Henry Stag

http://soundofcities.com/

Sound of Cities - An Interactive Electronic Music project by Henry Stag

The project, which officially launched in May 2007, originally targeted the establishment of an interactive network of projects in the cities worldwide. The essence of the project is to involve a broad palette of talented electronic music artists, emerging visual and multimedia artists, while building a significant network of hosting galleries. Moreover, for each of the cities the project will set out to establish at least one edifice or “Gallery” as the point of input. The edifice is electronically equipped to act as a huge microphone which is recording the vibrations of the surrounding environment. This data will be continuously monitored, recorded and digitally archived.

Through the selection of various frequencies the recorded data can filter out the seismic events occurring in the immediate surroundings. These events could occur in the interior or exterior of the edifice but subsequently represent the sounds coming from the “bowels” or heart of the city. The digital recordings of these seismic events are transferred directly to a midi data file for archival retrieval at any point in time. Simultaneously, the data can be transmitted to the artists via a so-called midi stream. The artist is then free to creative­ly manipulate the audio data with the use of the provided synthesizer or program sampler. This audio stream can then be directly transmitted to the server or to the mixer for the in­teractive manipulation and listening pleasure of the user. Hence the cities, or better said, the Earth is playing the music and the artists are composing its form, range and tempo. Visitors to the site can in turn choose to create their own variation of the score, thus allowing him or her to become a director / conductor within this terrestrial symphony.

From a musical standpoint, the goal of the project is to bring the young­er generation from the electronic music & the visual arts scene (Click’n Cut, Dance, Mod­ern Electronic Music etc.) together with the pioneers of electronic music. At the same time the project should be viewed as a “musical historical document.”

Until now many well known Artists  like: Daevid Allen (GONG), Amon Düül 2, Francois Bayle, Herve Boghossian, Paulo Chagas, Markus Detmar, Carla Diana, Hans Joachim Irmler (FAUST), Hugh Hopper  (SOFT MACHINE), Leafcutter John, Juergen Kirsch, Elodie Lauten, Dieter Moebius and Hans Joachim Roedelius  (CLUSTER), Andrew Pekler, Richard Pinhas (HELDON), Pixel, Stephen Scott, Atau Tanaka, Oscar Wiggli……and the following software companies: AAS, Arturia, Cycling74, EnergyXT, Magix, Midimaster, Lin-plug, Stelkens, and Widi …are involved in the project and did help in putting it on its feet.

More about at the: http://www.soundofcities.com