OUR PLANET IS SINGING ITSELF ::: The Web can be our Ears.
Our planet is singing itself, as we speak, at this moment the sound as heard outside our orbit is strange and cacophanous.
Audio is perhaps the most powerful navigational tool available to us. It is at once vastly imaginal, highly evocative, abstract and very specific.
The WORLDSONG PROJECT is designed to create a coherant matrix of audio, so that we can hear and navigate the informational world, using the multitude of audio cues that are already available to us.
WORLDSONG is a collaboration to develop world-wide audio navigation for the Internet. Beyond the current "hit and play" audio associated with Netscape, AOL and other browsers, or even the background ambience or broadcast-byte work being done with RealAudio, WORLDSONG is designed for surfers to "hear" the sounds of our planet and use them to navigate the Web. This aural travel through our planet's realtime symphony can create deep feelings of global continuity and exploration, all from an individual workstation anywhere on the Web.
WORLDSONG will eventually include conference spaces such as SOLACE (Sacred On-Line Active Communal Environment) with real-time spatio-located audio for business, meditation or entertainment.
T_Vision (ART+COM, Berlin) is an earth visualisation project. It provides a virtual globe as a multimedia interface to visualize any kind of data related to a geographic region. The virtual globe is modelled from high resolution spatial data and textured with high resolution satelite images.
T_Vision represents a prototypical visual interface for the type of navigation we are envisioning. Our audio plug-in is designed to function in conjunction with a T-Vision-type browser. This satellite based model will call on servers worldwide to spool the updated audio and visual materials.
WORLDSONG creates a protocol for audiofile types and sizes which music studios and individual users can follow for participation in the project. The stratafied classes of sound allow the software to comingle, crossfade or mix the various sound bytes. Should a navigator wish to explore one sound further, they may gesture and the source will be traced allowing access to the full audio file, its origins, history, creator, neighborhood and download-ability.
As we integrate Worldsong with VRML 2.0 and JAVA, these monophonic sound bytes will be spatialized in real time allowing visceral fly-throughs of cyberspace. The navigational aspects really come into play as T-Vision is translated into VRML 2.0 and the three dimensional planet is combined with its (now spatialized) audio counterparts.
Here is a description of the relationship between the audio and visual material.
Visual Strata *** Audio Strata
Astral (full earth view) *** Music of the Spheres
Ethereal (cloud view) *** Global Trance
Country View *** FM transmission
Region View *** Indigenous Music
Urban View *** Local Sound FX: present/historical
Hood View *** Open Site Microphone
Individual View *** Human Voice