Recent and ongoing projects

The Silence of the Land (SOL)
SOL is a long term project that uses sounds to promote active and constructive roles in the interpretation and management of natural and urban environments. The project investigates infrastructural use of social technologies and cross-media interaction in support of informal learning, sustainable development, and 'new heritage' practices. The project has been showcased at the Sonic Arts Festival and in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Gallery, listed in Stephen Wilson's Info Arts Links, and presented in several venues, including the HP Mobile Labs, Bristol. Project website: www.thesilence.org.

* TheSilence.org
A web 2.0 application for collaborative web mapping that enables users to capture and share sonic experiences. Through the application users can map and annotate urban and natural environments, create and share acoustic cartographies, and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue about the places in which they live. The result is an affective geography that changes over time according to participants' perceptions and interpretations of their environmental settings. We built and piloted the first prototype in 2007 in collaboration with the University of Brescia in Italy and the Institute of Digital Art & Technology, University of Plymouth, UK. A new version is currently under development funded by NSF.

* The Sonic Room
A tangible social interface for interacting with TheSilence.org in public settings. The interface provides local communities with an immersive environment through which users can "dislocate" perception by remixing the sounds generated through the web application and create an ideal soundscape of the place in which they would like to live. The interface allows perceiving new dimensions in the cultural space beyond the locative original and beyond rational history. We built a prototype in the summer 2008 in collaboration with the University of Brescia, Italy. The protoype is currently at the CU Museum of Natural History, where is being evaluated by prof. Ross Loomis and his students in Museum and Field Studies.

* Sound Camera
A locative application that enables user to capture and collect audio clips of their sonic experiences and upload them onto TheSilence.org. Through field activities and heightened listening, the application encourages a way of experiencing the environment that is direct and intimate, and ultimately reflective of participants’ perceptions and values. We built and piloted the first prototype in 2006 in collaboration with Politecnico of Torino, Italy.

Community of Soundscapes
The project represents the outreach component of SOL. It is a series of annual public programs promoting collaborative sound mapping in the region of Boulder Valley, Colorado. The project is a collaboration between the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, and the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks. The projects has been funded by the CU-Boulder Outreach Committee for two consecutive years in 2007 and 2008, and recently by NSF. Articles on the project have appeared on local newspapers and aired on regional radio stations, including Colorado Public Radio. The project has also been showcased in the 2008 edition of the annual CUEngineering Magazine to represent the research of the Department of Computer Science.