decibel 151

What happens when you become the search engine? What would you do if you could hear what other headphoned people are listening to on the street? decibel 151 allows you to create content with your presence. By entering a physical space, you become the entry. Your presence can be detected and your musical taste heard by others. decibel 151 puts a spin on the ideas of social networking, music recommendation and sharing experiences.

from fahrenheit 451 to decibel 151

Montag manages to escape into the river and drifts downstream into the country. He follows a set of abandoned railroad tracks until he finds a group of renegade intellectuals - the Book People - led by a man named Granger, who welcome him. They are a part of a nationwide network of book lovers who have memorized many great works of literature and philosophy. They hope that they may be of some help to mankind in the aftermath of the war that has just been declared. Montag's role is to memorize the Book of Ecclesiastes. Enemy jets appear in the sky and completely obliterate the city with bombs. Montag and his new friends move on to search for survivors and rebuild civilization..  

From Fahrenheit 451's dénouement comes one of the earlier examples of social networking as a means of preserving information and saving culture. In decibel 151 rare recordings of indigenous music from the Southern States are carried around by the 'Music People'. The listener, encouraged to move around the space others have walked on, picks up their tracks in surround sound audio. Spatial interpersonal relationships evolve between layers of historic recordings and human trajectories. 

decibel 151 opens up possibilities for generating online environments for music recommendations on social networking sites, where members enter a virtual space in order to hear what other participants are listening to and in one fell swoop capture the zeitgeist. Ideas of social networking, musical taste, and music recommendations are given a new evolutionary platform. 

By taking this concept out onto the street, multiple participants can choose to allow other headphoned individuals to hear what they are listening to and 'hear' people as they walk towards them. In this way participants who have disconnected themselves from the street environment via their headphones are able to reconnect using the same means they had used for disconnection. In its ultimate embodiment, decibel 151 can serve to address the paradox of listening as a means of environmental sound insulation, disconnection of the individual from a crowd, interaction of the isolated individual with other isolated individuals, and their possible reconnection. 

Michela Magas 2009 

This concept was made possible thanks to the work on spatial audio by Rebecca Stewart at Queen Mary, University of London. The audio technology behind the installation employs Ambisonics and binaural audio using HRTFs (head-related transfer functions). This technology creates a virtual auditory environment which envelopes the listener and creates the illusion of sound sources moving around. 

The use of indigenous music recordings from the Southern States used in the SIGGRAPH 2009 demo in New Orleans is made possible thanks to the work of the great American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, founder of the Cantometrics project.

Dan Rosenfeld of Microsoft Research created this classic concept shot for us (above).