I’m in Charles de Gaulle airport, outside Paris, and nearly home. Of all the security lines I’ve been through in the past few months, the Parisians have shown the greatest genius for combining a surly inattention with a peculiarly insular and unwelcoming aggression. Not for them the earnest pomposity of the Americans, the breezy efficiency of the Dutch or the free sweets of the Singaporeans – they are wise enough to stick to what they know and love, a paradoxical ability to simutaneously ignore and patronise, and they share their gift freely.

So I’m taking my mind off where I am now by thinking about where I’ve just been, Singapore. It’s a couple of years since I spent any time there and it was interesting for me to see what’s stayed the same and what’s changed. I saw more adverts for tourism to Macau, Taiwan and Korea, a reflection I guess of the relatively strong Singapore dollar, though perhaps also echoing what seemed to be a renewed focus on its Eastern neighbours by Singapore, in contrast to the pro-Americanism I saw last time. Some of the coffeeshops I remembered are still there: some of the malls I shopped in have vanished entirely. I didn’t dare go back to Little India, my previous neighbourhood: I imagine it looks much like Spitalfields does now, another area I lived in briefly that was reckoned worth cleaning up.

But the most noticeable change for me was the height. There are hundreds of new condos, and all of them seem many storeys taller than the towers I was used to. The flagship developments that were under construction as I left are finished now, and look squat and quaint below their newer neighbours. Old sightlines are gone, old landmarks obscured by new balconies, and the skyline has changed completely. I was staying in Tiong Bahru: walking around the two-storey blocks of the 1930s estate you are always overlooked by a series of immense structures (the Capital Tower, the new Pinnacle@Duxton HDB flats), and it’s hard not to think that the estate isn’t so much a conservation area as a modern reservation. Though of course some of the architects of these new buildings, and the even more spectacular ones yet to be built (the Singapore Scotts Road Towers, the Interlace residential complex), live in the estate. Singapore is too small to have the kind of disconnnect between planners and dwellers that we might be more used to in the UK.

So Singapore definitely seems taller. But lots more of it seems to be underground as well. There are new connectors between Wheelock Place and Orchard MRT, a new subway between City Mall and Suntec, three new floors of shops below ground in Ion mall. Rather than reclaiming land horizontally, from the sea, and eventually from Indonesia and Malayasia, Singapore seems to be reclaiming it vertically. No new territory, as far as the map is concerned: instead, they’re using engineering to overcome the physical resistances of densely-packed earth and thin, unsupportive air to fit more people (and businesses, and advertising) in the area they already have, in the same way that engineering and ambition enabled them to reclaim vast areas of land from the sea. It must be easier than facing the political resistances that limit horizontal expansion. Or perhaps it’s a way of overcoming them: tunnels between malls in Johor Bahru and Woodlands must surely already be on a planner’s laptop somewhere.

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.

On Sunday I got myself down to the Arnolfini for Interesting Sounds, an event that grew out of Russell Davies’ Interesting events. I couldn’t stay for the whole day, unfortunately, but what I saw was fantastic. Adam Harding showed us his reconfigured guitar, moving the essential parts into a rectangular board that can be played like a dulcimer: the distancing effect of changing the relationship between player and instrument suited his delicate abstractions. Jon Pigott showed us the Sonic Marble Run (see video below).

Grace showed us a video of the Dynion Dance Group dancing on Swansea’s Sail Bridge, choreographed by Paul Granjon. Matthew Olden demoed the latest version of Jungulator. Allen Argent showed us more MaxMSP madness, with a set of patches enabling collaboration and control across networks (my favourite was Netverb, which added reverberation effects computed from the shape of the network: echoes from a virtual room whose walls are made out of TCP/IP packets). We saw John Wild’s Sounds from the Perimeter Fence, recontextualising the site of the Olympics: gorgeous, bleak sounds, as you can see below.

I talked a little bit about an idea I had for making it nicer to be outside in cities:

- it’s all a bit jumbled at the moment, but I’d like to try making an antibeep and see if it works. I tried to make one using two Buddha machines, but it didn’t really work.

And then I just had time to see David Hanford’s Sound Chair (a thirties chair with speakers in the back and base and controls on the arm like a supervillain, intended for the subsonics produced from the beats of two analogue oscillators) and Tom Bugs demoing his analogue intricacies, it was lunchtime and time for me to go home.

I missed most of the rest of the day, but I think video and audio from the day will be up at http://www.interestingsounds.com/ soon. Can’t wait for the next one.

The title is bigger than this thought: just want to get it down before it flies away. We can, with our location-aware devices and our addressable objects and our ambient interactions and our wireless connections and radio flying around everywhere, rid ourselves of screens and touchpads and styli and become the pointer ourselves. We can play the city with our bodies the way we can play a theremin with our hands: by being in this place and not that one.

When I was in Singapore working with the Zoo using mediascapes, I had a dream of marking out a giant touchscreen interface, with a start button and menus and buttons, on a football field, and using the software to let people become the mouse pointer, opening files by running across real space and clicking buttons by jumping on them (accelerometers in pockets).

I’ve been talking to various people about a game, Resonance, that involves arranging yourself in shapes with other people and casting spells using your bodies as glyphs on the nodes of the pentagram, weaving superstition and magic and the occult together through space and concrete. They’re not talking about exactly the same thing, of course, but Dan Hill and Matt Jones are lumped together by Bruce Sterling as being heralds of a new pervasive urban alchemy, an open sorcery revealed through lumps of plastic and metal. I’m encouraged by the sympathy between Resonance and their more thoughtful perspectives, but I kind of still wish I was the only person making Kircherian links between these technologies and older ways of knowing the invisible. I am rubbish at sharing.