Sonic City

Sonic City was a form of interactive music instrument using the city as an interface. It enabled people to individually create a real-time personal soundscape of electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments. Paths turned into musical compositions and mobility through the shifting contexts of a city became a large scale musical gesture.

Worn on the body, Sonic City retrieved information about environmental context and user actions in real time, and mapped it to the live audio processing of urban sounds, resulting in music heard through headphones. One engaged into a musical duet with the city: urban atmospheres, nearby urban artefacts, random encounters, and everyday activities all participated in creating music as you were walking.

At the cross-road between urban exploration and experimental music making, Sonic City promoted the integration of everyday life settings and practices into personal forms of aesthetic expression with digital technology.

This project was produced in-between the Viktoria Institute and the Interactive Institute in Göteborg, Sweden.

Please click on the picture above to view the video documentation.

Lalya Gaye, Ramia Mazé, Daniel Skoglund, Margot Jacobs – 2002-04