miniature for mobiles app

it took me years to push this "new" app. no idea why. maybe it is because it became worse than expected (not the app...;), but how people use smartphones etc., it's sometimes stupid and ridiculous, why would I support that? however, the miniatures for mobiles is still a great platform, one of a few which enable you to make sound pieces for public space easily. anyway, today I have pushed the well aged iphone app to the store, let's see how long it takes until it's available...
IOS app (ifon, ipad), Android app

check the radio aporee ::: miniatures for mobiles

95% done...

and it never will be 100%... but here we go!!!

renovation...

after years of hesitation and procrastination... I've started to renovate the radio aporee ::: maps. design (well...), code, databases, everything will be touched. hope to have most of it done by end of the year. stay tuned...

radio aporee ::: ping ensemble

Some notes about a new idea, which potentially can make it into a grown-up project. If you follow the sparse posts here, you know that I have a strong interest in radio, and its possibilities when connected to / exchanging with networks... It's crucial for collaborative in-time adhoc spontaneous etc.pp. (...) radio creation, that the INTERFACE is simple and reliable. Even streaming apps, which are not very complicated to use, once set up, can cause quite some problems and show-stoppers. It needs care-taking and control while operating, aside from additional apps, howtos, manuals, accounts etc.

I've not been actively on any social network so far (don't consider the daily auto-tweeting of new contributions to radio aporee as participation...). BUT now I have created a Telegram account... and a Telegram BOT, which lives on the aporee server. And a group called ping ensemble with already a few members, friends and colleagues. What is it about?

Telegram

ping ensemble circuit and control interface

Basically, it's a bridge from the Telegram messenger to the aporee ecosystem. Means one can send voice messages and sound files directly from that messenger to radio aporee, where it gets played almost instantly (or whatever modes I'll come up with...) Since people are quite used to this sort of interface, it's the most easy way I can imagine, to get sounds from whatever site and situation into radio aporee. We already had a quick test session of the ping ensemble, to test the reliability of the server side, but in fact it was quite a nice radio piece, a bit eclectic and arbitrary, but interesting. Some 50 sound telegrams arrived within a short time, here and there merging with the field recording on radio aporee.

Is it now a "social radio"? ... I don't care. But I do care about the great possibilities which this tool opens. Shared, distributed, locative, readings, meetings, performances, documentary, sound art... Stay tuned for more...

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.

mobile streaming continued

a bit of tech info today...

while the raspberry PI (see older posts below) is a nice, rather inexpensive and portable solution for mobile radio streaming, it has shown some problems during daily use. first, it sometimes crashes for no obvious reason, leaving the system in a unusable state. may have been a problem of the SD-card in use, not sure. anyway, it's good to backup a working configuration and have a second card at hand, otherwise the session may be over. second, since it has no display or keyboard, and has to be controlled from a phone app over the internet, it can be quite confusing because of drops and delays, depending on the available network. I think a PI based setup is fine for semi-/stationary audio broadcasts, but for true mobile performances, something else is needed.

so, I've digged into the matter a bit deeper, and this is the best option I've found so far:

studio in a pocket

it's a used iphone 4s, a tascam IXJ2 preamp, and a pair of DIY microphones based on Primo EM172 capsules. the koalaSan streaming app has proven to work stable and reliable. the whole thing can be controlled from the phone's browser, with the radio aporee web app.

metada editor for live sessions

control streaming from html5 web app

since a while, i'm using it often for short live sessions on radio aporee. I'm quite pleased with the results and overall handling. the connection between phone and preamp is a bit fragile, maybe it'd be better to use a cable or fix it with something.

if you like, you can always find a log of some of the most recent sessions at archive.org.

anyway, now that some of the tech problems are adressed, i'll try to concentrate on what all this is meant for. new radio... stay tuned...

walking in split electro-acoustic realities

Electrical Walks by Christina Kubisch is a work in progress. It is a public walk with special, sensitive wireless headphones by which the acoustic qualities of aboveground and underground electromagnetic fields become audible.

electrical walk (photo by Patrick McGinley)

During the Audiograft Festival, Felicity Ford and I have performed a walk through both the acoustic and electromagnetic realities of Oxford Brooks campus. The signals from Christina's headphones were mixing with the sounds from a microphone, and broadcasted live on  radio aporee. It was quite interesting to see if and how our expectations of the hidden electromagnetic/sonic field correlated with the actual site and its audible environment.

Here's a log of our walk, including all glitches, noise, clipping, network drops and stream fallbacks etc., which naturally belongs to the acoustic patina of radio aporee live performances...


electrical walk part 1


electrical walk part2

audiograft festival Oxford 12-23 March 2014

 I've been at the audiograft festival in Oxford, continuing with my experiments on localized radio, performative broadcasting and affective geographies. During the festival days, i've performed walks, attended meetings and approached situations. This happened more or less spontaneously, so people could tune in to radio aporee at any time to follow the audiograft activities. Many of these sessions have been documented on archive.org, see audiograft live session recordings

broadcast from an audioHEARth event at an Oxford pub

broadcast from an audioHEARth event at an Oxford pub


The following two are from the nice Oxford City Market at early afternoon, which i've visited together with Patrick McGinley. Felicity Ford joined us later.






Oxford City market part 1


Oxford City market part 2

radio aporee ::: Marrakesh broadcasts

Marrakesh Souk

Today I've made a series of soundwalks through the Souks (markets) in the Medina of Marrakesh. Some of theses places and encounters I've shared live with listeners on radio aporee while walking, or resting in the shadow. Here are some sonic logs of today's promenades radiophonique (beware, there are glitches and dropouts of all sort in the recorded audio. That's because of the instable media I'm using, live streaming over more or less reliable mobile networks and the like. To expect and not  problem at all. Also, these recordings are made with the radio aporee stream recorder directly to archive.org, without any editing etc.):



Cafe Laksour, noisy street ambience


at the edge of Jemaa El Fna square


walk over Jemaa El Fna square


Medina, somewhere lost in the Souks


Medina, in the Souks, Qu'ran radio

trading urban stories - سوق حكايات المدينة

radio aporee is invited by Berlin based artists Berit Schuck and Julia Tieke, to collaborate on a 12h experimental radio program during the Marrakesh Biennale.


"Trading Urban Stories" reloads and combines "A Sonic Map of Alexandria containing twenty audio pieces about the Egyptian metropolis by the sea with"Here an Now. Voices of Marrakech", a radio happening inside and around the Old City of Marrakech.

Curators: Berit Schuck and Julia Tieke

Artists: Anna Raimondo, Burak Arikan, C-drík, Doudy Brocolis Widdy, Ennajraoui Noureddine, Greta Tiedje, Lisa Tiedje, Ghassan Waïl, Hassan Hajjaj, Kamal Laftimi, Jalal El Allouli, Radio Papesse, Udo Noll, residents of  the Medina of Marrakech and special guests

Tune in to nessradio tomorrow, Feb.27, at noon

mobile live audio streaming with a Raspberry PI

From time to time i get obsessed with non-stationary audio streaming, esp. in the context of the radio aporee continuous stream. As you may know, this station plays random selections of the 20000+ recordings from the aporee soundmap, but also reacts and interferes with listeners, activities in the field and a couple of live microphones from the locusonus project.

The broadcast box is one of the experimental tools to engage with sound in public space, it directly hooks onto the current broadcast and allows to play inbetween places, situations and archive recordings, right where you are at the moment. However, it's quite a bulky bunch of gear to carry around.

This setup is he latest of my experiments in that field. The unit left is a Raspberry PI, a little 40€ pocket size computer running Linux, connected to a USB battery which lasts for a day, and an Olympus LS5 recorder connected to the PI via USB. The stick attached to the PI is an UMTS/3G modem for mobile Internet access.

In short, this assembly is a complete mobile radio broadcast unit, which allows to send live sound in crispy stereo to radio aporee (or elsewhere), on-the-go. Of course, without a network the whole thing is pretty useless...

I still have to do some elaborated tests, and have to improve reliability, but the concept already seems very promising. If you are interested in tech details, let me know. tbc.

edit Sat. Nov. 2nd :

today i did a short test while washing my stuff in the laundry at Ohlauer Str, Berlin Kreuzberg. it worked pretty well it seems, got some feedback from listeners. with the stream2archive recorder on aporee.org i made two 15min. snapshots of "the show":

laundry, Berlin Kreuzberg, part 1:

laundry, Berlin Kreuzberg, part 2:

A100 - construction work progress

see also this previous post, and the sound map of the A100 area

The construction work for the A100 motorway in Berlin continues. A few month ago, in the area around Kiefholzstr., Berlin, many of the abandoned allotment garden houses have been squatted by homeless Sinti and Roma families, not totally sure about this though. They made a sort of living from collecting and selling metal scrap found in this area, kids were playing in the waste lands between the train tracks and the remaining allotments.

Here's a recording of that area, from this summer. A woman is washing, kids are playing in the green. see also radio aporee ::: maps - allotment, Mergenthalerring, Neukölln, Berlin


6 weeks later, August 17, 2013, the houses have been demolished

only the sound of the mobile concrete factory can he heard


October 11, 2013, construction work continues

the sound of the excavator, echoing in the landscape

Tuned City Brussels 2013 - bx in action

fmwalks/bx was the title of a series of sonic interventions in the city of Brussels, during the Tuned City festival. It was also a proof of concept, of how the system can be applied to places, what forms and formats would be possible and challenging. It turned out to be useful to have a wireless microfone available. People picked up the wireless for browsing around, into the nearby area, so I could mix the soundscape around the bx with the details and findings of their walking performance, along with other intersections with the radio aporee ::: maps etc. All walks and interventions were live broadcasted on the radio aporee ::: stream and occasionally into the FM space. By using a sort of virtual recorder on aporee, i could record and archive some of these sessions by simply touching a button on my mobile phone. Listen to some of the sonic traces on archive.org

preparing the bx at QO2. photo by Carsten Stabenow

 

Brussels, Botanique, spontaneous interferences with Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks

Botanique, airwaves

Parvais de Saint Gilles, Saturday market walks

city places - radio spaces ::: Chausée de Waterloo, Galerie Rivoli

Haren, finally some sun, charging the box (photo by C.Stabenow)

radio aporee ::: Tuned City Brussels 2013

Over recent years, and thanks to a broad community of artists, phonographers and individuals working with sound and field recording, the radio aporee ecosystem has collected and developed both an extensive body of sound as well as tools for artistic practices and research in the field.
In addition to aspects of collecting, archiving and sound-mapping, the radio aporee platform also invokes experiments at the boundaries of different media, and public space. Within this notion, radio is both a technology in transition and a narrative. It constitutes a field whose qualities are connectivity, contiguity and exchange. Within this, concepts of transmitter/receiver and performer/listener may become transparent and reversible.

During Tuned City Brussels, I will accompany the course of the festival with the experimental radio device bx (bROADCAST BOx), a hybrid assembly of tools and techniques for entering and exploring different media spaces more or less simultaneously. The bx is an advancement of the previous concept of fmwalks, a setup combining performative city walks and mobile FM transmitting. It creates a link between the radio aporee soundmap of Brussels, recent recordings from actual city surroundings and live activities at various festival venues. It delivers a daily sound stream in between documentation and artistic radio practice, embedded into the city’s urban atmospheres.

According to its notion of an interface, fmwalks/bx is open for participation. It encourages engagement and collaboration with the other Tuned City projects and artists. During festival hours, transmissions can be received on http://radio.aporee.org.

If you are interested in collaboration during the festival (26-30 June) – please register!