Developing The Sonic Aura Project

In the beginning of my master’s second semester there was the option to enroll for several interesting courses; ‘Information Visualization’, ‘Transformation of Politics’ and lastly ‘Scopic Regimes of Virtuality’. Eventually I choose for the Scopic Regimes course (supervised by Edward A. Shanken) in which “we [would] develop our own theories of contemporary scopic regimes by critically engaging with various interpretive methods and forms of visual production particular to new media” (Shanken, 2009). This built on Martin Jay’s theory of ’scopic regimes’ “[that] construct and are constructed by very particular sorts of viewers and articulate divergent systems of knowledge and value” (Jay, 1988 described by Shanken, 2009).

As we read some excellent theory by i.e Brian Matsumi, Slavoj Zizek and Thomas Boelstorff (last year’s bibliography has some overlapping theory) and weekly wrote blog-posts within a range of themes, finally I decided to start an art project instead of writing an academic paper. Unfortunately this would be in no way the easier alternative, and yes, I would also have to write a paper.

As my group and I read and wrote around the topic of virtual communities and ethics, I wanted to develop something in line of that theme. As my fellow students, Sarah and Marta, had started working quite eagerly on their Cubinator Project (an online performance) and the course length was merely 10 weeks, the pressure to develop something meaningful was rising.

In the end I developed a concept under the title of Pulse.fm, which would be later renamed to The Sonic Aura Project. I will summarize the concept by citing the project paper:

With The Sonic Aura Project I try to explore the boundaries of representation and manipulation of the virtual identity within an online community that solely relies on a audio-signal as means of self-representation. Such an ecology would indeed eliminate many of the freedoms (..) The Sonic Aura Project seeks to move away from on the one hand the hegemonic online networking models and their role as tools for maintaining social relations and on the other hand the freedom of the individual and the possible unstable factors of virtual identity and identity play.

(..) Every participant’s behavior is mediated through several input types which translate themselves more or less into different sound layers: a ’social media meta layer’ (linked to one’s existing social networks), a ‘physical layer’ and a ‘corporeal layer’. (..) The three types of input represent different instruments (although there are a few grey areas), namely: melody (meta-layer), rhythm (the user’s heart rate) and ambience (the microphone recordings).

The final product consisted of three demo’s that explore the boundaries and opportunities of such an ecology. Designing the systems was quite an exciting process, although programming them in Adobe Flash was somewhat cumbersome due to my limited ActionScript-knowledge. More elaboration on the project and the demo’s can be found on the project website (note that currently launching them from the site isn’t fully operational, please download the demo pack instead). It’s been a challenge to work on this project, I might pick up on the current prototype someday (probably after graduating) depending on how people respond to it.

Lately, I’ve also stumbled upon the Heart Chamber Orchestra project that also ties together biological data and generative music in an interesting way.