A project by Richard Widerberg & Zeenath Hasan / UIAH Media lab (FI)
When you IMPROVe your mobile phone, it turns into a music making device. Capture sonic material from the ether that surrounds you. Play it back in an improvisation session with your friends. Share your everyday soundscape and create new forms of music.
IMPROVe
IMPROVe is an aural architecture for socio-cultural exchange. Sonic realities of the everyday are improvised live in a non-linear mode. Local and remote audiences contribute and access open content. IMPROVe explores the role of the mobile phone user as a creator of her/ his own content. It attempts to define the mobile device as a tool for environment awareness by making the user conscious of their immediate sonic surrounding. By exploring the role of the mobile phone as a medium of sonic content creation and exchange, we propose the understanding of the music making mobile device as a medium of empowerment.
Scenario
A group of friends record sound objects and soundscapes from their daily life through a mobile device. The group meets in a local pub, where there is a sound system for playing the gathered sounds. They perform a live-remix of the sounds on their mobile devices. Through the sonic improvisation of their everyday soundscape, they affect their experience of the here and the now.
Functionality
IMPROVe collects sound via a mobile device and sends them to a location where they can be played back into a soundsystem. The same mobile device controls the playback of the collected sounds in the soundsystem. Playback control occurs in the physical location of the soundsystem. The playbacked sounds are processed live via interaction on the mobile device. The output of the processed sound can be directly heard through the soundsystem.
The first prototype of IMPROVe is going to be used in the Locative Media Workshop during Pixelache Helsinki 2006. IMPROVe will be used for a public concert by participants from the workshop.
IMPROVe has been developed in the Media Lab, Helsinki by Zeenath Hasan (media designer) and Richard Widerberg (sound artist) –mlab.uiah.fi/IMPROVe
The project continues to grow with new members on the team:
The Swedish duo of Kristina Lindström (interaction designer) and Åsa Ståhl (radio journalist) – aok.el-ljud.se + The Bangalore based Mahiti (free/ open source software developers) – mahiti.org