I found this article to be interesting, and it actually very closely reflects my idea of what I think I am going to do for my final project. I starting having this idea at the end of last semester, but Sonic City very closely resembles my idea, except in one respect. I am very interested in bio-sensing, so I would have the sensing capabilities of the system pointing inwards towards the user, rather than outward to the city. This may seem like a minor change, but it is quite important.
Functionally, what I was to do is construct a mobile EEG brainwave scanner, which would be hooked up to a very small computer running Linux. Then I would take the signals and convert them into audio. There are three immediately obvious applications of this for me. Like Sonic City, it could be used to change the way that we experience walking around the city, except receiving it’s cues from our changing emotional state as we pass through various spaces. I also wish to explore the Buddhist concept of ‘walking meditation’. As we talk about our hyper-connected state, and the act of disconnection, I find that one of the serious problems with our hyper-connected state is our lack of connection with ourselves. Many people use connectivity as a way to escape thier personal issues, and in that way, the internet has the capability to be abused in a surprisingly similar way to drugs and alcohol.
When I try to purposefully stop what I am doing and spend time with myself, usually in the form of meditation, I become incredibly agitated and uncomfortable. Lately I have been attempting a form of mediation called ‘walking meditation’ which is basically attempting to move incredibly conciously and intentfully when you are walking from place to place, in a type of meditative state. The audio system would read brain waves and level of agitation, heart rate etc. and would produce a harmonally pleasant tone when the user was calm and unagitated. When the user is in a rush, or when their mind is racing, the audio tone would become unpleasant. This would require the user to try to ‘control’ themselves, be calm, and mediate.
The third obvious application of the system would be creating live music out of the brain-waves, with the intention of creating a controlable system that could be used to create music intentionally. This is something that I will probably explore, but is somewhat outside of the scope of this class.
2 Comments
What you describe reminds me of Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping project – http://www.biomapping.net/ – and something like that would certainly be within the scope of our class…
Yes, I found Bio Mapping to be very interesting as well, but I find the whole locative media world stuck in this ‘mapping’ concept. Not everything has to be a map… it can just exist and be experienced. Of course, locative media it’s very nature involves ‘location’ which leads naturally to mapping, but in my limited interpretation, locative media is simply locational and contextually aware media, which doesn’t really need to be mapped at all.