, but in more of a sound-art medium and context.
Specifically, Im going to try an execute the first iteration of a concept I first presented at Conflux in October (and named this blog after), The Rhythmanalysis Lab. Taking the essays of Henri Lefebvre as a starting point, I want to develop a methodology for investigating rhythm as a primary object in personal, architectural, and urban spheres.
Ideas, collaborations, talk to me. More to come.
This weekend at AAG (Association of American Geographers) Annual Meeting. I presented the following paper in a session led by Seth Spielman (who does some amazing work identifying “personal cities” through geopaths). And I got to hang out with the imitable Sarah Williams.
OpenPaths: A new approach to aggregating personal geographic data
The collection of personal geographic data from mobile devices is a ubiquitous practice of service providers and application developers. These data are being stored, analyzed, and monetized primarily by corporate interests; there is limited agency for individuals over their own data. Awareness among the public regarding the value of their personal data is nascent. OpenPaths, created by the Research and Development Lab at the New York Times Company, is a platform and a model and a platform that demonstrates the collective value of personal data sovereignty. It was developed in response to widespread media coverage of the obfuscated but accessible location record generated by all Apple iOS devices. OpenPaths participants store their encrypted geographic data in a cloud infrastructure while maintaining ownership and programatic control. Projects of many kinds, from mobility research to expressive artwork, petition individuals for access to their data in exchange for a stake in the outcome of the project. Ultimately, we would like to activate the practice of “participatory sensing” on a large scale in a way that self-regulates the creation of ad-hoc geographic datasets. Furthermore, within a theoretical context, OpenPaths moves beyond locative media’s primary concerns with connectivity, the coupling of data to place, and spatial representation to address the components of an ethical implementation of crowd-sourced geographic systems in the age of “big data”. How can we seat the individual in a mode of control over personal geographic narratives in a society in which locative media has become banal?
