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.

…dear boy, events. Lying about the future into the tannoy of the Arnolfini; running around Bristol chasing a giant ball around an infinite pitch (and making my debut as a commentator for Korean Lazer Ball); watching Quantic’s new film and seeing him trainspot records afterwards; meeting lots of local authority people who were really keen to think about the future; sorting out my dissertation and getting started finally. Lots of other things.

Right now I’ve just booked a place in the airport car park (am off to the coast near Málaga for a few days) and I’m transferring Tito Paris to my phone for the flight. One bid for something interesting to get off in the morning, and I’m done for this week. And when I get back I should talk about some of these things in a bit more detail.

I’ll probably start with the Ghosts of Birthdays Present, though. If you’re in Bristol over the next couple of weeks and fancy helping out some of those marooned in the hereafter, let me know in the comments.

Spoke at geeKyoto yesterday: had a wonderful time and left feeling energised and inspired. Lots of different things to think about, a few changes I want to make to the way I live, and (hopefully) the start of some really interesting conversations: there were some really bright and talented people I felt privileged to be around. Full marks to messrs. Simpkins and Hammersley – thank you both!

I’ve got longer notes from the day that I need to digest before I put up here: broad themes that seem to stand out right now are a faith in the power of making the invisible visible (so a lot of talk about data visualisation and open data), the importance of community in effecting social change and a refreshing lack of faith in technological fixes that are unsupported by changes in behaviour. Two things that seemed to arise from a lot of people’s talks that I need to think more about: all the failures that people described (in regulating emissions, or in delivering aid or technology) seemed to be more about management and process than technology or access to data, despite this last point being a central article of faith for the conference, and I wonder if that might be a more productive (though more boring, perhaps) thing to think about. And the second was this idea of “community” – it seems to come loaded with a set of ideas about the sort of people in the community, that they’re nice people like us, whereas of course plenty of revolting people form communities as well. Minor point, really.

Anyway. My bit didn’t make anyone leave, which is my usual measure of success, but I think there were a few points that I might have offered people in a more structured and articulate way. It was a good experience to speak to a different audience, though, having spent the last couple of years talking mainly to education conferences and policy types, and I’ve got a few points to consider for the next time I talk in front of people. Learning, learning, always learning. For what it’s worth, I’ve put my slides up here if you’re interested. And I was really pleased to discover, during a vanity google, a twitter survey on a question that Ben posed afterwards, from Jemimah Knight: really interesting responses, will have to give them a bit of a mull.

So. Notes to come on speakers and ideas but short version: it’s brilliant, go to the next one.

Bangkok,
originally uploaded by kokeshi.

I’m in another hotel, one that looks a lot like the other ones I’ve been in recently, where I had a drink in the bar downstairs, and listened to someone sing My Funny Valentine while I thought about someone a long way away, and I will be very disappointed if tomorrow I don’t have to film a Suntory commercial.

The drive from the airport was incredible, everything very brand new indeed, apart from the taxi touts whose only concession to their new environment seems to be a suit. The airport follows the kind of grey-steel-and-curved-glass-with-blue-highlights template that makes me think of Canary Wharf, although the curves follow a Thai line rather than a Waterloo-style bulge, making it quite distinctive. That, and the fifteen-foot high multicolored statues of figures from Thai myth that gaze down unsmilingly upon you before Immigration.

Between the city centre and the airport they’re building a “skytrain” extension, I think: they’ve got what looks like part of a trainline on a series of concrete pillars that follow the motorway, on the other side of the latticework advertising hoardings, rising high above the bungalow shops and bars that make infrequent splashes of light in the shadowy palms. At first, I thought the tiny, one-floor buildings were vestiges of the recent past managing somehow to continue in the shadow of the future, but then I realised, passing the grey concrete pillars that still lacked a trainline, that they’d decided to skip the future and go straight to building the past: in the ghostly light of the giant advertising hoardings, the pillars looked like ruins from a post-oil age; Roman witnesses to the Saxons busy beneath them, relics of an age where ambitious new transport links were necessary and laudable, instead of hubristic and doomed.

This trip also made me realise how much I love 3G: I had a moment of worry when I realised I hadn’t even thought about a visa: google in the departure lounge told me not to worry. And despite doing no research at all on any aspect of being in Thailand, by the time I stepped out of the car at the hotel I knew what the exchange rate was and which banks I could use. The best thing is, it didn’t occur to me that anything was unusual about this until a minute ago, when I imagined telling myself 5 years ago that not only would I own a phone, using it to access the internet thousands of miles from home wouldn’t even give me pause for thought. I love living in the future, even if some of it looks like relics already.

Futurelab have a blog: it’s called Flux, and it’ll be launching in the New Year, once we’ve had a play with it. There’s a panel of contributors, including people from outside Futurelab, so hopefully it’ll present a range of voices, all dealing with various issues around learning and technology.

It’ll be interesting to see how it feels when you’re one voice among many. For one thing, I have to think about what goes either side of my posts now. My first contribution, an intemperate and overlong rant about “digital natives”, comes just after Martin’s restrained condemnation of the decision to scale back Ultralab, and the two together do a good job of making us look a bit miserable. Will try and find some more positive things to put up there. And make my posts shorter.