A strange new concept in sound and space from across the pond:
Not all subways are created equal. What if technology designers recognized this fact and attempted to create an interface that took a deeper look at what being mobile means to each of us? What if they tried to reflect and enhance your sometimes conflicting, but always meaningful and situated, experiences? What if they designed for your underground? They did. [Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer, and Karen Martin] created undersound.
undersound is a new type of experience, an interface that is on your mobile phone and in the underground stations you pass through every day. It is part personal, part public and all about the tube. undersound is a way of listening to, distributing and affecting the flow of music in the underground that goes beyond just the music itself. It allows you to see your journeys, the people around you, and the tube itself in a new light. [...]
undersound will be spatially distributed at individual stations and throughout the wider tube network. I can add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls, and I can download tracks on the platforms. Architectural configuration of the stations affects my experience of contributing and downloading music as the proximal nature of the interaction with these situated points require s myself and other undersound users to congregate at certain locations within the station for the purpose of interacting with the system.
Each track in the undersound system will be tagged with its place of origin (the station where it was uploaded) and this information is visible as the track is being played. This may trigger memories and musings around my personal relationship to that place. Is there also a correlation between the flow of people around the tube network and the flow of music tracks around the undersound network? What might a sense of place for these digital artefacts be? Do they care about geographical location too or might their sense of place revolve around the quality and type of network and the technological devices they pass through?
While in the carriages of the tube, I can browse undersound music of other people in range. Because the system will be gathering metadata on the stations where the track has been (via uploading/downloading at the transfer points) and thus its spread within the network, the time it has been in the system, the number of times it has been played, the number of people who have played it, and so on, I will be able to see this information when I look at other people's music. I can browse through other's tracks anonymously, but if I decide to download a song from someone else an alert will be triggered on their phone letting them know that I am grabbing one of their tracks.
In this way, I cannot take a track from another passenger without them knowing—there is a social cost. It is possible for them to ignore the act altogether, but in keeping with much of the tacit interaction which tube riders engage in, we hope that this will provide an acceptable social opportunity to connect with another person. This sharing of music would not violate current social practices and would ideally afford new ones.
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