SHEPARD, Mark

Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit

Given the ubiquity of mobile devices and wireless networks, and their proliferation throughout increasingly diverse and sometimes unexpected urban sites; what opportunitiesand dilemmas emerge for the design of public space in contemporary cities? Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] is an open source software platform for cultivating public sound gardens within contemporary cities. It draws on the culture of urban community gardening to posit a participatory environment where new spatial practices for social interaction within technologically mediated environments can be explored and evaluated. Addressing the impact of mobile audio devices like the iPod, the project examines gradations of privacy and publicity within contemporary public space. The TSG Toolkit enables anyone living within dense 802.11 wireless (WiFi) hot zones to install a sound garden for public use. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), participants plant sounds within a positional audio environment. These plantings are mapped onto the coordinates of a physical location by a 3D audio engine common to gaming environments overlaying a publicly constructed soundscape onto a specific urban space. Wearing headphones connected to a WiFi-enabled device, participants drift though virtual sound gardens planted by others as they move throughout the city. Sound and the City The sonic dimension of cities is relatively unexamined public terrain. Today, we mostly think about how noisy and disruptive cities are, and try to control their sound through legislation. Traffic, police sirens, car alarms left blaring by negligent owners, construction workers repairing a water main by wielding jackhammers at dawn, or elderly neighbors who are hard of hearing and listen to the television at high volumeeach in some way has been regulated by a code or environmental impact study (or occasionally by local intervention of other neighbors). At the same time, common everyday practices exist by which the sonic space of the city is occupied and negotiated. Hacking the sonic space of the

city is as old as the street performer, or as recent as the portable boom box, super-sized car stereo subwoofer or Mitzvah Tank. Ad-hoc performances entertain captive audiences in subway cars along a mornings commute, and a micro-economy develops. More recently, the use of mobile audio devices like the Walkman and its progeny the iPod offer alternate modes by which the aural experience of the city is augmented and managed via the prosthetic implantation of an earbud. Historically, theoretical work on the urban experience has focused predominately on the visual, where the urban subject is typically situated within theories of the gaze and the spectacle. While the critique of ocularcentrism is well documented, the auditory culture of cities is only elliptically considered. George Simmel, one of the major theorists of the modern metropolis to emerge in German philosophy and social science around the turn of the 20th century, states: The interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than that of the ears. This can be attributed to the institution of public conveyances. Before buses, railroads and trains became fully established during the 19th century, people were never in a position to have to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on 1 end without exchanging a word. Pointing to a common urban experience that emerged with the introduction of mass transportation to the city, Simmel places the visual over the aural as the dominant factor in shaping this experience. However, is this accurate? Sound functions quite differently than vision across the everyday life of the average urban dweller. We do not need to direct our attention to a sound source to hear it. If vision has a tendency to focus on objects, sound is far less tangible. Sound moves through us more physically than vision, which tends to operate through a more practiced sense of distance. As Andre Malraux noted: One hears the voice of others with the 2 ears, and ones own voice with the throat. Sound is both felt by the body and understood by the mind. It is pervasive in ways the visual is not. Sound is heard in a shared space, where every ear in range is impacted by the same sonic waves. Sound differs from vision in the

SHEPARD, Mark

TSG Concept Diagram, typical street corner installation, Mark Shepard

way relations are established between subject and object, and the placing and spacing of urban experience. It is a space where we cannot simply close our eyes. While our eyelids and neck enables us to avert our gaze (but not that of others), we resort to prosthetic implants like earplugs or earbuds to control what we hear. The relationship between sound and public interaction in the social and economic organization of the city is longstanding. The bell tower and muezzin in the mosques minaret are two examples. Marking time through soundand with that a call to action (to work, to prayer) these devices provided mercantile and religious bodies with tools for social habituation and control. Clock towers were especially important in European cities engaged in large-scale textile manufacture, for example, as they provided a uniform means of organizing the behavior of workers and citizens alike. In 14th century Brussels, there were different bells (werckclokes), sounding at different times, to signal the beginning and end of the work day for each group of spinners, weavers, twisters, tapestry 3 workers and whitesmiths. In contemporary Iraq, the muezzin has served not only to mark the Islamic calls to prayer, but also to broadcast messages organizing social resistance to an occupying power.

The modern metropolis brought a host of new sounds to the public environment. This city offered a markedly different soundtrack than that of pre-industrial cities. Louder and less controllable, this city is one from which Futurists like Luigi Russolo drew inspiration: Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, noise was born. Today, noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities 4 of men. John Cage framed this so-called noise in his silent work 433. Written in 1952, the composition temporally frames the ambient sounds surrounding a given performance (an airplane overhead, traffic sounds and involuntary sounds from the audience) through a silent composition in three movements. 433 was in part inspired by Cages visit to Harvards anechoic chamber, designed to eliminate all sound; but instead of the expected silence, Cage heard the pulsing of his blood and the whistling of his nerves. The year before, he had written his Imaginary Landscape # 4 for 24 performers, each of whom adjusted the volume or tuning of one of a dozen radios; although the dial settings were exactly

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emerging networks Network

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prescribed, the result depended upon the frequencies and formats of local stations. The political ecology of sound, silence and noise in the everyday experience of modern cities has also been a preoccupation of policy makers. Congress attempted to define a national noise policy with the passage of the Noise Control Act of 1972. The Act assigned to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the role of leading Federal agency with the task of coordinating the programs of all Federal agencies relating to noise research and noise control. Ten years later (1982), all funds for noise control were withdrawn from the EPA, and today the country is without an effective, overall noise policy. Residual responsibility for the control of environmental and occupational noise currently rests with a dozen agencies of the Federal government, as well as State, municipal, and local authorities. However, the

activities of these organizations are largely uncoordinated, and the enforcement of existing noise control regulations is at best sporadic, and in some cases nonexistent. iPod Nation With the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979, the politics of the aural dimension of public space migrated from that of centralized regulation via the bell tower, the muezzin and modern attempts at legislation, to a decentralized model based on portable, personal stereos providing localized audio environments for personal use. The Walkman provided a means to personalize the auditory experience of public space in the course of daily life. At the same time, these devices posed new questions regarding social protocol within public space. Sonys original design for the Walkman

TSG Client Interfaces

SHEPARD, Mark

included two headphone jacks and a bright orange talk button that would temporarily mute the sound coming from the player to enable conversation between people listening to it. Today, the iPod has replaced the Walkman as the device-du-jour, and its market penetration within urban environments has been noted. What is less frequently discussed is how the device and its use within urban contexts are spawning new spatial practices and social protocols within the course of everyday life. Offering a layer of privacy within public space, the iPod mitigates the cacophony of urban environments by enabling users to personalize their experience of public space with their own private soundtrack. In effect, the device becomes a tool for organizing space, time and the boundaries around the body in public space.

Wearing headphones in public not only provides a means to keep the world at bay, but also offers a degree of personal choice in creating the auditory experience of the city. On the bus, in the park at lunch, while shopping in the delithe city becomes a film for which you compose the soundtrack: Get on the bus going home. Im listening to Rap music. Thinking about the films Ive watched. Trying to find things in Goodfellas that Ive seen in other films. The journey is so long because of the traffic. I get so tense that I end up becoming a character from Goodfellas for fifteen minutes. I reach Our Price. Turn it off and its fine to get in 5 character.

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Donning a pair of earbuds also grants a certain amount of social license, enabling one to move through public space without necessarily getting too involved and absolving one from some responsibility to respond to what is happening around them. Some people use earphones to deflect unwanted attention, finding it easier to avoid responding because they look already occupied. Faced with two people on the sidewalk, we will ask the one without earbuds for directions to the nearest subway entrance. In the same way, removing headphones when talking to someone pays the speaker a compliment. Further, the phenomenon of playlist sharing highlights new forms of social interaction, something presaged by the original Walkmans design incorporating two headphone jacks. Sharing playlists provides an alternate mode by which the personal is communicated. The Flneur, The Situationist and The Smart Mob The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city lures the Flneur like a phantasmagora. In it, the city is now a landscape, now a room. Both, then, constitute the department store that puts even Flanerie to use for commodity circulation. The department store is the 6 Flneurs last practical joke. Alone in the crowd, at home in the crowd today we drive in the shopping mall. While it would be problematic to simply map iPodders onto historical models such as the Flneur or the Situationist for one thing, both are predominately concerned with the visual it may be constructive to revisit these two characters in light of broader questions regarding the inhabitation of public space in contemporary cities. If the Flneur presents a point of reference for a mobilized observer for whom the aestheticization of the urban is simultaneously a liberatory and alienating practice, the Situationist drive suggests a spatial practice for liberation from an alienating commodification of the city. Today, negotiating our daily lives in and through the city involves evermore-subtle maneuvers between the public and private, the virtual and actual. The placing and spacing of the urban experience is strewn across radically different environments. The gaze of the crowd has been replaced by that of the surveillance camera; the pyschogeographic attractions of the terrain have become a schizogeography of nodes and networks. At the same time, the crowd has become far more sophisticated in terms of its ability to organize, cooperate and mobilize. Howard Rheingold has described the emergence of smart mobs that use mobile communication and computing technologies toward the organized 7 occupation of public space. From the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, where autonomous but networked groups of demonstrators used swarm tactics, mobile phones, laptops and PDAs to win the battle of Seattle, to the overthrow of the Philippine government in 2001 via the

Proliferation of WiFi access points (from top): Chicago, New York, San Francisco, map data courtesy WiGLE.net http://www.WiGLE.net

SHEPARD, Mark

National map of WiFi access points, map data courtesy WiGLE.net http://www.WiGLE.net

mobilization of millions of demonstrators through the use of text messaging, the crowd today is empowered in ways previously unimaginable. Ubiquitous Computing and Locative Infrastructures The killer apps of tomorrows mobile infocom industry wont be hardware devices or software programs but social practices. The most far-reaching changes will come, as they often do, from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities and markets that the 8 infrastructure makes possible. If much of the late 20th century discourse surrounding public space and information networks emphasizes the production of a global, virtual, placeless space of flows, the ubiquity of mobile communications and wireless networks has revitalized an interest in placebased and locative information spaces. Untethered from a desktop computer hardwired to the Internet via a cable, people are more frequently interacting with (and through) mobile devices and wireless networks as they move throughout the city. On sidewalks, in lobbies, across parks and public squares, on busses, subways and commuter trains, the mobile citizen constantly negotiates between contingent desires, virtual information networks

and the infinitely variegated attractions of the terrain of the contemporary city. In these wirelessly interconnected environments, socalled location-based information services are becoming common. These services provide information customized for ones location in physical space. Examples include on-board navigation systems in automobiles, contextaware audio walking tours accessed via mobile phones, or electronic city guides that provide information to a handheld PDA detailing various attractions or amenities located within walking distance. These services all depend on some form of locative infrastructure that calculates the location of the mobile device in physical space and provides the service with coordinates by which to deliver geospatially-filtered information to the user. Locative infrastructures come in a variety flavors. Perhaps most sophisticated is the Global Positioning System (GPS), developed by the Department of Defense in 1994. This system determines location by measuring the time radio signals take to travel from satellite transmitters to ground-based receivers. By comparing at least four of these signals, location can be established within a few meters. Other systems have been developed for indoor locations where GPS and radio signals are blocked by the floors, walls and ceilings of buildings.

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The Cricket system, developed at the Media Lab at MIT, uses beacons emitting both radio and ultrasonic pulses to calculate location based on proximity to the nearest 9 beacon, which is in turn identified with a specific room. Intel Research in Seattle has developed a system using existing 802.11 wireless (WiFi) networks that functions 10 both indoors and out. Toward a Propagative Urbanism I call a tactic, on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a proper (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the others place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. The proper is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on timeit is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 11 on the wing. To the extent that media conglomerates and federal agencies are responsible for developing these new infrastructures, we can expect to see new practices for consumption and surveillance gain momentum. The current power struggle over file-sharing, copy-protection and regulation of the wireless spectrum highlights the dilemma. To what degree will technology users be empowered to share, participate and create using these infrastructures? To what degree will their power be limited to consumption? The TSG Toolkit is a parasitic technology. It feeds on the propagation of WiFi access points in dense urban environments as a free, ready-made, locative infrastructure for cultivati ng community sound gardens in contemporary public space. The concept leverages the fact that the protocol for WiFi networks requires access points to publicly broadcast their SSID (Service Set Identifier). Access points producing the WiFi signals used to determine the location of a participant may be open or encrypted, and need not be owned by those deploying the TSG system. As the hardware component of the infrastructure is tied to the propagation of WiFi networks, the extent of the gardens is cast in a parasitical relationship to that of a specific wireless protocol. Where the presence of WiFi access points is minimal, gardens may simply consist of plantings along a sidewalk. Where a local density of nodes exists, gardens potentially take the scale of a neighborhood. In cities where WiFi networks are ubiquitous, gardens potentially extend throughout the entire city.

Proliferation of WiFi access points, New York City, map data courtesy WiFiMaps.com http://www.WiFiMaps.com

SHEPARD, Mark

on EnterGarden
> sign in to garden > download sounds to device from server > initialize audio environment

while InGarden
> device determines location in physical space > updates listener position in audio environment

on PlantSound
> select sound to plant > set playback parameters > upload sound and paramters to server

on PruneSound
> select sound to prune > modify playback parameters > send modified paramters to server

INTERNET

802.11 (WiFi) AP

802.11 (WiFi) AP

802.11 (WiFi) AP

802.11 (WiFi) AP

INTERNET

INTERNET

HTTP CONNECTION CABLE LINK

TSG Concept Diagram, Interactive states, Mark Shepard

Notes
1. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Penguin, 1973. p. 151 2. Goddard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. p. 241 3. Corbett, J. Martin. Sound Organization: A Brief History of Psychosonic Management. Ephemera Vol 3. No. 4. http://www.ephemeraweb.org 4. Russolo, Luigi. Art of Noises. New York: Pendragon Press, 1986 5. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000. p. 92 6. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. p. 156 7. Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2003. p. 158 8. Ibid. p. xii 9. Nissanka B. Priyantha, Anit Chakraborty, and Hari Balakrishnan, The Cricket Location-Support System, 6th ACM Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MOBICOM), Boston, August 2000 10. Anthony LaMarca, et al. Place Lab: Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons in the Wild, Pervasive Computing: Third International Conference (PERVASIVE 2005), Munich, Germany, May 8-13, 2005 11. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. p. xix Mark Shepard (M.S. Advanced Architectural Design, Columbia University; MFA Combined Media, Hunter College, CUNY; B.Arch Cornell University) is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of emergent digital cultures. His independent and collaborative work has been exhibited at Artists Space, New York; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine; the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida; Cyberfest, Boston; the Viper International Festival of Film, Video and New Media, Basel, Switzerland; the Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands; and the Arealle99 Electronic Arts Festival, Brck/Linthe, Germany, among others.

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802.11 WIRELESS SIGNAL

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