Dynamic & Sound
How to use strategies of sonification in an urban space?
A Sound Studies Lab Workshop
as part of the KOSMOS Summer University
at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Collaborator
Christian Kassung
Location
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Georgenstraße 47
10117 Berlin
Participants
25 maximum
Concept
Since the middle of the 19th century natural sciences almost exclusively processed their data through graphic recording methods. Since approximately twenty years sonification establishes itself as well, for example in the field of medicine (EEG data) or seismology (F. Dombois). In the process information is either directly emitted via speakers (audification), allocated to certain sound properties (parameter mapping) or transformed into virtual objects that can be made audible by a suitable simulation (model-based sonification). It is crucial for all three methods not to transform chronological information of the data into spatial parameters but to preserve them as the acoustic event.
The strategies of sonification in an urban space are to be tested as a future scenario of traffic. In this attempt two questions are dominant: How can traffic of electric vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians be made audible in order to 1. achieve a strategic improvement in terms of constructional planning and 2.enable the individual traffic participant to reduce risks and to assess the traffic situation? Starting point for this discourse is the fact that traffic as a dynamic system has always been perceived optically as well as acoustically. In fact in most cases we subconsciously rely primarily on the auditory impression of a traffic situation. The aim of the project is to explicate this implicit knowledge about the acoustic processing of traffic data. To this end methods and insights of cultural history analysis, musicology, physics and informations theory as well as practical art are applied.