“Sonic City is a wearable system that turns the city into an interface for real time electronic music making. It enables its user to create a personal soundscape of live electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments. The prototype consists of a small laptop computer, a microphone, headphones, a micro-controller, a MIDI interface, and a number of sensors (sensing light, metal, movement, proximity, sound level, etc). The system gathers information about the user’s actions and surrounding context with sensors worn on the body and a layer of context and action recognition. This data controls the audio processing of live urban sounds collected by the microphone. Resulting music is output through headphones in real time and in the context in which it is created, as the user is walking. Mobility through shifting urban context becomes a large-scale musical gesture…

Sonic City is one example of mobile music making. This paper sets this project and the notion of mobile music making into perspective, describes how the characteristics of this type of systems affect user behaviour and experience, and discusses implications for this emerging field…” From Performing Sonic City: Situated Creativity In Mobile Music Making by Lalya Gaye and Lars Erik Holmquist, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2006.