Basic Electroacoustics II: Electronic Sound in Art

Music G6602Y
Spring 2003

Professor: Douglas Repetto, douglas@music.columbia.edu
TA: Johnathan Lee, jlee@music.columbia.edu

Our Motto: "Why, then how."

March 27th, 2003



Sound Art Online

In The Beginning...the web was almost all text. Then images started popping up. Then some of the images were animated. Sound was slower to arrive, and when it did, it was pretty raw (see "Down By The Bay" below!). Nowadays we've gotten pretty comforatable with the idea of the web as a pan-media experience (no smell-o-vision yet). All along, sound artists have been doing their best to exploit whatever it was that the web had to offer.

Sound art online tends to cluster into a few general catagories. We'll take a look at a number of pieces and talk about their why and how. Note that there's a LOT of this kind of work on the web. These are just a tiny sampling of what's out there.

multi-site performance

An early version (phone, rather than web-based): Three Cities / Multimedia Tele-Concert (about halfway down the page)
Jesse Gilbert: interaXis
lots of others: http://www.turbulence.org/multilocation/index.html

online jamming

Phil Burk: WebDrum 2
Chris Brown & John Bischoff: Eternal Network Music

collaborative projects

Douglas Repetto: down by the bay (I was young and tender, don't blame me!)
musicolab: http://www.reggieband.com/musicolab/ (broken, but you get the idea)
nowRECORDING: http://www.nowrecording.com/

search engine exploitation

Amy Alexander: lots of web-based pieces
David Birchfield: Interactions
Jason Freeman: N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella)
Peter Traub: bits & pieces / netsong / sibling revelry

sound toys

Nick Didkovsky: The Rhythmicon
G.H. Hovagimyan: Love Songs from My Computer
Stephen Vitiello: Tetrasomia
John Hudak: Lines of Travel
John Hudak: artifact

other cool things

Nick Didkovsky: Zero Waste
Jason Freeman: Telephone Etude 1: Shakespeare Cuisinart

tools for creating online sound art

There are many ways of working with sound online. Here are some of the more common tools.

The Perl programming language
Apple's Quicktime
Macromedia's Flash/Shockwave/Director/Etc.
RTcmix
The Java Programming Language
The JSyn Audio Software Synthesis API and Plugins for Java


Your assignment: Comb the web for some sound art projects. What trends do you see? What's interesting? Which pieces exploit the promise of the web in interesting ways? Which pieces fail? Do the pieces do things that couldn't have been done before? Does it matter? Present at least five pieces and have something to say about each one!