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!