Campus Collaboration: UrbanRemix A major component of the ARTech Residency was the use of the Institute’s UrbanRemix App to capture sounds for use in an original composition by Jade Simmons. Georgia Tech students recorded sounds from their everyday lives, and submitted over 150 samples to a database that Jade accessed to create “Rhythm As Necessity…A Soundscape.”
About the UrbanRemix App UrbanRemix is a collaborative and locative sound project. The goal in developing UrbanRemix was to design a platform and series of public workshops that would enable participants to develop and express the acoustic identity of their communities, and enable users of the website to explore and experience the soundscapes of the city in a novel fashion. The UrbanRemix platform consists of a mobile phone system and web interface for recording, browsing and mixing audio. Participants in the UrbanRemix workshops become active creators of shared soundscapes as they search the city for interesting sound cues. The collected sounds, voices and noises provide the original tracks for musical remixes that reflect the specific nature and acoustic identity of the community. The project draws upon long-standing aesthetic practices that bring realworld sounds into electronic works, such as musique concréte, acoustic ecology, and the chance approaches of John Cage, as well as practices in public art and relational aesthetics that structure new forms of engagement and collaboration between artists, designers and citizens. Its innovative contribution is in the combination of these aesthetic approaches with current technological trends in location-aware mobile applications and in digital performance and interactive art. The project was conceived of and is directed by Jason Freeman, Michael Nitsche, and Carl Disalvo, who are professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It is made possible by the invaluable work of numerous students and designers, and supported in part by the Music Technology program, the Digital Media program, and the GVU center at Georgia Tech. To date, the UrbanRemix project has mounted events in collaboration with the Atlanta Beltline "Art on the Beltline" project, the City Centered festival and Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, the Atlanta Public Schools and Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, and the Times Square Arts Alliance in New York. Several Atlanta based artists are also using the UrbanRemix platform for the creation of site-specific audio-works and locative media performances. Multimedia Listen to sound clips and remixes submitted for “Rhythm As Necessity.” UrbanRemix Supported by Turner Broadcasting, GVU Center at Georgia Tech, Intel Foundation, Georgia Tech Foundation and Google.
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