Lörstad , Henrik , d ' Inverno , Mark and Eacott , John The intelligent street : responsive sound environments for social interaction

The Intelligent Street is a music installation that is able to respond intelligently to the collective requests of users interacting together. The performance it creates is largely influenced by the collective set of text commands from users’ mobile phones. In this way, users in shared environments, subjugated for so long to uncontrollable and often undesired ‘Muzak’, can now directly influence their sonic environment and collectively create the aural soundscape that they desire. We see our project as enabling inhabitants of any given space from passive consumers to active creators, and anticipate it has significant commercial, social and educational potential. In this paper we present a description of the installation, its software architecture and implementation, as well as a report on subsequent user-evaluation in providing a musical public playground and, moreover, our over-arching goals as musicians and software engineers.