Social Synthesizer is composition that translates the idea of synthesis to the world of Flickr, Skype and new media:
Social Synthesis is the audiovisual synthesis technique pioneered by Aetherbits that explores the aesthetic synergies emerging from the contemporary use of collaborative internet technologies. The result is a recombinant flux of sensory information aimed at holding a mirror to the collective unconscious as it emerges from the internet in the form of social software and user contributed content websites.
The core of the Social Synthesizer is a real-time score generation application based on concepts ranging from Swarm-Intelligence (SI), hash table mathematics, Database Theory and datamining techniques.
The Real-Time-Score-Generator is a technological mashup of custom built software that leverages digital audio synthesis with polyphonic video synthesis techniques to power an immersive yet sublime environment capable of inducing higher states of information awareness.
Background (via Aetherbits):
Online, Social Synthesizer uses a wide range of audio synthesis techniques on a database of user contributed recordings to algorithmically compose music. The community can influence the sound of the compositions by inserting sound recordings into the database. This is accomplished by using Skype (a software program that allows users to make free calls over the Internet) and calling to what is essentially a contemporary answering machine.
The recordings become a part of an algorithmic computer generated stream of music that anybody can listen to and influence. Onsite, the Social Synthesizer processes in real-time images drawn from Flickr (a website for users to share photographs). The archetypical images drawn from an user contributed content website such as Flickr become universal yet personal meaningful data that are reprocessed by an acoustically driven visual synthesizer.
Damining the collective unconscious: Datamining is the ensemble of techniques geared towards the extraction of processable knowledge implicit in databases. The same way that datamining techniques explore and research databases to extract hidden, previously unknown information, the immersion in the Social Synthesizer’s audiovisual composition is a sensorial experience that allows the public to explore the internet’s global repository of collective memory and the intuitive extraction of the online community collective unconscious.
The Social Synthesizer is ultimately a sensitive content development system. It epitomizes the conjunction of creativity through diversity in an open media culture. Information as media, information as real-time collective art that, at the same time, can become personally relevant and highly subjective. Social Synthesis.
