Last Friday, David Gunn, Director of inter-disciplinary creative organization Incidental visited the Studio to introduce us to FEED, the multi-touch live composition application that the group is currently developing.

David told us that Incidental's projects range from hi-tech to lo-tech in execution, but that the main areas of interest that run through their output are site-specificity and finding new ways of allowing users to access and contribute media; breaking away from traditional content delivery models that were created as a result of various socio-historical forces and rely upon the presence of a regulatory curatorial power to function.

Incidental's first project was the creation of a website called Folk Songs for the Five Points in 2005, which included a sound map allowing users to create their own “folk songs” by remixing and overlaying different sounds taken from around New York’s Lower East Side. This differed from other similar projects of the time, as it was based around exploratory interaction with the location rather than an archival structure. They subsequently set out to produce more participatory modes of generating audio for such projects, training groups of people from different communities to compose their own sound samples to be associated with where they lived.

The team then moved on to create tools such as the Echo Archive program, that would allow for simplified modular manipulation of found sounds and could be used by school children as an alternative musical instrument, making electronic music composition more accessible. This was followed by an Open Cities project that saw musicians visiting locations to collect sounds and images before constructing live audio-visual performances on-site from these gathered materials.

Around 2008-9, Incidental stopped working on digital projects in order to focus more attention on exploring modes of interaction and site-specificity, but last year they began working in collaboration with Arnolfini on a new digital music project.

Reflecting upon their past work as preparation for this project, the group came to three key understandings. Firstly, they realized that websites like the ones they had previously built had helped to shape a new type of cultural activity: performative listening, in which the user is active in shaping their auditory experiences. They saw this as a new type of aesthetic and artistic activity, which challenged the idea of authorial or curatorial powers controlling an audience's consumption of media.

Secondly, they considered how the fundamentally detached processes of editing and uploading materials to the sites had detracted from the immediacy of the participatory role of the user, allowing them only an impoverished form of interaction with the platform upon which the content was delivered. This lead to the third understanding, that by taking media away from its creator for the editing process, they were again subscribing to a model involving privileged curators doctoring and approving submissions.

Initially the team played with existing composition apps to help them to define exactly what they wanted to achieve with this project, concluding that they wanted to develop a platform for an open creative experience that retained a sense of danger and in which the user was not bound by a lack of optionality that would preclude the possibility of "going off the rails".

The resulting FEED app is currently at the prototype stage; the team have figured out the underlying audio engine that they intend to use, but have not yet fully developed the aesthetic or interaction aspects. A video of the program in action can be seen at: http://www.theincidental.com/blog/the-feed-begins/

The primary mode of the app makes use of a live feed of ambient sound to create four-second long samples which appear on the touch screen as looping "particles", which can be moved around the field to manipulate qualities such as reverb or stereo direction and can be interacted with through various gestures to change pitch, volume or sample length. Prerecorded sounds can also be loaded into the app to create a backdrop which can be sampled and manipulated in the same way.

David told us that he has been thinking about the uses of the app, whether it is intended for public or shared performances or whether the uniquely absorbing individual experience of using it in isolation should be considered its primary purpose. He has been considering FEED's potential uses as a tool for bestowing curatorial power upon individuals and the idea of adding a publishing function that would allow users to share their compositions in some way.

The concepts for the app were originally thought up in collaboration with students from South Wales and the Incidental team will be returning to show them the prototype in the near future in order to gather further suggestions for the ways the team can develop the visual aspects of the app and improve its accessibility: adding visual feedback to assist user understanding.

Lunchtime Talks are an ongoing series of presentations and discussions by Studio residents and associates. They take place at 13:00 on Fridays and are free and open to everybody who’s interested in what we do. For the full programme of talks, please visit: http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/events.