Social Mobile Music Navigation Using The Compass by Atau Tanaka, Guillaume Valadon, and Christophe Berger – ABSTRACT: During a regular day while on the move, most people interact with multiple portable devices: a personal music player, mobile phone, and digital camera. People driving cars in addition may also use navigation systems. Whereas each of these devices are getting more and more sophisticated, and packed with numerous functionalities, they are each optimized for specific usages. Modern mobile phones for example, claim to function as digital cameras and music players, but these are features that are more often than not added on almost as an afterthought, and are not integrated with the connectivity that the mobile phone represents. From an engineering point of view, the goal of this project is to push mass-market mobile phones to their limits in networked musical exchange by implementing The Compass. Specifically, we are targeting phones embedded with WiFi, music player and location1 capabilities. The idea was to build a true convergence application that integrated localization, mobile networking, and music listening. Mobile Music Workshop Proceedings, page 34 [PDF]

Floating Fabulousness: Representation, Performativity and Identity in Musical Ringtones by Isabella van Elferen and Imar de Vries – ABSTRACT: In this paper, we consider musical ringtones of mobile phones to act as virtual, communicative and cultural performances. They appear unpredictably, they communicate signs which are interpreted by a variegated and dynamic audience, and establish stages upon which cultural meanings are portrayed. We will argue that the musical ringtone functions as a musical madeleine in Marcel Proust’s sense, an involuntary mnemonic trigger of a complex web of individual and collective memories. Having this quality, the ringtone lends itself perfectly for the performative manifestation and display of (sub)cultural identities in the public sphere. Keywords: Performativity, ringtones, mobile phones, communication, representation, identity. Mobile Music Workshop Proceedings, page 38 [PDF]

URBAN SENSING: Urban Sensing systems research is a collaboration between CENS and the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP) that seeks to develop cultural and technological approaches for using embedded and mobile sensing to invigorate public space and enhance civic life.

Unlike scientific applications, many sensors for urban applications are already ‘out there,’ watching and listening. Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighborhoods, and the near ubiquity of wireless access in many future urban settings will allow us to publish or share data easily, immediately. Soon private citizens will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their communities. They will be able to cross-reference spatially and temporally tagged data they gather with publicly available data from private and municipal monitoring of the city—traffic, weather, air quality, pedestrian flow—the environment and rhythms of urban life.

At the edges of culture, lightweight web applications, built on this publicly available information and free web services, emerge already almost daily to explore new linkages among these varied data. Expanding on their approach, we are exploring how these intermittent georeferenced media records of everyday life can be coordinated to achieve ‘distributed documentation’ of the urban environment, as well as be fused with other sensed data about the city and fed back into the physical, collective experience in urban public spaces. Unlike scientific applications, the hardware is not owned and managed by a small number of central authorities. Citizens carry sensors and contribute data voluntarily. A single entity does not pose interesting ‘hypotheses,’ design experiments, force participation. Instead, the process of learning from an urban environment can be organic and decentralized, existing more in the realm of social networking software. However, the power of this network still comes from our ability to verify the context of shared data, to actuate (to filter, identify and respond to events); to aggregate data in space and time; and to allow individuals to coordinate activities.