Urban Sound Diary
Technical Development + Creative Research
Urban Soundscape Analysis, Archive, and Creative “Remix”
Concatinative Synthesis, Feature Extraction (Machine Learning), Web Audio API
Project Leader: Marcel Zaes Sagesser
Team Members: Xuehua FU (MSc Computer Science), Zhaorui Lio (MA Computer Music), Hao Zheng (RA), Jiayi Wen (Master student Robotics & Intelligent Manufacturing)
2024
[unpublished work, currently under review, please do not share or circulate]
On the example of Shenzhen, a large Chinese city with a high sonic density, this research aims at understanding, through a designed technological sound interaction device, the “messiness” and loudness of the city famous for its “high-tech” pioneers. Sonic technologies are a constitutional element of our contemporary urban soundscapes, which, in turn, are increasingly overtly complex assemblages. Urban Sound Diary is a browser-based app designed for mobile phones; it is a log where individuals document or record auditory experiences, focusing on the sounds they encounter in their daily environment in urban space. Instead of (or in addition to) writing down thoughts and events, a sound diary captures or describes the soundscape – the collection of sounds present in a particular space at a given time – as experienced by a single individual. Our app allows the user to record sounds from their daily environment, and to reorganize and relive their own sound diary through the sound explorer, an interactive 2d visualization of the accumulated sum of recorded sounds with creative remix functions. Using an interdisciplinary framework with sound studies, music technology, data visualization, computer science and auditory interaction design, this research project sheds light on a novel, practice-based approach to interacting with the sonic city. This approach has the potential to reveal new knowledge about how users interact with their urban environments through sound technology; and how the city itself is ultimately shaped by technological interaction with it.
#Urban Soundscape
#App-based Sound Interaction
#Participatory Audio Crowd Sourcing
First presented as a workshop at the Chinese CHI’24 Symposium, November 2024, Shenzhen