Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit

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 opportunities—and 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 volume—each 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
SHEPARD, Mark
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 morning’s 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
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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
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ears, and one’s 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
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
mosque’s minaret are two examples. Marking time through
sound—and 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
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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.
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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
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of men.”
John Cage framed this so-called noise in his
silent work 4’33”. 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. 4’33” was in part
inspired by Cage’s visit to Harvard’s 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
zone 2
TSG Concept Diagram, typical street corner installation, Mark Shepard
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
TSG Client Interfaces
SHEPARD, Mark
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. Sony’s original design for the Walkman
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.
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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 deli—the city becomes a film for which you
compose the soundtrack:
“Get on the bus going home. I’m listening to Rap
music. Thinking about the films I’ve watched. Trying to
find things in Goodfellas that I’ve 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 it’s fine to get in
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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 Walkman’s design incorporating two
headphone jacks. Sharing playlists provides an alternate
mode by which the personal is communicated.
The Flâneur, The Situationist and The Smart Mob
“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar
city lures the Flâneur 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
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Flâneur’s last practical joke.”
Proliferation of WiFi access points (from top): Chicago, New York, San
Francisco, map data courtesy WiGLE.net http://www.WiGLE.net
SHEPARD, Mark
Alone in the crowd, at home in the crowd – today we
dérive in the shopping mall. While it would be problematic
to simply map iPodders onto historical models such as
the Flâneur 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 Flâneur 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 dérive
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
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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
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 tomorrow’s mobile infocom
industry won’t 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
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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
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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 one’s 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
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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
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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 other’s 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 time—it is
always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized
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‘on the wing.’
Proliferation of WiFi access points, New York City, map data
courtesy WiFiMaps.com http://www.WiFiMaps.com
SHEPARD, Mark
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.
on EnterGarden
while InGarden
on PlantSound
on PruneSound
> sign in to garden
> device determines location
> select sound to plant
> select sound to prune
> set playback parameters
> modify playback parameters
> upload sound and paramters
> send modified paramters
> download sounds to device
from server
in physical space
> updates listener position
> initialize audio environment
in audio environment
to server
to server
INTERNET
802.11 (WiFi) AP
802.11 (WiFi) AP
802.11 (WiFi) AP
802.11 (WiFi) AP
INTERNET
802.11 WIRELESS SIGNAL
HTTP CONNECTION
CABLE LINK
TSG SERVER
INTERNET
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, BrŸck/Linthe, Germany, among others.
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