Oterp is a mobile phone game project using a GPS sensor to manipulate music in real time, depending on the player’s position on Earth. It generates new melodies when travelling. The objective of Oterp is to mix the reality of our everyday environment with a video game. This is a new way to imagine our movements in a society increasingly on the move and dependent on mobile interfaces.

Washington, D.C.-based band Bluebrain’s new album dropped yesterday, Friday, May 29, 2011, but not in the way one might think. It is available on iTunes, but not in MP3 form — rather as a location-aware app that only works within the stretch of park in downtown D.C. called the Mall.

“The music changes and evolves based on your chosen path within the park,” says Ryan Holladay, one half of the band. (His brother, Hays, makes up the other half of the outfit.) “To do this, the app uses the phone’s built-in GPS capabilities.” The app features a map of the Mall that shows what locations are tagged with sound.

The album, titled The National Mall, contains about three hours of music that the brothers composed while traipsing around the area. “It was certainly the most amount of exercise I’ve ever gotten while making an album,” Holladay says.

The disc will not be available for standard download as a musical piece, since it will only work when one is standing in the Mall.

For more, go here.

UrbanRemix is a collaborative and locative sound project developed by Jason Freeman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael Nitsche, and many of our students at Georgia Tech. Our goal in developing UrbanRemix was to design a platform and series of events that would enable participants to develop and express the acoustic identity of their communities, and enable participants to explore and experience the soundscapes of the city in a novel fashion.

The UrbanRemix platform consists of a mobile phone system and web interface for recording, browsing, and mixing audio. It allows users to document and explore the obvious, neglected, private or public, even secret sounds of the urban environment. Continue reading

Halsey Burgund, Scapes :: July 13, 2010 - November 4, 2010 :: deCordova, 51 Sandy Pond Rd, Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Halsey Burgund is a musician and sound artist who lives and works in Bedford, MA. Burgund’s projects are collaborative and provide participants with an active role in content creation. Part of generation Wiki and the democratization of knowledge, Burgund uses open source platforms, GPS technology, and interactivity to create musical scores from participants’ spoken words that continuously evolve in real-time. Scapes, Burgund’s project for PLATFORM 3, creates a two-way audio experience for museum visitors influenced significantly by their physical location on deCordova grounds. Participants will use handheld wireless devices and headphones to listen to audio and also to make their own recordings which will be immediately assimilated into the piece for everyone to hear. Organized by former Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik and current Koch Curatorial Fellow Lexi Lee, the exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color brochure.

The Institute of Unnecessary Research presents e-MobLArt — Exhibition of the European Mobile Lab for Interactive Media Artists following a one year collaboration :: May 20 - June 10, 2009 :: Opening: May 20; 8:00 pm :: Center for Contemporary Art - Warehouse B1, Thessaloníki, Greece.

The exhibition includes two projects involving Anna Dumitriu: KryoLab is an installation that brings together bioart, ice sculpture and sound, in an investigation of delicate relationships in the Arctic ecosystem. This work is about our journey, the experience of participating in the E-MobiLArt project, working with artists from other backgrounds and travelling to new locations. Initial discussions about the nature of arctic, the sound of cracking ice, the disintegration of ice with sound, and the bacterial flora of the Arctic, discussed under the hot Athens sun at the first workshop gained momentum during long nights of conversation illuminated by the cool midnight sun at the edge of the Arctic Circle. Continue reading

[Image: Push!Music autosharing situation and software demo on handheld] “Instead of sharing music in front of a computer, what if you could simply share songs, directly from your MP3 player, with friends and other people you encounter in your everyday life? And what if songs could send themselves autonomously from player to player, depending on where they ‘fit in’? Together with my colleagues at the Future Applications Lab in Sweden, I have explored how music could be shared wirelessly between mobile devices in ways that are intended to be playful, intriguing and spontaneous. Mobile wireless technologies not only let us stay connected to those far away from us, they can also increase our awareness of what is happening right here, right now. For example, recent mobile applications let you search for apartments for sale in the same neighbourhood you are currently walking around. Continue reading

Wi: The Journal of Mobile Media — Active Radio … Launch and Demo :: April 7, 2009; 11:00 am - 1:00 pm :: Simultaneous Broadcast**: MONTREAL: Department of Communication Studies C-Pod Space, Room CJ 2.192; and Concordia University–Loyola Campus, 7141 Sherbrooke St. West; TORONTO: Mobile Media Lab at York University, 217 York Lanes; BOLOGNA: Marconi Foundation.

Active Radio focuses on the role and place of Active Radio. The concept of active radio comes from Jean Laurendeau’s french-language biography of Maurice Martenot — inventor of les Ondes Martenot. This early electronic musical instrument (1928) produces its sound through the interaction of two radio waves. Continue reading

Spatial Dissonance, Subjective Imagination and Locative Media: An Interview with Paula Levine, conducted by Barbara Crow, April 3, 2008 on Skype using Call Recorder, Wi Journal: Paula Levine’s “… recent installation, Signature, is inaugural work in the new Contemporary Project Space at the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa, California. Signature is a contemporary portrait of seismic history as it intersects with local lives and landscape. The work uses GPS satellites to trigger the sound of the 1906 Bay area earthquake. The same overhead satellites also cause the surface of a projected digital image of Santa Rosa to rupture and reveal the hidden presence of the Rogers Creek Fault that runs directly through the centre of the city. The sound is converted from a selection of seismograph recordings of the 1906 quake. Santa Rosa was severely destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires. While the Rogers Creek Fault has been quiet for many years, current seismic research refocuses attention on it as a possible continuation of the more active Hayward Creek Fault, lying to the south of the city…” Listen to the Interview and/or Continue reading >>

University of Minnesota West Bank Arts Quarter In partnership with the American Composers Forum Call for Works: 2009 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts :: February 17 - 22, 2009 :: Minneapolis, MN :: Submission Deadline: October 31, 2008.

Now in its seventh year, the Spark Festival invites submissions of art, dance, theater, and music works incorporating new media, including electroacoustic concert music, experimental electronica, theatrical and dance works, installations, kinetic sculpture, artbots, video, and other non- traditional genres. Although Spark does not force submissions to adhere to a annual theme, we are especially interested this year to feature wearable and mobile technologies, and events will include the first Spark Fashion Show. Continue reading

“Grey zones are spaces or places of alterity. They could be Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’, or Marc Augé’s ‘non-places’, or Edward Soja’s ‘thirdspace’ (just to name a few) [1]. They exist as real spaces and places we know and are also new spaces created by the use of technology. As artists begin to explore these spaces with locative media, what are some effects of locating and properties of these spaces and what might be their correlates in other discourses around space?

The field of research and practice of locative media is abuzz with new work and ideas, especially with work that deals with specifics of a data- or narratively-described place implied in ‘locating’. With much focus on the specific, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that there do exist ruptures in locating and its related technologies. In the process of locating, boundaries shift, errors occur, things are read as something else, signals get lost. These are some of the effects or properties of ‘locating’ that make evident the slippery boundaries in locating, revealing spaces that can be defined in some way as ‘other’ and that shift over time to occasionally blur the pinpointing of a locative ‘moment’…” From Swimming In The Grey Zones - Locating The Other Spaces In Mobile Art by Leslie Sharpe, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2006.