Mobile Music Workshop 2004-2008

A lot of researchers take care of the future of mobile sound. The very active european ones have organised a series of Mobile Music Workshops which I attended first in 2006. In Brighton we had a wonderful time and I met there Frauke, Lalya, Erik, Arianna, Atau, … Over the following years we met occasionally at related events. Since we take care about the issue of mobile sound and dissemination we love to link back and forth.

Meanwhile they have published a book about it which is a serious buy! Creative Interactions – Mobile Music Workshop 2004-2008 was reviewed by Regine recently at We-make-money-not-art. Check it!

Urban Sync goes Emotiv?

$299. The Emotiv EPOC. All the details about the hardware and SDK to dig into conscious thoughts, etc. on their website. Should I consider a hardware upgrade of Urban Sync? Or should I stop reading WIRED? Comments appreciated!

Excerpt of the SDK description for developers being interested in using the Emotiv EPOC:

Affectiv™ Suite
The Affectiv suite monitors player emotional states in real-time. It provides an extra dimension in game interaction by allowing the game to respond to a player’s emotions. Characters can transform in response to the player’s feeling. Music, scene lighting and effects can be tailored to heighten the experience for the player in real-time. The Affectiv suite can be used to monitor player state of mind and allow developers to adjust difficulty to suit each situation.

Cognitiv™ Suite
The Cognitiv suite reads and interprets a player’s conscious thoughts and intent. Gamers can manipulate virtual objects using only the power of their thought! For the first time, the fantasy of magic and supernatural power can be experienced.

Expressiiv™ Suite
The Expressiv suite uses the signals measured by the neuroheadset to interpret player facial expressions in real-time. It provides a natural enhancement to game interaction by allowing game characters to come to life. When a player smiles, their avatar can mimic the expression even before they are aware of their own feelings. Artificial intelligence can now respond to players naturally, in ways only humans have been able to until now.

Afterglow – Urban Sync on YouTube!

I did it. A lot of people have been asking about the visual layer. In the end I mashed-up phonecam images with sound snippets of the project. YouTube what else, spread the buzz…..

Day21: Mission accomplished / Download section updated!

I am back. Today on Day22 I had a look on the big graffiti-like monster that was painted on the Porto region by my pure body interaction with the city.

The download section is now complete regarding the 19 interventions. You find there the un-edited fieldnotes and the .kmz-files. In a couple of days I will post about the update of the remaining high-volume data. In the meantime I have to figure out ways to deal with compression, typical data transfer rates, etc. …

Urban Sync in Porto is closed, mission accomplished. Big thanks to the Português Conexão!

PS: See you July09 at SMC2009.

Day20 – Part II: I do like Tuesdays and disturbance!

People have a real life. Good. On weekends they get lazy about reading blogs. Good. Urban Sync had its best days always on Tuesdays. A nice reoccuring pattern. Interesting. You are allowed to disturb it!

Day20: European patchwork

Rui managed to craft some preliminary patches for Processing communicating over OSC with Max/MSP. Thanks. It is good to get work done by people who know what they have to do! I really enjoy the art of European Patchworking:

Using the sensor band of G. Papastefanou -a psychosociologist, artist and inventor with greek origins- to allow Stephan -the German artscientist- to perform a short-term scientific mission for gathering data in Porto -the secret capital of Portugal- being hosted by Fabien -a french guy who has lived and worked in Paris, Barcelona, Vienna- which ends up in a sonification by Rui – a portuguese composer and creator of sonic spaces- … So much for a great contemporary interpretation of the European idea.

And I have not even mentioned all the other people given their very special input to this patchwork.

Day19 – Part II: Urban Sync LIVE in Kaiserslautern!

Come chat with me! Tonight the guys of Kaiserslautern’s brandnew Kulturkollektiv will transmit Stephan from Porto to Kaiserslautern, to the real place! People in Kaiserslautern should go to Wollmagazin and chat with me!

Day19: Wrap-up, Backup, Crunch

Day 19 of my mission. 19 sessions have been recorded. 45 hours of urban sound, sounds in the GHz range, GPS trails any physiological data. 180 hours of data.

Today I am working at INESC to wrap up with Fabien about the things achieved so far and about ideas for next steps. Summer Schools, SMC2009, missions in other cities, improvements of the hardware, software, methodological approach, potential collaborations with academic institutions as well as commercial players, etc. We have already a lot of very concrete points on the list. Good. Very good.

In addition to the wrap-up I am giving a backup of 41.5 GB of data to INESC. They intend to work on it for different purposes. Audio analysis, MIR, sonic interaction design, etc. Fabien takes care of providing the data to the other academic partners at Porto, e.g. UCP- Escola das Artes or Faculdade de Belas Artes on demand. In a couple of minutes I will meet Rui who has already been working on sonifying the biodata.

I am very happy that so many people already start to show interest or work with the data. So much for the dissemination and potential exploitation.

To find more answers to the scientific questions a couple of weeks will be needed in November -back home at DFKI- to crunch the data for the correlations between the different data streams. Since my colleagues at DFKI already did recently data mining of huge data sets with Rapidminer. I am optimistic to get ahead with this issue very soon. Unsupervised clustering of the audio stream will be another issue Christian at the DFKI site in Saarbrücken has promised to work on. And I am looking forward to discuss a little bit with Randy Goebel of University of Alberta about my mission.

PS: Tomorrow is the first day I will take a day-off. No Urban Sync. Just relaxing without digital ego-surveillance. I need it!

Day18: Sincronização Urbana – A Review by Cristina Sá

Cristina did a nice review of my talk including images (Ruben Sousa) that were part of the media task-force of the students recording the talk. I wouldn’t be surprised if they craft a nice video for their art-related channel at YouTube. It was one of those talks where the audience twists the mind of the speaker…

(If you really think about translating the review by the help of machines, the target language should be English! If you go for German the machine does not really get the point…)

PS: In the morning I did a session at the Norte Shopping mall … hmmh … tell you more soon, at least I had an expensive haircut which was needed urgently.

Day17 – Part III: Night owls

In a couple of hours I will hopefully capture Session#17. It is a typical one representing activities at night. Intimate things about emotions. Good to have people here that help a little bit to arrange such things.

PS If you wonder about the missing sessions here a short wrapup – Lais de Gaia, Salvares, Carro Eléctrico, INESC, Estadio Dragao, Taxi – … hopefully soon also online, at least the .kmz.