In this work, we report on the results and lessons learned from different disciplines while researching the loosely-defined problem of hearing a city. We present Xenakis, a tool for the musification of urban data, which is able to capture some features of a city's topology through the distribution of street orientations, and turn it into a (very) small piece of music, a loop, which can be used as building block for compositions. Besides providing complementary visual and auditory channels to interface with this data, we also allow the piping of \textit{midi} signals to other applications. This concept was developed by visualization researchers collaborating with musicians using design study methodologies in an open-ended way. Our results include musical tracks, and we take advantage of the scope of alt.VIS to communicate our research in a sincere, humorous, and engaging format.
@article{arxiv.2109.14992,
title = {Xenakis: Experimenting with Data, Cities, and Sounds},
author = {Victor Schetinger and Ignacio Pérez-Messina and Renan Guarese and Velitchko Filipov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14992},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
This manuscript heavily links to a miro board as part of an experiment in exposition, and was presented at alt.VIS, a workshop co-located with IEEE VIS 2021 (held virtually)