PLACE: Howe Hall Auditorium

SPEAKER:
Mark Hansen
Bell Laboratories
 

TITLE:
Experiencing Information Systems Through Sound
 

ABSTRACT:

As part of its long-standing interest in breaking down the boundaries separating disciplinary genres, the Brooklyn Academy of Music developed a year-long artist-in-residency program in conjunction with Lucent Technologies. The Arts in Multimedia (AIM) project paired artists working in new media and communications technology with scientists at Bell Laboratories. In 2000, sound artist Ben Rubin (EAR Studio, New York City) and I received an AIM award for our proposal entitled "Ear to the Ground" (ETG). As a collaboration between a statistician and an artist, we are looking to create sound representations that further the arts of data analysis, discovery, and expression. We plan to establish a series of listening posts, points in the physical world or on the Web, where people can engage large, often abstract data streams, bringing an awareness and understanding of these data to the general public. By creating these installations, we also hope to establish general principles for the public display of complex data.

ETG's first listening post provided a sonification of the traffic on a Web site. The richness of this representation is controlled by the number of visitors accessing detailed content  (Web pages or other documents). The presence of each active visitor contributes to the loudness and tonal balance of a low-register drone. Each major section of the Web site is assigned a different pitch, the relative volume of which is increased as more visitors browse content from that area. Requests for more informative content deep in the site are represented as higher-pitched pulsing tones: the faster the pulses, the more people are accessing that area, and the higher the pitch, the more detailed the content.  See Hansen and Rubin (2000) and Hansen and Rubin (2001) for more information.

ETG's second project titled "Listening Post" focuses on answering the question "What does the collective voice of the Internet sound like"  Countless others are with you when you browse the Web, some reading the same words at the same time, and yet you have no way of sensing their presence.  Listening Post gives voice to this vast, silent world, transforming collective online activity and communication into a multi-layered sound installation. At the center of this uniquely designed space is a large array of vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) that flash samples from tens of thousands of online exchanges in real time, revealing the patterns and rhythms of people communicating with each other. The technical challenges implied here are considerable; from scalable monitoring agents that continually cull new content on the Web and update various measures of activity, to statistical natural language processing and dynamic clustering schemes that allow us to track topics and extract representative phrases.

Listening Post will be installed as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2001 Next Wave Festival and will be open to the public from December 6 -- 16, 2001.  Additional funding for this piece has been supplied by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
 
 

COFFEE: 3:45 p.m., 104 Snedecor Hall