Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface

Lalya Gaye, Ramia Mazé, and Lars E. Holmquist

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

In the project Sonic City, we have developed a system thatenables users to create electronic music in real time by walkingthrough and interacting with the urban environment. Weexplore the use of public space and everyday behaviours forcreative purposes, in particular the city as an interface andmobility as an interaction model for electronic music making.A multi-disciplinary design process resulted in theimplementation of a wearable, context-aware prototype. Thesystem produces music by retrieving information aboutcontext and user action and mapping it to real-time processingof urban sounds. Potentials, constraints, and implications ofthis type of music creation are discussed.

Citation:

Lalya Gaye, Ramia Mazé, and Lars E. Holmquist. 2003. Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1176507

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Gaye2003,
 abstract = {In the project Sonic City, we have developed a system thatenables users to create electronic music in real time by walkingthrough and interacting with the urban environment. Weexplore the use of public space and everyday behaviours forcreative purposes, in particular the city as an interface andmobility as an interaction model for electronic music making.A multi-disciplinary design process resulted in theimplementation of a wearable, context-aware prototype. Thesystem produces music by retrieving information aboutcontext and user action and mapping it to real-time processingof urban sounds. Potentials, constraints, and implications ofthis type of music creation are discussed.},
 address = {Montreal, Canada},
 author = {Gaye, Lalya and Maz\'{e}, Ramia and Holmquist, Lars E.},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 date = {22-24 May, 2003},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1176507},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {Interactive music, interaction design, urban environment, wearable computing, context-awareness, mobility},
 pages = {109--115},
 title = {Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2003/nime2003_109.pdf},
 year = {2003}
}