locus sonus > Locustream Soundmap.en

Locustream SoundMap (2006/...)

At one point it seemed necessary to provide the "streamers" (as we have come to call the musicians and artists who've responded to our call) with the possibility to access the streams themselves, not only to hear their own stream but also those provided by other people. So we made this animated map which shows the location of all the streams and indicates those which are currently active with a blinking light. By clicking on a chosen location one can directly listen to the OGG Vorbis stream in a browser.

Community of streamers. Another interesting development arising from the fact that we are involving other people to set up the microphones is that we have found ourselves with a network of people - artists, musicians and researchers, who are inherently interested by networked audio. This has led to use of the streams for art forms, outside of the lab itself (SARC in Belfast, Cedric Maridet in Hong-Kong, etc.).
Much of our research concerns the emergence of listening practices which are based on the permanence, the non spectacular or non event based quality of the streams. We have found ourselves creating a sort of variation on Cageian (as in John Cage) listening, importing a remote acoustic environment in a way which can be chosen by the user, creates a renewed concentration on the local environment itself.
This has led us to reflect on a form which adopts a permanent or semi permanent situation to present the streams publicly, and which involves a relationship between the local and the remote environment.
(We're continuously working on updated versions of the SoundMap)

Collaborations :

Réseaux : Creacast, ENSA Villa Arson Nice, nujus.net NYC, The Thing Inc. NYC, Google Maps

Développements : Stéphane Cousot (PHP, mySQL), Jean-Louis Paquelin (serveurs), Gilles Misslin (Creacast)