SONODE

SONODE is an interactive piece that integrates mobile applications, web page, database, and culminates in a sound composition. This piece comes from walking as an aesthetic practice. Tour Mexico City reinventing and drawing sound maps. The piece invites the reflection of the user through the city tour, not only walking to get from one point to another, walking as a critic, as an exploration route, as an artistic experience. Open country wandering. For this work, it is sought that the user develops a more critical listening since usually many sounds are discriminated by the human ear. By being more aware of the sound of Mexico City, the user is able to listen beyond what exists and create some of it. Mexico City is constantly moving and changing, which facilitates this critical listening. In SONODE, the user becomes a nomad who wanders the city in a surreal way and turns listening into an aesthetic form. Mexico City is a huge place full of contrasts and is what seeks to reflect the piece, such as nuances, and differences. Just as it is possible to listen to children playing in the city parks, patrol sirens are heard at all times just to the side. Just as the city is home to a lot of folklore and culture, it also harbors corruption and violence. Creating a collective awareness of the situation of the city through wandering and listening is one of the main objectives of SONODE.  

The project has a great influence on the book “Walkscapes” by Francesco Careri, which speaks of walking as an aesthetic practice and the reinvention of the landscape through surrealism and Dadaism.

The piece is divided into three fundamental parts: the mobile application, the website, and the composition.

The mobile application is the main platform of the piece since it is the starting point. The app allows the user to record an audio clip and take a photo, then the user will make a description of the sound by means of tags, and finally, both files (audio clip and photo) will be uploaded to the geolocated web page. It also allows you to visualize the location of the audio clips on a city map, listen to them, search for clips by tags or “tags” and finally allow you to listen to a sound piece from the selection of different parameters such as “tags”.

The mobile application was developed for Android and iOS operating systems. For Android, Android Studio, Google's development environment, was used. The iOS app was developed in Swift, Apple's programming language. In both operating systems the operation is very similar, both for Android and for iOS, the PD libraries for mobile devices are used, which is where the audio recording and the compositions are made. In order to obtain the location of the user at the time the audio recording is done, geolocation services are used, and then a call is made to the database and the Amazon storage system to upload the files. It also makes use of the Google map service for viewing all locations in the city where they have been recorded.

All audio files and photos are stored in the Amazon storage service and the website “sScape” is responsible for making a call to that service so that it can be viewed on the map of Mexico City.
Finally, the composition is carried out within a patch of the Pure Data programming language that is embedded in the mobile application.

You can see more in: http://sonode.net