My career so far has grown from designing sound and sound systems for the internet and so I thought I’d like to jot down a few notes on why my experiences of this have become such a major force in my creative practice.
The internet has lots of people on it and I needed to make sound and music for them. I started off making loops, composing little bits of music that would cycle round in the background driving people gently insane. I did this because I didn’t really know what I was doing and hadn’t really thought about it, I guess it was fairly early days (1998) for sound and the internet, certainly in terms of interactivity. I had been doing this for a while when I got a brief for a job which made me take notice of what I was doing and pushed me in a direction that I’ve been following ever since.
The job was a website for MTV2 and the brief was, essentially, ‘make it sound nice but don’t piss anyone off’. Easy. The audience was a highly critical and opinionated bunch of music lovers with highly divergent tastes. No problem. Lovely. My solution was that the user would make the music themselves as they navigated the site, essentially a kind of sonification (though I didn’t realise at the time). Sonification seems now to have become one of the focal points of my work. My research is based around it, my practice uses it as much as it can and my commercial clients must be bored stiff of me trying to foist this approach on them.
I think what delights me about sonification is that the act of composition is traditionally based on data, musical instruction, which comes exclusively from the composer. What we see with sonification is a release from this and the implementation of an approach that gives shape to a composition by the use of data that is completely separate from the musical domain. Be it mouse movements, slight changes in atmosphere, the dimensions of a room or a game of chess, the data produced can be sonified, either directly, as we can see in works by Alvin Lucier (Music On A Long Thin Wire, I Am Sitting In A Room), or in a more mediated fashion with John Cage’s work Reunionand particularly in the Audible Ecosystemics works by Agostino Di Scipio. The “open”-ness of these pieces gives the data used to produce them the life to direct and colour the work in a profound way, and the manner in which they are produced, with the injection of scientific and/or statistical elements, adds a new and enriching layer to the narrative of the pieces and the resulting listening experience.
It seems to me then that the internet is ripe for his kind of approach to design. It has so much gather-able data available for constructing intuitive ways of communicating with users through audio and visuals. There are artworks which use this vast pool of data to drive them,Listening Post for example, but I guess what I’m talking about here is the everyday, in-browser experience of the internet. There is certainly a push towards data visualization at the moment, I’d be interested to see if this push carries through to audio.
