Soundscraper – live social soundscaping

A series of Soundscraper performances will take place over the coming months, some solo and some collaborations with other composers, musicians, sound and visual artists.

All of these performances will rely on people participating (volunteering), worldwide, providing live sound streams to a “mixer-performer” from their environments, according to a score (a schedule, really) of requests for certain “place-sounds” during certain time periods of the piece. A Soundscraper timetable (the score) creates gatherings of people and their sound-worlds, as well as transitions between these worlds.

Soundscraper performances will take place inside small venues, with capacities of about 40 to 80 people. While the performance venues are intimate, a performance itself can be streamed worldwide over the Internet for others, including the participants, to experience.

The primary goal of these performances is to create interesting mixed sound environments that are sculpted out of real sounds happening somewhere else right now.

The mixer-performer will be receiving live-streamed sounds from the participants, and attempting to shape (more like herd or sweep) them into a kind of narrative musical expression. This blending, or “mixscape”, of sounds and processes will be the output that is heard inside the venue and, in turn, streamed to the Internet.

Inside the performance venue the live sound feeds can be blended with processed variations of themselves. There is control over the “dry/wet” mix of the inputs, so the mixed soundscape can range from being the pure, raw, input sounds to being a sound that bears little or no resemblance to the input sounds.

And, inside the venue the sound is projected from several locations (speakers) that are dispersed about the space. The performances can generally be experienced either seated or roaming freely around the space to better explore some of the soundscape’s nooks and crannies.

Learn more about upcoming Soundscraper performances and consider blending your slice of the world into the mix,