Tag: porto

Bike Opera – layering sounds in space

New advancements on the the bike opera project with Kaffe Matthews include a brand new mapping tool based on, yes you guessed it – Ushahidi which I’ve been using for a lot of wildly different projects recently. This time the work has been mainly focused in improving the area mapping – adding features for editing polygons so Kaffe can layer her sounds in space:

swamp-edit

This work is fairly reusable, as it only concerns changes to the submit_edit_js.php file in the standard Ushahidi install. In the meantime, Kaffe has been collecting sounds from musicians in Porto and building up a work of truly operatic proportions. We keep our fingers crossed that the bike mounted BeagleBoards can cope with all this material!

Angelika

New Portuguese Bicycle Operatics

Prepare your bicycle clips! Kaffe Matthews and I are starting work on a new Bicycle Opera piece for the city of Porto, I’m working on a new mapping tool and adding some new zone types to the audio system.

While working on a BeagleBoard from one of the bikes used in the Ghent installation of ‘The swamp that was…’, I found (in true Apple/Google style) 4Mb of GPS logs, taken every 10 seconds during the 2 month festival that I forgot to turn off. Being part of a public installation (and therefore reasonably anonymised 🙂 – this is the first 5th of the data, and about all it was possible to plot in high resolution on an online map:

It’s interesting to see the variability of the precision, as well as being able to identify locations and structures that break up the signal (such as the part underneath a large road bridge).