ROADMUSIC

Generative music for the drive

with Peter Sinclair

GMEM - centre national de création musicale commissioned me in February 2013 a musical piece for Peter Sinclair’s RoadMusic Project. It consists of a small embedded device which hosts several sensors, a camera, a sound output and the Pure Data Music System.

The exhibition took place in February 2013 in the city center of Marseille. It was though a “very” urban drive in the well known traffic density of the city. I was, for the piece, particularly inspired by the toughness of the city and electrical tension the journey could arouses. Like probing the dense electromagnetic field, also some sound junk in the car virtually moved by physical model connected to the accelerometer. The camera was used to detect the white dashed line on the middle and the side of the road and to modulate a filtered high pitch white noise. One particular instrument is a kind of synthesized bell sound act as a “campanile” in an old fashioned way.

I was also involved in helping Peter “cooking” the raw data from sensors. Especially detecting specific events in the drive like breaking, turning, accelerating, and also getting some macro level statistics.