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Sound/tracks: real-time synaesthetic sonification of train journeys

Published: 26 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Travelling on a train and looking out of the window at the moving scenery reveals a composition of "visual music" with its own tempo and rhythm, its own colours and harmonies. The project sound/tracks aims at capturing these visual impressions and translates them into a musical composition in real-time - producing an immediate and unique soundtrack to the train journey based on the passing landscape. To this end, the outside impressions are captured with a camera and translated into instantaneously played back piano music. The immediately added sound dimension allows for reflection of the visual impression and deepening of the state of contemplation. For the resulting compositions, the passing scenery can be considered the score. "Re-transcription" of this score to an image gives a panoramic overview over the complete journey and exhibits some interesting effects caused by the movement of the train, such as compression and stretching of passing objects. In addition to intensifying the experience of a train journey, sound/tracks permits to persistently capture and archive the fleeting impressions of journey and composition and allows for re-experiencing the trip both visually and acoustically at a later point.

References

[1]
sound/tracks Project Web Site. URL: http://www.cp.jku.at/projects/soundtracks/
[2]
W. G. Collier and T. L. Hubbard. Musical scales and brightness evaluations: Effects of pitch, direction, and scale mode. Musicae Scientiae, 8:151--173, 2004.
[3]
D. L. Datteri and J. N. Howard. The sound of color. In Proc 8th Int'l Conference on Music Perception & Cognition, Evanston, USA, 2004.
[4]
M. Gondry. Music video for "The Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar", 2002.
[5]
T. Pohle and P. Knees. Real-Time Synaesthetic Sonification of Traveling Landscapes. In Proc 5th Int'l Mobile Music Workshop, Vienna, Austria, 2008.
[6]
M. Reinhart and V. Widrich. tx-transform. URL: http://www.tx-transform.com/ (last access 2008/04/28).
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E. Rusconi, B. Kwan, B. L. Giordano, C. Umiltà, and B. Butterworth. Spatial representation of pitch height: the SMARC effect. Cognition, 99:2:113--129, 2006.
[8]
Wikipedia. Alexander Scriabin. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Scriabin. (last access 2008/04/28).

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MM '08: Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia
    October 2008
    1206 pages
    ISBN:9781605583037
    DOI:10.1145/1459359
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 26 October 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. mobile music generation
    2. real-time sonification
    3. train journey

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    MM08
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    MM08: ACM Multimedia Conference 2008
    October 26 - 31, 2008
    British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,145 of 8,556 submissions, 25%

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