An internet-based architecture for live audio interaction worldwide with participation open to the public at large. http://www.auracle.org/, a networked sound instrument, controlled by the voice and played over the Internet
An internet-based architecture for live audio interaction worldwide with participation open to the public at large. http://www.auracle.org/, a networked sound instrument, controlled by the voice and played over the Internet
'I started in another direction which I now call Networks; these are inter-connections of lay people again, having a dialogue with sound that is beyond language. I did the first one, also in the middle of the sixties, with a radio station in New York City. It involved doing something which was unheard of at that time: I plugged the telephone system into the radio station. I installed ten telephone lines at the station and asked people to call in during a two-hour period with whatever sounds they wanted. It created a live sound collage made with the participation of anybody within a twenty-mile radius the ten million people who were living there. These Networks gradually progressed into a series of radio/telephone events, in different cities. In the middle of the seventies I realized one for the whole of the USA with two hundred radio stations and five cities where people called into. I made huge trans-continental loops to transform their sounds.It was called Radio Net. At that time the word ‘network’ wasn’t a word in general us; it was a word that engineers knew but if you mentioned ‘network’ in a cultural context or any kind of conversation except with an engineer, no-one would know what it was. With these network ideas, I was also trying to go beyond the event and make them into entities. I was trying to figure out how I could take over a radio station twenty-four hours a day, or a network of radio stations. Fortunately, though, the Internet arrived. As of last year there is a work, Auracle, which is there twenty-four hours a day at a site called www.auracle.org. It is a point of meeting to create a network of people who play an instrument together using their voice'.
Max Neuhaus
In 1966, Max Neuhaus combined a radio station with the telephone network to create 'Public Supply', a two-way aural virtual space twenty-miles in diameter encompassing New York City and open to the general public. Within this area anyone could enter into a live dialogue with sound by simply tuning in to the radio station and making a telephone call.
In 1977, for 'Radio Net', he extended the concept to include the entire United States via National Public Radio's network of 200 radio stations.
Inherent in his original vision, though, was the concept of moving beyond radio events and creating an entity - something there twenty-four hours a day ready to be joined by anyone at any time. After 'Radio Net' Neuhaus also wanted to create something where a multilingual public could interact and move on to a global scale.
In the 1970s the technology to realize these concepts was a long way off. But now the internet has reached a point where their realization is possible and Neuhaus has concieved Auracle.