Music, Walk with Me

My musical work Music, Walk With Me sonifies data in response to my starting timbral and textural pointillistic musical concept of a few simultaneous  sine waves. What interested me was how the sound of a chord could change based on changing volumes of its notes.. I imagined  music with a slow tempo that would analyze a chord from different viewpoints, or “soundpoints.”

I preferred to collect a data set that related to my life. After about a week of hard thinking I realized the answer was sitting in my pocket: I’d been collecting my own data set for over a year now with the Samsung S Health app, a step counter on my phone. The two primary parts of the data are daily and hourly steps taken. I thus had a number for frequency and for amplitude. While the information captured has itself become more and more interesting to me, I am still most proud of how I have expressed it artistically. To create chords, this piece draws on data created by myself and 3 friends. The four of us together thus create fluctuating harmony just by walking (i.e., by having walked). I mapped the data as such: for each day, every person is represented by only one pitch, which changes in volume based on quantized temporal averages. Walking 10,000 steps will therefore yield a tone of 1,000 Hz with a static pitch but a subtly or dramatically changing volume.

Time is compressed in this piece in both its concert and installation forms. Moving through each day, 1 second represents one hour. A whole month of 30 days will thus last exactly 12 minutes.