Digital Sound Project

For the sound project of the JPMorganChase Kids Digital Movement and Sound Project, children use digital technologies to record and study the sounds of their environment and their own voices. They use the knowledge gained from this study to synthesise their own digital compositions. The children employ user-friendly tools geared to their developmental levels, but in a highly sophisticated context - a distributed or ubiquitous computing environment in which machine intelligence is not restricted to a fixed CPU and monitor, but is instead deployed in mobile formations throughout the learning environment. A large part of the control of the digital synthesis is achieved through external controllers that offer children a direct physical relationship to the elements of sound. The children work in teams and create the compositions collectively. The script (form) of the resulting compositions evolves from the soundscapes that the children experience and analyse. The children are encouraged to listen to the interaction of the sound elements of each soundscape and to incorporate this interactivity in their group compositions. In such an environment, children see that organisation can arise as a consequence of emergent structure (the unanticipated interaction of numerous interdependent elements) rather than from top-down design. Our ultimate goal is to enhance the sonic experience and connect it as directly as possible to sonic creation without the interference or mediation of external artificial processes.

The following four sub-projects/workshops are currently running. All sub-projects will produce public performance of their results. All sub-projects will present preliminary results /works in progress at the Interactive Concert of the 3rd World Summit on Media for Chidlren (link to program). Here is a summary of each of the sub-projects.

In A Walk Through Harlem The performers tell the story of a February walk through Harlem, where they recorded the sounds of the neighborhood and of various things they found. Using several unique digital instruments, they mix and modify these sounds and the sounds of their own voices, telling a sonic story. Images of their walk accompany them, in an unusual computerized slide-show that responds to their performance.

Kids in (Sound)Space is a live, collaborative, interactive composition. Environmental sounds that were recorded by the group (supermarket noises, buses, the subway) are loaded into a computer. These sounds are represented by objects that float around on the computer screen. The performers can control the motion of the sound objects via sensors they wear on their bodies. As the objects move around on the screen their qualities change: volume, spatial location, pitch, tempo and a number of other parameters can be altered for each sound. When a number of sounds are loaded at the same time, a sound environment, or space, is formed. In performance, a new piece is created every time as the performers work with the sounds in the sound space to create environments and moods that change over time.

During the workshops for the creation of Wind Symphony children using filtered noise attempt at first to re-create natural noised-based sound environments: the sound of the waves, the sound of the wind, the noise of traffic, the noise of crowds, blowing wind in tubes, noise based speech syllables, noise based animal sounds. Children experiment extensively with frequency content, frequency contour and amplitude envelopes, and their interaction/integration. Through their experimentation with the creation of natural noised-based environments, of which they have strong implicit knowledge, children familiarise themselves with digital synthesis techniques. They are then able to use these techniques to create their own compositions (sound essays) that are not necessarily related to natural sounds. The final compositions (sound essays) are combinations of material created by the children during the preparatory sessions and improvisatory material created in real time during the performance.

read more about the projects.

see the original proposal.