Flou'ing the Coop, Or Music Meets Science

In years past, I pushed a lot of piano teachers to the brink. Mrs. Hoettelting had her husband put up a heavy-metal gate that was conveniently locked when I was due for a lesson. Miss Cedarcraft joined a convent. Considering all of the suffering I caused with a piano back then, its mind boggling as to the pain I could cause these days.

Just think, for instance, what I could do with Flou (pronounced "flew"). Developed by Jason Freeman, Mark Godfry, and Andrew Beck, Flou is--well, I'm not sure what it is, but it sounds very cool. The best I can tell it is a musical game that lets you use the sound to navigate through 3D worlds, zoom through objects in space, add loops, and apply effects to an evolving musical mix. You can also design worlds and share them with other Flou users. Freeman is an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's Music Technology Group, where he focuses on algorithmic composition, networked music systems, and audience-participative musical environments. Godfrey and Beck are grad students who work with Freeman.

The goal of the Music Technology Group is to push the boundaries of musical expression and creativity through technology, focusing on creating novel musical instruments and applications--stuff like new interfaces for musical expression, algorithmic composition, music information retrieval, audio visual communication, musical networks, digital signal processing, machine and robotic musicianship, and sonification. And they seem to be doing a bang-up job at all this.

In a more familiar world, Freeman created iTunes Signature Maker, which analyzes music collections and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. Freeman also developed N.A.G., a "Network Auralization for Gnutella." Also referred to as "sonification" or "audification," auralization is the representation of data through sound. With N.A.G., you can type in one or more search keywords, and N.A.G. looks for matches on the Gnutella peer-to-peer file-sharing network. The software then downloads MP3 files that match keywords and remixes them in real time based on the structure of the Gnutella network.

But Freeman and crew aren't the only ones investigating auralization. It has been a research area for Andrea Polli for a number of years. Her Atmospherics/Weather Works project, for instance, is a distributed software project for the sonification of storms and other meteorological events, including Hurricane Bob. And it sounds really weird.

Music technology indeed. Will someone please pass Mrs. Hoettelting the aspirin?

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 03:10 PM  Permalink