Metopia: Experiencing Complex Environmental Data Through Sound

This extended abstract describes Metopia, a research project in the early stages of progress, a wireless sensor network for urban spaces, to aquire a complex set of data from the environment for the purpose of making a sound composition. The programming language Pure Data is used to create a sound composition from the aquired data. This research project is using a real-world problem such as air-pollution as a way to explore a responsive environment, to communicate the state of the toxic level into an immediate auditory response. Atmospheric pollutants is a major health issue and Metopia is one way of examining this problem through aesthetic and conceptual choices and at the same time making sense of complex data through generative principles and through algorithms. The composition is using Pure Data on embedded Raspberry Pi 2 equipped with ARM processors for real-time processing, coupled with an array of sensors using Arduino for data acquisition.