Xenakis: Experimenting with Data, Cities, and Sounds

TL;DR

This paper introduces Xenakis, a tool that transforms urban data into musical compositions, providing a novel multisensory interface for understanding city topology through sound and visuals.

Contribution

The work presents a new tool for musifying urban data, combining visualization and auditory feedback, developed through interdisciplinary collaboration and design study methodologies.

Findings

Produced musical tracks from city data.

Demonstrated multisensory data interfaces.

Engaged audiences with humorous and sincere presentations.

Abstract

In this work, we report on the results and lessons learned from different disciplines while researching the loosely-defined problem of hearing a city. We present Xenakis, a tool for the musification of urban data, which is able to capture some features of a city's topology through the distribution of street orientations, and turn it into a (very) small piece of music, a loop, which can be used as building block for compositions. Besides providing complementary visual and auditory channels to interface with this data, we also allow the piping of \textit{midi} signals to other applications. This concept was developed by visualization researchers collaborating with musicians using design study methodologies in an open-ended way. Our results include musical tracks, and we take advantage of the scope of alt.VIS to communicate our research in a sincere, humorous, and engaging format.