IMPROVe

The IMPROVe project will be presented at Mobile HCI ‘06 conference in Espoo, Finland from the 12 to 15 September 2006.

Art gallery Myymälä2 on Uudenmaankatu was flooded with sonic waves induced by the participants of the Hearing Helsinki workshop who performed a live improvisation using the IMPROVe tool. The performance lasted 20 minutes and used sound samples that had been recorded the week before in the Hearing Helsinki workshop. The first 20 minutes was not enough for the participants, and they encored themselves to another, longer session. Guests and walk-in visitors to the gallery joined in the performance as well.

Part of the IMPROVe team were teaching in the Hearing Helsinki workshop last week. For the workshop a mobile podcasting system developed by us and Jurgen Scheible was used. The workshop participants recorded sounds with the mobile phones and published them directly to the Hearing Helsinki podcast.

July 22 to 30 IMPROVe resounds at Futuresonic 2006 in Manchester.

Remember when your entire world of experience was the sound of your mother’s heartbeat? Out of the womb, involved in the routine of everyday life, what sounds shape your world now? Take hold, take charge and control your everyday experience through the soundscapes that surround you. The IMPROVe team invites you to listen, record, mix, and play your everyday soundscapes for the public, your loved ones, yourself.

Mothers of Arts is a day long event at the Masters of Arts 2006
University of Art and Design Helsinki
Media Centre Lume
Sunday, May 14th 2006
1200 to 1600

This July 12 to 15, the IMPROVe team have been invited to demo and perform at the Digital Art Weeks Symposium 2006 in Zurich.

The performance with IMPROVe at the Railway station in Helsinki was great. We used sounds recorded in the station and played them back in loud-speakers. Four phones controlled the processing and playback of the sounds. The phones were passed around in the audience. To control big sounds in a big space with a small device was a very nice experience. Look at the video-documentation from the performance (and listen carefully…):

Streamed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKEF1-CYkPc

Download: improve_pixelache.mov (10.7 mb)

IMPROVe is part of Pixelache 2006 festival in Helsinki. At the moment in the ongoing Locative Media workshop. On Thursday 30 March IMPROVe will be presented in the Mobile arts & experiments seminar.

Then the grande finale is the IMPROVe concert in the west wing of the Helsinki Railway station on Saturday 1 April 17.00. People from the Locative media workshop will improvise with sounds collected during the workshop. Free entrance!

Part of the IMPROVe team just visited the Mobile Music Workshop at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Met a lot of friendly people, saw a lot of nice projects, got good feedback on IMPROVe, participated in interesting discussions. Many thanks to the organizers!

Crucial questions that kept popping up during the workshop were:
What is mobility?
What is mobile music?
What is a mobile environment/situation?
What is the relationship between mobile devices, body and movement?

A comment in these discussions was that we are using technology to re-socialize public space.

Worth thinking about. We will keep on investigating.

Three point overlapping definition of noise, compiled succintly by Torben Sangild , author of Aesthetics of Noise

acoustic - white noise, color noise
communicative - when noise is considered as that which disturbs communication
subjective - annoying sounds

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Dust and Noise is the theme of a 3-day seminar organized by NSU , a decades old travelling debate forum attended mostly by Nordic intellectuals.