Whistling in the Wind

Whistling in the Wind is a hybrid data-sonification / electronic music composition. The piece can be thought of as a 'data-guided' generative music composition. It uses live and histoic data from environmental monitoring stations located around the city of Maribor in Slovenia as its data inputs. This data influence musical change, in real-ttime, within the composition's own generative logic.

The installation can be thought of as similar to wind chimes in that one system (the collection of tuned pipes) is exposed to another (the wind speed and direction), but a little more complex. The first system is the musical composition, described in software, where some parameters are variable and open to external influence while other element are fixed and more deliberatly composed.

The composition can be installed in a physical location such as a gallery or public space as well as existing as a live streaming Internet radio station.

Live Stream

http://rizom.si:8000/whistling_in_the_wind.mp3

Credits

Whistling in the Wind was commissioned through the EU funded KonS Platform for Contemporary Investigative Arts as a creative response within the city{making}sense project directed by urban planner and architect Andrej Žižek.

https://kons-platforma.org/dogodki/andrej-zizek-citymakingsense/()

Technologies

The composition uses Supercollider in conjuntion with a set of Python and Bash scripts which gather data from the environmental monitoring stations via an API. The composition is then streamed as an online radio using Liquidsoap and Icecast. Everything runs headless on a Debian 12 server requiring minimal long term maintenance.

Code

The code lives in a git reposity publicly hosted by kompot.si, a collective of Slovenia's finest autonomous infrastructure and free software advocates.

• https://git.kompot.si/rob/witw

System Requirments

Debian 12 OS, Jack2, Supercollider 3.13.0, Python3, Bash, Liquidsoap, Icecast2 Streaming Server

---