Moon Instrument - Thing from the Future

In a world where sound is permanent and has form, sound never dissipates away. All sound is permanent. This world has unique properties and problems surrounding these aspects. In this “Thing from the future” exercise, I focused on creating artifacts at two scales –

(a) an individual in this world and (b) the entire human collective in that world.

World (Arc) – Permanent Sound - Acoustaverse

Terrain – Zombies

Object – Artwork

Mood – Dread

Scale: An Individual

Zombie Humans

In our world with ephemeral sound, capturing the moment with our pocket-sized super computers has become a huge priority. Concerts and Live performances have taken a dramatic turn with most of the audience busy trying to capture the sound rather than experience the actual listening. Looking at an audience transfixed into their tiny recording screens as a barrier between them and the actual performance is strikingly like a group of zombies. A brain-dead consumer group that behaves in a predictable non individualistic way.

In 2016 there was a patent from Apple, about infra-red data streams that will contain watermarks and fingerprints, broadcast alongside all performances. The mobile device when detecting these watermarks will either apply the watermark to your recordings or block the ability to record completely. This kind of extreme control is almost impossible to imagine being enforced at scale yet raises interesting intervention questions.

Zombie Sounds

This peculiarly weird phenomenon does not exist in the Permanent Sound world. A performance is valued as it ends up creating a unique sonic cloud brought into existence at the live event. The culture of consuming sound with a tangible audio cloud, leads to a very different kind of copy being made though. A zombie version of the performance is sold as careful sonic sculptors create copies of the piece. Sculpted pieces do not come close to having the same aural experience, and people still visit their favorite artist’s websites to order “original copies”. Most famous artists also have their live repertoire in their sound museums where one can experience the actual stage performances in all their sonic cloud glory.

Terrain – The Moon

Object – Instrument

Mood – Pleasure

Scale: Humanity

Sonic waste generation was a huge problem over the last couple of centuries in the world of Permanent Sound. The government tried setting sonic budgets for every community, designating sonic dump yards for the cloudy physical sounds to be dumped at etc. More recently with intergalactic trans communication, the moon was determined as a sonic dump yard for our cluster. All sonic waste is now transported to the moon for dumping at regular intervals as a united earth wide effort.

Since the moon now houses all sounds created on Earth, a particular investigation from students at the MIT Media Lab has been surfacing. The moon has been converted into an instrument that can be played from Earth. Using a new interface app that can be downloaded from opensource brain Tweet network onto your modular brain-phone devices, you can activate, sequence and make an electronic instrument out of the samples stored on the moon. This has led to a whole new genre of artists that perform exclusively using moon samples and perform massive moon raves.

All humans and holograms are welcome to these week long generative moon raves.