Developing Telematic Electroacoustic Music: Complex networks, machine intelligence and affective data stream sonification

Abstract

This paper proposes expanding telematic electroacoustic music practice through the consideration of affective computing and integration with complex data streams. Current telematic electroacoustic music practice, despite the distances involved, is largely embedded in older music/sonic arts paradigms. For example, it is dominated by using concert halls, by concerns about the relationship between people and machines, and by concerns about geographically distributed cultures and natural environments. A more suitable environment for telematic sonic works is found in the inter-relationship between ‘players’ and broader contemporary networked life – one embedded in multiple real-time informational data streams. These streams will increase rapidly with the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), and with the increasing deployment of algorithmic decision-making and machine learning software. While collated data streams, such as news feeds, are often rendered visually, they are also partly interpreted through embodied cognition that is similar to music and sonic art interpretation. A meeting point for telematic electroacoustic music and real-time data sonification is in affective composition/performance models and data sonification. These allow for the sonic exploration of participants’ place in a matrix of increasingly networked relationships.