WELT KLANG SPHÄRE / GLOBAL SOUND SPHERE

Kinetic light and sound installation, by Alexander Pospischil

In this extensive installation, various sounds from different locations around the world are selected, arranged, and brought to life through the unpredictable movements of a rolling sphere.

read more at the project's website.

app-free miniatures for mobiles?

Earlier this year, the radio aporee app was blocked on iTunes because I've missed to pay the developer fee, and on Google Play, because I've missed to confirm some longish changes in some terms of service. I'm not a fan of apps anyway, I tend to think web, networking and open standards... But this accidents made me angry. I'd love to escape both of these app-ecosystems, and leave app-stores etc. behind.

So, after this experience I've started to look into HTML5, whether it could replace the aporee app at all. The answer is yes and no... Web apps cannot access local storage beyond some (low) limits, which is bad since cost-saving WiFi syncronisation of sounds before a walk is not possible. Further, IOS safari does not autoplay sounds unless you install the URL as desktop app (didn't know before). IOS also prohibits volume control from programs. But has great HTML5 performance. On Android, all that works, but it sucks performance-wise, at least on older phones, older Androids, and whatever.

So I decided to find the lowest common denominator:

• pure online mode, i.e. all sounds will be loaded over the net
• no fade-in, fade-out, or crossfade, as implemented within the app, only off/on
• stripped down user interface with very few functions

This works, but fails when the network is slow, your phone is old, and for some unclear reasons. But I've made some walks in front of my door, which where promising, sounds loaded quickly over 3G, a few little delays didn't stop the show, GPS worked fine most of the time. After all, I'll decided to continue with the app-store-free web app for the miniatures.

Try it out at aporee.org/mfm/mobile and let me know if it works for you.

SELECT nearby miniatures

PLAY selected miniature while walking

non-geographic topographic maps

75x75 map, 100 learning epoches

On radio aporee, I'm researching the possibility to create non-geographical topographic maps out of the sounds and their meta data. Since it is impossible to create an exact 2-D image of n-dimensional data, we rather try to find tendencies, proximity and clusters of similarity. Distance implies difference, but nearness does not necessarily imply resemblance. Lines and structures between areas indicate divergence, like rivers and mountains separate nearby areas in real landscapes. How meaningful these maps can be depends on the pattern we choose for comparision. Read more...

distant readings

distant reading - excerpt of a spontaneous live session on radio aporee, by OR poiesis (Maribor, Slovenia) & unosonic (Berlin, Germany). Sounds and texts were not synchronized nor negotiated in advance, it's more or less a result of moods, atmosphere amd the very moment. to be continued. The track consists of 2 live sources (OR poiesis and I, from our respective locations) and a background from radio aporee's playlist. So it's actually a toposonic mix of 3 layers. Since we experience up to 30 sec of buffering, i.e. delay between the sending source and its audibility on the radio, it's quite difficult to perform just in time. Anyway, I'd say it works nice.

Ringo Cafe

Sanderstr., Berlin, April 2008,

The sea has passed, to plot is possible, given detachment and a careful angle, all destinations are predictable. And given too, the confidence of distance, strangers may take a hundred neural journeys [...] And even though, on any printed landscape, directions never tell you where to go, maps are an evening comfort to the traveller, a pencil line can quickly take him home.





Some places matter. When they go missing, threads and fragments of ephemeral interwoven biographies may tear away. Without: who knows what's hidden in this word? 

a quiet monday, 5.10.2009


public viewing, 20.9.2009


ventilation pipe, men's toilet, 22.11.2014


last coffee, familiar sounds, 22.11.2014

colabo radio aporee

Tonight, Tuesday August 12, from 7pm to 6am Berlin time, radio aporee is on air on
senderberlin.org FM 88.4 (Berlin) and 90.7 MHz (Potsdam),  and of course online on radio aporee.

As some already know, the permanent radio of radio aporee plays random selections of sounds from the global map -- unless listeners tune in. then a bunch of "agents" start working backstage, bringing back sounds from listener's locations, scanning open microphones (from the locusonus project and others), creating mixes based on text searches, phones calls etc. pp.
 In a way, this radio "listens" to its listeners, their activities, locations, various events, sensors, and so on. recently, "live" has become important, i.e. entering the more or less archive-based stream with ad-hoc performances, sonic interventions from daily situations, or just a few minutes of actual ambience. some are doing that for a few month now, see the log of some past sessions at archive.org (the radio has an archival function which can record a session to archive.org automatically).

although that all is unstable media, and highly experimental, it has proven to work quite nice. so, the idea in mind is a participative radio, created by and shared among interested persons and parties, in between live and archive, sites and situations. it's not about the usual forms and formats of radio production, rather the transient, ephemeral and unexpected. Tune in tonight and get an idea!

World Listening Day 2014

"Listen To You"

radio aporee participates in the 5th World Listening Day.
read more about the WLD at the World Listening Project's website

you are invited to participate, please send your audio recording to radio aporee, and help creating a sonic snapshot of the world, on July 18, 2014:

• you can upload to the radio aporee ::: maps (please tag your recording with WLD 2014 or similar) or directly to the WLD2014 project page on radio aporee (open for upload on July 18)
• please read the instructions on how to upload to the soundmap. let me know if you have problems.