 |
File Sharing and Interactive Mobile Music Making artists: Owen Chapman and Sam Thulin |
| Bluetooth Beats is a mobile media project involving audio compositions that are specially prepared for interactive improvised concerts via audience members’ cell phones. Small MP3 files are provided through a portable Bluetooth server. The “concert” starts as participants begin to playback these sounds on their mobile devices, controlling volume, moving through space and interacting with each other. Using Bluetooth as a means to creative interactive mobile music highlights a series of different issues, including the challenges involved in treating proprietary hardware as a mechanism for artistic creativity. This hints at topics relevant to the 2009 Concordia President’s Conference Series “Every Breath You Take”, referencing a wider conversation around portable communication devices, content provision, and file sharing. Owen Chapman worked with Sam Thulin to compose Bluetooth Beats, fragments of original music that come into rhythmic alignment – thereby creating a beat – when played across participants’ mobile devices. Some of the pieces feature an alleatoric style – meaning no fixed tempo, so that users don’t need to be well-timed in starting and stopping sounds. For stronger rhythms, finding successful versions of beat alignment will provoke users to learn the physical or muscular trick to starting files at the ‘right’ time. This aspect of playing the files will no doubt be one of the many things that users are invited to experience while participating in a Bluetooth beat, or ‘cell jam’. This project was launched on November 4, 2009 at the President’s Conference Series. Bluetooth ‘sniffs’ out a phone in order to send a message. How far a message can travel depends on the range and capabilities of a server. File sharing occurs within a definable range and depends on the type of bandwidth or spectrum being used. This work is highly interactive and opens up the creative potential mobile communication devices not only for pushing pre-determined content, but for creating interactions. Plus, it can instill an awareness of what it means to be in ‘range’ of what is invisible: spectrum, which enables communication and one of its corollaries: surveillance. In this way, this campaign is not only a demonstration of the potential of the mobile media gallery (our bluetooth server device), but of something few people are aware of: the invisible clouds of ethereal data that they pass through everyday. One interesting feature of composing for mobile phones is that the device’s status as ‘new’ technology belies their connection to older forms of audio playback. While in New Brunswick this summer, Owen picked up a beautiful old wind-up gramophone at an auction. Playing records on it around the house, he noticed some things: 78 rpm records from this era (1920s) all feature a lot of male vocals, trumpet solos, violins, orchestras, etc… these types of sounds sit in a fairly limited frequency range (or all the frequency ranges, in the case of an orchestra), sounding better coming through a gramophone horn than female vocals, flute solos, stand-up basses, cellos, etc… low and high pitched sounds in general. The fidelity of the gramophone was such that record producers had to think about what would come through on the listening end, arranging their compositions/recordings according to the limited fidelity of the playback medium. Cell phones are exactly the same as the gramophone in terms of what comes through. The tiny little (Piezo powered) speakers inside the average cell phone have pretty much zero bass frequency response, and they also roll off a lot of high end sounds. Then there is the fact that sounds are usually mp3 files, wherein anything under 128 kbps sounds compressed, and without much fidelity in terms of high end sound. It’s like a loop right back to the 1920s for those designing ring tones or cell phone jams! |
|
| Bluetooth Beat 1 – Good Night
Component Audio Files: Good Night Synth Good Night Drums Bluetooth Beat 2 – Hear the Bells? Component Audio Files: 02 |