[PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:

>> If one can't reasonably hear the censorship in it, is it appropriate to
>> advertise the work using such a title ?
> How would you define a 'reasonable listening of censorship'?

Well, perhaps there isn't one that can be done with IP addresses. IP 
addresses don't mean much to people, even less than phone numbers do, 
because the DNS and WHOIS systems do their best to hide those numbers away 
from people. There are hardly any well-known IP addresses apart from 
127.0.0.1 and 192.168.0.1, which are reserved for things outside of the 
internet anyway.

Then there is the problem of putting numbers in any way that the numbers 
could be recovered (or recovered enough) from the data. In the case of IP 
addresses, anything one bit away is a totally distinct address, so, if 
such distinctions are hard to hear, you aren't really playing the IP 
address, but rather, a fragment of it. The way you play it, even if 
someone could make sense of MIDI notes as high as 255 (when even just 140 
is above Nyquist...), there are 24 combinations that would sound the same 
(for most IP addresses), because in an IP address, the order of the bytes 
is important, which is not rendered as such (you'd be either preserving 
the order or doing anything else that amounts to doing the same). Thus 
there are many combinations of non-banned addresses that sound exactly the 
same as the banned ones.

Both things led me to think that in this work, the IP addresses are 
secondary, the fact that they are banned addresses is secondary, and the 
concept of censorship is secondary.

That said, I don't know how censorship could enter a music piece as music.

However, there are obvious ways to make it enter as lyrics : you write a 
song against censorship, and then it will get censored in China, and now 
it's doubly relevant to the topic of censorship.

> Sure, but in this case soundfile is only for online documentation, the 
> work is exhibited as multichannel audio installation, the audience can 
> interact with the software and read relevant information about the 
> how/what/why.

Ah, that's very nice. Will you put some of it online one day ?

  _______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC