Some notes towards a project I’d like to do. I think turning our paths through the world into collaborative auditory maps would be a wonderful thing.

Exploring links between music and mathematics in a networked mobile system

This project would develop software capable of analysing the positions of a group of learners relative to each other and streaming music generated computationally using the qualities of the group’s shape back to each learner, allowing members of the group to receive auditory feedback on the shape of the group, and to manipulate the audio stream through positioning their bodies differently in space.

For example, five learners, each with a mobile device capable of broadcasting its location (through GPS, network triangulation or similar), might be the vertices of a five-sided polygon, as imagined from above. Qualities of this shape – the interior angles, the length of the sides, the regularity of the shape, the surface area it covers, the length of time the shape has persisted – could map to musical features – dynamics, frequency range, degree of polyphony, range of instruments, different thematic material, degree of harmony – that could be used by software in generating a musical response.

The software would be designed to enable the precise nature of the correspondence between geometric quality and musical feature to be set by users themselves, allowing learners and teachers to explore the connections between the shapes made in space and the ways they can be analysed to an appropriate degree of complexity, and to represent the relationships between shape and harmony in the way they feel is most appropriate. Regular shapes might lead to more harmonious music; shapes sustained for a longer period might be louder than those that persist only briefly; serendipitous figures might be rewarded with specially-chosen vocal samples; learners might be guided towards target shapes through more attractive or moving musical forms; basic musical rules might be used to chart the stochastic movements of students travelling home, producing auditory geographies of familiar territories: a school song might be written by the movements of a victorious sports team during their final match.

The pedagogic value of this system might lie primarily in the capacity for supporting cross-curricular exploration, the participatory design of learning activities by learners themselves and the opportunities it presents for learning across age groups, with more able or older students preparing geo-acoustic systems for younger students to experience, or technologically more fluent students realising other students’ ideas about the relationships between shape and music.

Additionally, from a research perspective, the embodied nature of learners’ interactions within the geo-acoustic system is modally distinct from more usual forms of interaction with these subjects and presents an interesting and novel set of questions around the ways in which intellectual understanding relates to physical bodies, as well as being an opportunity to foreground current issues in education debates, not least perhaps the opportunity to explore more rigorously popular notions of “kinaesthetic intelligence” and to promote physical activity within an educational context. The nature of the activities designed by teachers and learners might well resonate with current interest in the potential educational value of pervasive and augmented reality gaming.

Despite this interdisciplinary focus, there are a number of traditional subject areas addressed in the development and use of such software. The following list is indicative rather than comprehensive.

• Geometry — understanding the ways in which practical geometry abstracts shape from the physical world and the language mathematicians use to describe geometric shapes and relationships
• Acoustic theory — models of synthesis, tone and timbre
• Music — composition, generative approaches to music creation, music theory
• Computer science — understanding networks, representing and manipulating variables using programming languages
• Psychology of perception — making sense of the world through auditory cues, proprioception and mental schemata
• History of science — Pythogarean notions of order and harmony, and how far these relate to current ideas about the way we understand the natural world to be ordered

Additionally, exploring the possible activities that this software might support could lead to explorations of the ways in which information can be presented through sound (sonification) and the various groups in society who might find this approach to sharing information about their environment beneficial, as well as supporting conversations about sound design in media, noise pollution, the ethics of location-aware software and the ways in which people’s individual actions contribute to larger effects.

Just listening to the Today programme, with one of the shrill Humphreys fangirls interviewing Andy Burnham about advice given to people regarding swine flu. The swaggering media demand that the world be either one thing or the other, true or false, yes or no, fits badly with the nature of probability and risk, forcing the politician to make claims that cannot be true because they deny chance. I was left with the impression that if we all wash our hands no-one will get sick, and that if I do they will drag Mr Burnham back on to demand that he accepts responsibility for the actions of the virus.

This is just a reminder to myself to consider how we deal with probability and risk in a national conversation that refuses to acknowledge chance without responsibility: the things Beck talks about in his risk society work, but also the impossibility of talking about and accepting outcomes in which people are seen to suffer.

She also seemed to think that men tell their womenfolk whether or not they can go to work, but that is probably a separate post.

I’m trying out Chrome for a bit, and liking it enough to get over my dislike of using products from the Man: it’s clean and fast, and seems to do everything I ask it well. It’s like a web butler. But one of the things I’ve noticed about it is that its default homepage is changing the way I browse.

Like Opera, the homepage has nine slots in it, for screenshots of pages you find useful so you can click on them and get going. I like it in Opera, and thought quite hard about which sites I wanted to include (mail and twitter, obviously, and this blog, and work webmail, and a couple of other things). But in Chrome I don’t think I have that choice: it looks at my history and decides which ones I like most.

And as a result I’ve noticed that I spend less time on trivial or just plain uncool sites, in case someone sees my homepage and thinks that what I like. I’m sure that over time my “most visited” will be a genuine reflection of the sites that are most useful to me. But in the meantime, I’m a bit disturbed to find how easily I regulate my behaviour if I think other people will see it.

(Do you know what, I just saw this post again for the first time since I posted it, and I’m sorry to say my first thought was that the author should count themselves lucky anyone wants to follow them at all. How prissy and uptight! Dear oh dear. Still, I can’t think of any other way of saying it. Never mind.)

If you ask to see my updates on Twitter, and I don’t know you as a friend in real life yet, then I probably won’t approve your request. It’s nothing personal. I’m sure you’re really nice. But for me Twitter has always been about friends I know, not work or celebrity stalking or accumulating vast numbers of webfriends or selling magazines. And I’m not making the mistake I did with other social networks, where I let other people dictate how I used them.

Also, I reserve the right to break that rule and to apply it inconsistently.

Also, this article describing Twitter as your house is a good read.

I met a spiritualist tonight. We were in a busy pub, camping a table, and he sat down as we did: of course, at the time he was just a person we didn’t know. Later, though, we got talking, and it turned out he’d come down from Ayrshire, via the Wirral, to join around 500 people, in a place I’ve been impolite enough to forget, in order to watch a noted mediun — “you’ve not heard of him?”: no, nor remembered his name a few hours later — and, hopefully, hear from his mother, dead these past eight years; he and his mother were close, he said, holding up his crossed fingers. When there’s someone ready to speak from the other side, there’s a kind of light bulb appears above their head: the people speaking don’t get older or change their views because time doesn’t really mean the same thing on the other side.. On his wrist he wore a copper bracelet with a Greek repeating design, to help his arthritis.

He impressed me, this man who believed things I’m used to hearing mocked, and although I didn’t feel impelled to join him, nor alter my belief that harking after people who have left isn’t healthy, for them or you, I still couldn’t articulate my own beliefs with a confidence equal to his: when asked if I believe in eternity, I could only muster a mealy-mouthed sophistry to the effect that I believed in infinity. I was impressed not by his ontological views but by his lack of evangelical zeal, and his quiet but firm belief in the importance of being master of your own mind and subject to no group’s insistence on a particular way of thinking. “I believe in freedom of mind”, he said, and so, I thought, do I, but only one of us has the courage to test it.

Of course, freedom of mind is a flag under which a motley crew might fly, and I excused myself once he began to explain that Darwin was wrong, not wanting to hear anything which might temper my fine opinion of his polite and cogent way of talking. But he lacked the shine and sparkle of the zealot: his grey hair was neat but not strict, his manner assured, his whole demeanour lacking the excessive normality of someone trying to convert. I don’t know what he’ll experience tomorrow, but if he hears that his mum’s doing ok, then I don’t see how that can be censured, and I hope he hears she’s well.

Earlier today I met a man who has venture capital for colonising the moon. My references may be a little adrift.