[See also:
http://williamthomaslong.com/releases/xiexie/ ]

[via:
https://www.are.na/block/3545019 ]

"Phonetic script: Xièxie
Chinese characters: 谢谢
谢谢 ( xiexie / xièxie ) is composed of these characters: 谢 (xie) , 谢 (xie)
English translation: thank you, thanks
to say | to thank | literally means 'thanks'. 'Thank you' in Chinese would be xièxie nĭ (if you thank an individual), or xièxie nĭmen (to say thank you to a group of people).

- Chinese -> English Dictionary

A week before leaving, I bought a dictionary and phrasebook.

Covered in rain, during the days and even the nights, Shanghai was lit in a glow, a mist turning to a constant grey fog. Buildings lined with neon and lcd screens flashed, and from around corners and behind buildings, the night was illuminated much the same as the day. Cars separated the classes, their horns voices punctuating the streets, as pedestrians in groups loosely scattered the streets, talking and walking on speakerphone.

Standing by the metro escalators, there in the square with the overhanging trees of a park, there is construction all around. The buildings seem to be climbing into the darkness at this very moment. Leaving behind and moving forward. We seem to know everything already, our illusion of experience. I imagine taking your hand, I imagined taking your hand, and the lights in the subway flicker as we go deeper. Transit bookmarks each experience, every daydream, and in the end they're interchangeable and indistinguishable between reality and imagination. Try to remember which is real.

To Hangzhou the maglev reached 303 km/h, the towering apartment buildings hunch under construction, passing by in blurs on the flat farmland landscape. I fell asleep, as you were dancing but to no music. The lilies on the lake nodded in the rain, dipping into the water. There was a Wal-Mart near the hotel where I won a pink bunny from a claw machine. I remember the beauty of the architecture of Hangzhou station, birds swirling around the pillars near the top, the echoes of the deep station interior, and the laughing at being lost. There at least we have each other, that memory, or that daydream.

Everything moves faster than we can control. Days are just flashes, moments are mixed up but burned on film, and all of the places and times are out of order. If it could only be us, only ours. If it was ours, if it was us. Sometimes everything goes faster than you can control and you can't stop, much less understand where you are. I bought a dictionary and phrasebook, but "xièxie" was the only word I ever got to use.

- Will Long, January 2019

Preorder note: Expected arrival date: June, 2019
Track lengths may differ between formats.

released January 24, 2019

Xièxie is available as a 2LP edition of 300 copies, 150 silver and 150 black, a 2CD, 6 panel package edition of 500 copies, and a 2CS oversized slipcase edition of 150 copies.

Download includes bonus 2-track, uncut version of the full album.

Design by Rutger Zuydervelt
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu"

[See also:
http://www.celer.jp/
http://williamthomaslong.com/
https://www.instagram.com/willlong_8/
https://soundcloud.com/two_acorns ]

"Come along as acclaimed journalist and author Jon Mooallem takes a walk through tranquil woodlands of the Pacific Northwest. No talking; just walking. Ambient. Pleasing. Unusual."

…

"Customer Reviews

Sooooo Soooooothing...
by Christopher Gronlund
Because I'm a tech writer by trade, and because I don't commute to work, I really don't have the ability to listen to many podcasts. Talking does not work well with writing, and evenings are spent with my wife, or doing the writing I prefer doing.

But ambient footfalls out on a walk? Yes! Not only can I listen to this while working...the pacing of the steps slogging along probably improved productivity. Bonus: I'm sure I'll relisten to episodes when I need to block out the world and get things done.

Finally
by Code Name Dazzle
The walking podcast I've been waiting for!

Slug Murder Truthers
by Ryan Nickum
The pitter patter of host Jon’s feet upon the soft Pacific Northwest soil is a soothing sound... that is until about 6:09 into episode 1, when the host can clearly be heard stepping on a banana slug. At first I thought that squishing sound might be mud, which is common to the area, but immediately after one can clearly hear his pace quicken and his breathing increase, as he hurries away from the horror he’s caused."

"The web is busy now. No bad thing. But much too busy to have a single place to gather my friends around photos, another around status updates, etc. I used to have one community online, and now I've got a hundred. And while I can shard them by app (business on LinkedIn, family on Facebook, my global village on Twitter), it's a lot of effort to maintain that. And it doesn't make any sense.

Until:

Tom Coates invited me to join a little community of his in Slack. There are a handful of people there, some old friends, some new friends, all in this group messaging thingy.

There's a space where articles written or edited by members automatically show up. I like that.

I caught myself thinking: It'd be nice to have Last.FM here too, and Dopplr. Nothing that requires much effort. Let's also pull in Instagram. Automatic stuff so I can see what people are doing, and people can see what I'm doing. Just for this group. Back to those original intentions. Ambient awareness, togetherness.

Nobody says very much. Sometimes there's a flurry of chat.

It's small, human-scale. Maybe it's time to bring all these ambient awareness tools back, shared inside Slack instances this time.

You know what, it's cosy. I've been missing this. A neighbourhood."

"Lost in Doi Saket - a sound map

I've never been a driver and have a hopeless sense of direction, so deciding to rent a scooter for my month in Doi Saket was always going to be risky. Nor did things start well at the rental place. Before I had even managed to ride a metre with my feet off the ground the owner had declared me ready to go and pushed me out the door. Almost immediately I was lost and so began my 600 kilometre recording tour of the region. At its heart my soundmap is about the process of weaving an emotional landscape from a physical spaces. It explores the way fragile and fleeting moments like a teen listening to love songs on the shores of a lake, or a joyful burst of backyard dancing slowly sink into an area, shaping it in the same slow way that walking along a similar route every day will eventually create a path. Lost in Doi Saket is about the different ways people leave a mark on the places they inhabit and visit. The way a community wears the land around them, and the way this process changes them too. The piece isn't intended as an collection of observations, it isn't simply about things I heard or saw, it is also about the things I did here -- the different ways I tried to explore, understand, participate and listen to Doi Saket. It's about the little things like struggling to buy cigarettes, and big things like realising I was very ignorant about Thailand. It's about the beautiful, haphazard and confusing process of getting to know and like new people, and new places and catching yourself totally lost in a moment. It is a record of the tiny ways I shaped Doi Saket during my time here, and the far bigger mark my visit left on me.

Kate Carr, Doi Saket, Thailand.

Thanks to: Helen Michaelsen, Pisithpong Siraphisut, Rees Archibald, Tim Plaisted and Tanya Serisier.

This artwork was made possible by the Compeung Residency Grant Program."

"Somewhere around the end of February my Nabaztag rabbit stopped doing the only thing it did any more - announcing the time in odd, amusing ways, in a strange English accent.

It was an act any of you could have built with a couple of line of javascript and a voice over artist but it felt different because it was embedded in a plastic rabbit.

And, although I didn't notice straight away the sound of the Nabaztag not doing anything because one a routine failure faded into the sound of the Nabaztag not doing anything because they'd switched the servers off and I noticed it had died and I was sad.

I've owned three iterations of the Nabaztag/Karotz thing - each bought and connected in the fond hope that it would finally make the network talk to me rather than just appear on a screen. And each didn't quite work, and each attempt at hacking around it didn't quite work either and then they just became Minimum Viable Talking Things muttering to themselves in the corner of the room.

But there was still something to love about them.

Not least because they suggested there were alternatives to the Silicon Valley object design axis where everything sits somewhere on a line between Useful and Delightful. They found another interesting place to be, a line between Useless and French, and they explored what it meant to make the network into something funny, social and decorative. They didn't fail because no one wants that. They failed because the technology wasn't good enough and because hardware is hard.

This still feels to me, like fresh and unexplored territory - the network talking to you, not you talking to it. It doesn't need speech recognition, it just needs to connect to your feeds and friends and occasionally tell you what's happening. The Nabaztag took that further by embedding that capability in something charming and odd, something that didn't look and feel like 'technology'.

Now, though, the servers are off and it looks like my only option is to learn how to run it off a Raspberry Pi.

The rabbits have fallen apart."

"The world around is made up of information that competes for our attention. What is necessary? What is not?

When we design products, we aim to choose the best position for user interface components, placing the most important ones in the most evident and accessible places within the screen. Equally important is the design of communication. How many are notifications are necessary? How and when should they be displayed? To solve this, we can be inspired by the principles of calm technology.1

Principles of Calm Technology

I. Technology should require the smallest amount of our attention.
Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak.
Create ambient awareness through different senses.
Communicate information without taking the wearer out of their environment or task.

II. Technology should inform and encalm.
A person's primary task should not be computing, but being human.
Give people what they need to solve their problem, and nothing more.

III. Technology should make use of the periphery.
A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back.
The periphery is informing without overburdening.

IV. Amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity.
Design for people first.
Machines shouldn't act like humans.
Humans shouldn't act like machines.
Amplify the best part of each.

Examples

Tea Kettle
If a technology works well, we can ignore it most of the time. A teapot tells us when it is ready, and is off or quiet the rest of the time. A tea kettle can be set and forgotten, until it sings. It does not draw constant attention to itself until necessary. A tea kettle's whistle brings information from another room to one's attention.

Inner Office Window
An inner office window provides an understanding of whether someone is busy or not without the need to interrupt them.

Jawbone Up
The Jawbone Up has a single button and a colored status light. The device can be set to buzz after a short nap or at the optimium sleep cycle for a good night of sleep. It counts movement in the background without requiring additional action from the wearer. The device syncs to the user's phone through the audio jack and gives a summary of the wearer's individual day in sleep and physical activity.

Lavatory Sign
This simple sign tells you whether the lavatory is occupied or not. No need to translate it into multiple languges. The simple icon is either occupied or not.

Roomba Vacuum Cleaner
The humble Roomba Vacuum cleaner chirps happily when it is done and emits a sad tone when it is stuck. There is no uncanny valley present in this technology. Roomba doesn't have a spoken language, just simple tones. This makes it easy to understand what Roomba is saying, and elimates the need to translate the tone into many different languages.

Sleep Cycle
Sleep Cycle is a mobile application that monitors your sleep and allows you to track times of deep sleep and REM. You can set an alarm in the app and Sleep Cycle will wake you up before the time at the best place in your sleep cycle with a soft noise or buzz. Because the haptic alert occurs under your pillow, you can configure it so that you can wake up without anyone else being affected by the alarm.

Smart Badge
A smart badge is simple. Smart badges are small, wearable technologies that don't require a charger, user interface or operating system. Simply touch a provisioned smart badge to a door or elavator panel and you'll easily gain access.

Calm Communication

Haptic Alert
Use haptics or touch to inform someone of important information. Many people set their phones to buzz, but other products such as the LUMOBack Smart Posture Sensor buzzes you when you exhibit poor posture. Touch is a high resolution of human sensation. A lot of information can be conveyed with no visual or auditory requirement.

Trend Graph
A good trend graph is all about making the formerly invisible visible. The Sleep Cycle app graphs sleep over time, compressing that long term data into an easily accessible format. Be patient: good data may a long time to collect, but it is well worth the wait! Displaying data in a elegant way is one of the most important aspects of trend graphs. Elegance is about information and comprehension, not just visual appearance.

Status Light
Status lights are farily common on video cameras. A device is active when the red 'record' light is on. Status lights can be used for more than just recording. Our daily travels are mediated by the simple colors of traffic lights. A light that shows the weather is far more calm than a weather ssystem that constantly calls attention to itself. Think about how to use different colors of light to inform and encalm in your products.

Status Tone
A status tone is a quick way for a device to let a person know whether it needs attention or not. Products that have a positive tones upon completion, or negative tones when stuck are more likely to be helped by their human owners.

Status Shout
A Status Shout is similar to a Status Tone but can be much louder and more urgent. Smoke alarms, tea kettles and microwaves all use shouts to alert people to their status. Ambulances use Status Shouts to alert people to make way for an emergency. Tornado warnings utilize Status Shouts to help neighborhoods get to a safe place and out of the tornado's path. Status Shouts should be reserved for very important information.

Popup
Popup alerts are perhaps the most common form of alert, but they can quickly overwhelm people when not used correctly. Alerts should be used when deleting a piece of content, for an emergency, or when someone has specifically opted into a piece of content or stream. Otherwise, try to think of ways to alert a person using the other senses.

Timed Trigger
A simple status light on a timer can make for a calm and informative notifier. An orange light that turns on at sundown or reminds you to brush your teeth.

Delay
Use a delay or interrupt during a change of state. For example, when the headphones of an iPhone become disconnected, the music player automatically pauses the music."

"If you don’t know what you’re looking at: SPEKTRMODULE is a podcast of haunted, ambient and sleepy music I compile for my own amusement."

[via: https://twitter.com/debcha/status/430470298203590657 ]

"As explained in Lisa Reichelt’s Twitter-friendly coinage of “ambient intimacy,” social media use countless trivial messages to build a detailed portrait, even an imagined presence, of a friend. At least to some degree, this restores a lost kind of awareness found in traditional life. The upstairs shutters are opened, the bicycle is gone from its usual spot at the usual time, deliveries are being made, and the neighbors are gossiping. To their enthusiasts, social media re-create some of this environmental sense, albeit across the necessary distances and at the accelerated paces of the metropolis."

…

"The world has been filling with many new kinds of ambient interfaces. Nothing may be designed on the assumption that it will be noticed. Many more things must be designed and used with the ambient in mind. Under these circumstances, you might want to rethink attention."

…

"Embodiment makes the difference. Walking provides more embodiment, more opportunity for effortless fascination, and better engagement than looking or sitting. Depending on the balance of fascinating and annoying stimuli, a walk around town may well do some good. That balance is now in play, under the rise of the ambient."

…

""Does having more ambient information make you notice the world more, or less? Can mediation help you tune in to where you are? Or does it just lower the resolution of life?"

"(T)he Internet shakes the university to its core; presumably, the two are now breeding a new heir."

(((The first statement is true. The second? Not without a little help, at least not with purpose and foresight. And no, it's not massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs are the mp3 of education - they radically disrupt the distribution of information, but that's only one slice of the wider pie. mp3s have not radically changed music; largely only distribution. Likewise, MOOCs are the low-hanging fruit of learning: the easiest bit to translate and transmit, and the lowest value component. It is learning at its simplest, its most mundane. This is still useful as it frees up education - say, the university - to spend its time and resources doing something higher value instead - focusing on moments of intense, engaged collaboration, together in physical space. The rest can be displaced: with a hand; it is no great loss. No more than compact discs, and their absurdly-named "jewel boxes". Anyway.)))"

"The role of architecture seems central to future inquiries into attention. The cognitive role of architecture is to serve as banks for the rivers of data and communications, to create sites, objects, and physical resource interfaces for those electronic flows to be about. At the same time, architecture provides habitual and specialized contexts by which to make sense of activities. And, where possible, architecture furnishes rich, persistent, attention-restoring detail in which to take occasional refuge from the rivers of data."
(((Very good. Again, you won't see architects getting this pointed out at architecture school much currently - with a few honourable exceptions - but there's a good role for architecture in future (alongside many other things of course.))))

"Eric Paulos is the Director of the Living Environments Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) with a faculty appointment within the Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley. Previously, Eric held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute and in the Entertainment Technology Center. Prior to CMU, Eric was Senior Research Scientist at Intel Research in Berkeley, California where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group - challenged to employ innovative methods to explore urban life and the future fabric of emerging technologies across public urban landscapes. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in urban computing, sustainability, green design, environmental awareness, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, and intimate media. Eric is a leading figure in the field of urban computing, coining the term in 2004, and a regular contributor, editorial board member, and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley where he helped launch a new robotic industry by developing some of the first internet tele-operated robots including Space Browsing helium filled blimps and Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs).

Eric is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit and a frequent collaborator with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories. Eric's work has been exhibited at the InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Japan, Ars Electronica, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF), SFMOMA, the Chelsea Art Museum, Art Interactive, LA MOCA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the ZKM, Southern Exposure, and a performance for the opening of the Whitney Museum's 1997 Biennial Exhibition."

[via: http://make.berkeley.edu/ ]

"The hidden truth about many attempts to “bury” technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your “cognitive resources” so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on “contemplating” other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery."

"Imagine being told that “you visited 592 Web sites this week. That’s .5 times the number of Web pages on the whole Internet in 1994!”

The goal here is not to hit us with a piece of statistics — sheer numbers rarely lead to complex narratives — but to tell a story that can get us thinking about things we’d rather not be thinking about. So let us not give in to technophobia just yet: we should not go back to doing everything by hand just because it can lead to more thinking.

Rather, we must distribute the thinking process equally. Instead of having the designer think through all the moral and political implications of technology use before it reaches users — an impossible task — we must find a way to get users to do some of that thinking themselves."

"While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an “aesthetic of friction” that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought — nay, contemplation — slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?"

"Solace is a game you will never get to play. A world built from the music up.
Each song inspired a different piece of concept art/screenshot.
I see the composition and concepts of the game with great clarity. But you can imagine whatever you like."

"The Good Night Lamp is a family of connected lamps that lets you communicate the act of coming back home to your loved ones, remotely.

A family of lamps is made up of a Big Lamp and Little Lamps that are linked to it. Send the Little Lamps to anyone in the world so that when you turn your Big Lamp on, the Little Lamps turn on as well.

Collect your friends' Little Lamps and watch them turn on and off as they come home, go out or go to bed. You'll never come back to an empty home again."

"The Good Night Lamp can be used as an intimate network for two, or as a physical social network for all your friends.

Close family: When you worry about a loved one living alone, give them a Big Lamp, and your Little Lamp will switch on whenever they use it. It's a simple way to see that they're around and pottering. …"

"Perhaps the best Wii idea of all, and one too little copied in other consumer electronics, was that the device itself lit up when something important had happened to it. If a friend sent you a message or if a game needed an update, the system would start emitting a blue glow from its disc drive. You didn't have to turn the Wii on to know something was ready for your attention; the device's light pattern showed it. Most inert consumer electronics do nothing like this, which is a pity. What a disappointing failure that we don't have more electronics that make themselves useful even while they are more or less turned off."

"Adams, Plaid and Persen combined the poem with electronic music and the ambisonic field recordings to produce a piece titled Nord Rute -- the first in a four-part collection of performances about indiginous peoples titled The Compass Series, which merge poetry from Valkaeapää, music from Plaid and ambient audio from Adams. Nord Rute is a narrative account of the Sami people's annual migration.

The resulting performance is described as a "three dimensional psycho-acoustic experience" and an "ambisonic narrative evocation". During a performance the floor is covered with reindeer pelts and surrounded by speakers that create a plane of sound within which blindfolded audience members can immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the journey across the frozen wastes. To enhance the experience, there'll be absolutely no heating -- blankets will be provided and schnapps will be served instead."

Notes here by litherland:

“The ephemerality of speech [sic] in these tools better affords intimacy.” Revisit. /

“That speech is temporal also means someone can be absent, which makes presence meaningful.” Makes a lot of assumptions; needs to rethink (or think harder about) what speech is. Or what he means by it. /

Concept of “intransient group memory.” /

Interesting thoughts about playgrounds. /

“Conversation is an iterated game, so your pseudo can be a strong identity even if it isn’t your *public commercial web face*.” [my emph] /

“Hosts use soft power to influence. The group still governs itself.” /

“Recording is corrosive to candid sharing, so a private internet space must be transient.” /

"How can design bring empathy back in an increasingly disconnected world?  Modern war has lost traditional connection between soldiers on the battlefield and civilians at home.  Shifting enlistment to the poorest members of the nation, increased media coverage of data, rather than individuals, and government censorship has lead to apathy.  The Beat Empathy Device records the heartbeat of an anonymous soldier, and physically taps it into the chest of a civilian.  They share excitement, fear, calm, and death.  The news becomes news about your soldier, not just some soldier.  Now, imagine if this was your drivers license or Government ID."

"Romance has lived too long upon this river; a single-serving web page that tells you how high the tide is at London Bridge: explicitly close up, but also, roughly, at a glance.

The scale runs from zero metres (low tide is typically around 1m deep at London Bridge) to 7.6m (this is around the peak for Spring tides, so if the water fills the screen you know it’s a big one).

The Thames and its related activities are of course the Hello World of real-time data, but I also wanted this to be useful. So Romance… also serves as a weather forecast, warning you if you need to wrap up or take a brolly when you go out."

[Text from: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/portfolio/project/romance-has-lived-too-long-upon-this-river/ ]

[via: http://magicalnihilism.com/2010/12/29/romance-has-lived-too-long-upon-this-river/ ]

"Bubblino is a Twitter-monitoring, bubble-blowing Arduino-bot.

He watches twitter for a chosen keyword and every time he finds a new mention then he blows bubbles."

"For future generations, the experience of rediscovering long-lost friends will be unfamiliar. Similarly, new friends are all too easy to make. If alienation was in part the product of feeling alone in a city or in mass society, misunderstood and unable to find others like oneself, today the Internet makes it possible for us to connect to a massive number of dispersed, networked publics brought together around particular taste cultures. Through social networking sites, we come to regard each other as intimates even before we have met. Intimacy is now a matter of keeping up the "telecocoon," the steady, ambient conversation that keeps individuals together regardless of how far apart they are."

"In response to two strong global vectors: the rise of pervasive information technologies and the privatization of the public sphere, Marc Böhlen and Hans Frei propose hybrid architectural programs called Micro Public Places (MMPs). MPPs combine insights from ambient intelligence, human computing, architecture, social engineering and urbanism to initiate ways to re- animate public life in contemporary societies. They offer access to things that are or should be available to all: air, water, medicine, books, etc. and combine machine learning procedures with subjective human intuition to make the public realm a contested space again."

"Enter the ambient world of Osmos: elegant, physics-based gameplay, dreamlike visuals, and a minimalist, electronic soundtrack.

Your objective is to grow by absorbing other motes. Propel yourself by ejecting matter behind you. But be wise: ejecting matter also shrinks you. Relax… good things come to those who wait.

Progress from serenely ambient levels into varied and challenging worlds. Confront attractors, repulsors and intelligent motes with similar abilities and goals as you."

"The right word is "unfinished." Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a "nature," and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the "nature" of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more "primitive" than ours take this entirely for granted - surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It's not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic - it's saying, Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from."

[via: http://preoccupations.tumblr.com/post/897984340/unfinished ]

"In our current relationship with technology, we bring our bodies, but our minds rule. “Don’t stop now, you’re on a roll. Yes, pick up that phone call, you can still answer these six emails. Follow Twitter while working on PowerPoint, why not?” Our minds push, demand, coax, and cajole. “No break yet, we’re not done. No dinner until this draft is done.” Our tyrannical minds conspire with enabling technologies and our bodies do their best to hang on for the wild ride....

"Through his book, In Pursuit of Silence : Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, George Prochnik explores the benefits of decluttering our sonic world. Speaking with doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and citizens, Prochnik examines what gets lost when we can no longer find quiet. Some of the characters he's encountered on the road include:

"The client sits on phone, downloads soundtrack – custom for city – pulls from location API, & mixes sounds according to instructions. There’s cleverness sure, some audio gee-whizery secret sauce, all very patentable & proprietary that seamlessly pulls it together. As you make your way from uptown to downtown, tone shifts gradually, like in Mr Q’s park but moreso. Mr Q is strictly last century, he’s amateur hour hacker hobbyist. It’s laying copper when we could be putting up cell towers in Africa. Disney doesn’t know from happiest place on earth. On the server it’s all very user-friendly, very drag-n-drop. We show you map of city & your uploaded audio files. You can paint-in areas, just like Photoshop...Colour your regions & associate sounds accordingly. We crowdsourced the names of neighbourhoods from Flickr to give you suggested outlines, if you just wanna throw something together, but the real artist can paint down to the nearest half-meter."

"The city becomes a useful digital playground of information. Cities would be designed to allow for citizen environment manipulation. Controlled from your phone turned remote control, transportation, dinner reservations are queued to your exact needs, a personal ambient soundtrack is sent through airwaves as you walk through the street.

"On the intensity of ideas: If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas. You expect to be engaged with ideas strongly whether you are for or against them. If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture." + "On the naming of things: [...] that was music designed by leaving things out – that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out. All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real. Names are very important."

"I think the reasons these more casual recommendation and discovery methods work better for me are 3-fold: 1. They allow me to employ my fuzzy, intuitive perception of peoples’ broader personality and taste to determine how likely I am to like the things they like (I thought the person on Brightkite looked cool, so I trusted her taste; I think my Last.fm friends are cool, so I trust that new stuff I see them playing will be interesting to me). 2. They aren’t explicitly recommendation systems, but rather allow people to implicitly recommend things just by going about their normal business (someone likes a web page so they post it to Delicious to remember it later, the hipsters at Frankies like Gene Clark so they play his music while they work and I hear it incidentally). I think people are more likely to participate in this kind of system than one where they are expected to formally recommend things. 3. They don’t require me to narrow what I’m looking for by overly specific criteria"

"Hello and welcome to CitySounds.fm! Here you can listen to the latest music from your favorite cities around the world.

At The Board you see the most musically active cities right now. The Board is constantly changing as new music is being created. On the individual city pages you can see what genres that are popular and listen to more of the latest tracks. Tweet the link to a city and you will be registered as a listener on that cities page, in that way your favorite city becomes more popular."

"WideNoise is the iPhone and iPod Touch application that samples decibel noise levels, and displays them on a worldwide interactive map"

[via: http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/widenoise_to_let_all_familiarize_with_the_concept_of_spimes_12460.asp ]

[see also: http://www.openspime.com/2009/01/25/widenoise-to-let-all-familiarize-with-the-concept-of-spimes/ ]

"After all, he concludes, "2009 will be a year of listening."

"The Buddha Machine is a small audio-gear, some kind of "multipurpose ambient device". It is a small portable device with batteries, a speaker and some build-in audioloops. You can select the soothing loops and they keep on playing. With two controllers you can select the volume and (this is the special part) the pitch of the loop. Nothing really special, compared to the things you can do with audio-software, but this device is very charming and inviting to some nice uses."

"This video shows listeners discovering the RjDj application, and let you hear what they hear."

"Brian Eno has conspired with Peter Chilvers on a recently released iPhone app called Bloom that allows you to make your own generative music. (see video above) While at best I would be labeled as “musically challenged,” I found it addictive and easy to make a soundtrack to my daily activities with this tool. Very fun, and definitely a higher brow activity than Guitar Hero."

"Finally exquisite news again, where people from Cologne (and Vienna I think) were really involved in. The RJDJ is an iPhone application, that will turn your life into an interactive musicvideo. It plays music, that will be modified by sensory input. In other words you have music, that reacts to sensory and environmental input. It makes use of different sensors, like the microphone, the acceleration sensor and the touchpad. RJDJ turns your mobile phone into a very complex mixture of music playing device, music instrument or reality shaping artifact. The creators say about it, that it is "like glasses for your ears". They are right. Not only for them the RJDJ is a "digital drug"."

"RjDj is a music application for the Iphone. It uses sensory input to generate and control music you are listening to. RjDj is mainly consumed with headphones. Think of it as the next generation of walkman or mp3 player. The consumer experience of RjDj is similar to the effects of drugs. Drugs affect our sensory perception, so does RjDj. RjDj is a mind twisting hearing sensation."

[more: http://www.rjdj.me/ ]

"We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links."

"...First it’s models of how the world works, then it’s models of how other humans work....[with games] You get to explore other paths to take in the same situation. Eno: “That’s what we do with everything I call culture"

"The ability to stay in touch with people that we have stronger or weaker ties with in this light weight way will be something available to them from a very young age and...throughout their entire lives. What do you imagine the repercussions will be?"

"With the applications I build, you don't have to step out of your life to get an alternative perspective on your everyday. It is either presented to you automatically or is alongside you, available whenever you are interested in something new."

"Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark has set up a twitter account for his house. This allows his home automation system to keep him updated about lighting, security, energy usage, etc. while he is away. Check out this great example of the potential for ambient i

[via: http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=74475_0_24_0_C ]

"Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark has set up a twitter account for his house. This allows his home automation system to keep him updated about lighting, security, energy usage, etc. while he is away. Check out this great example of the potential for ambient i

"Our technology enables individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors. We provide a set of open APIs and communication protocols to manage the data collected."

"Education is probably the best way to help people manage exposure via content, but one of the key challenges for designers in social spaces is to design tools that support awareness and management of this exposure through unruly contact lists."

"MOBIlearn is a worldwide European-led research and development project exploring context-sensitive approaches to informal, problem-based and workplace learning by using key advances in mobile technologies."

"Professor of Learning Sciences & Director of Learning Sciences Research Institute at University of Nottingham. The focus of the LSRI is to explore theories and practices of learning and to design and evaluate novel learning technologies and environments.

"Professor of Learning Sciences & Director of Learning Sciences Research Institute at University of Nottingham. The focus of the LSRI is to explore theories and practices of learning and to design and evaluate novel learning technologies and environments.

"pink noise masks background noise to help you concentrate. Now with source code and white noise, for those less colorful. Drown out annoying roommates and co-workers today!"

"DIY KYOTO value simple things, and seek to produce products of perfect convenience and utility, elegant in their conception and efficient in their operation"

"as technology learns to be social it's also got to learn to be polite. And the best way for a sound to be polite is for you to be able to hear it, but no-one else. And you can't do that with volume, you have to create something that's personal and releva

"phonography/field recording; contextual and decontextualized sound activity"

"Jaiku potentially gives Google Holy Grail - time relevant, location based targeting of info, personalised to very high degree...not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on profile, location & availabil

"fundamental change that information processing goes through when it becomes ubiquitous. One of the ways I've been discussing this transformation in the last couple of years is by talking about information as a material"

"I'm particularly interested in physical/tangible computing, fiction in design, expressive/performance interfaces, social aspects of hardware and software, open source tools, music technology, and lots of other things."

"a portable/wearable device aimed at “dwellers of small towns who yearn for edginess of living in a big city: “enables users to designate any arbitrary space in their town, no matter how dull or empty, as one of their “Thrill Zones”, simply by dra

"Where are the exciting new practices that make real use of the unique affordances of mobile devices going to come from? Apart from government or LA sponsored projects where is the diversity of potential practice going to come from?"

"Psychology. Characterized by a high degree of emotional responsiveness to the environment."

"The Puyo's visual approach may be quieter and no more discreet, but I do like the idea of the car communicating its state and behaviour with subtlety."

"Designed as a 'Seamless Soft Box,' the PUYO uses a gel body to help protect pedestrians in case of an accident..."PUYO is a Japanese onomatopoeia that expresses the sensation of touching the vehicle's soft body."...glows, aiding in nighttime visibility"

"alternative approach for location-based technologies“...collecting & keeping of content can have important social values over & above simply consuming the content in situ"

"Although things have been achieved in the academia, it’s as if we had troubles going beyond the current state in gaming, social computing or navigation. My point here is not to criticize this blogpost but rather to show that LBS innovation is VERY slow

"As you add trips to different destinations, Dopplr’s logo becomes your logo, reflecting what you’re doing - right the way through to the ‘favicon‘ that shows up in the address field of most browsers."

"as we access net through a computer, it's a place we visit. As...something we carry with us everywhere, it swallows us whole. Our presence...becomes constant, intertwingled w/ real world, connected in ways that will emerge from constancy/intertwingling."

"Nebula is an interactive projection system designed to enrich the experience of going to bed, sleeping and waking up. It provides intuitive and natural ways of physically participating in a virtual experience, through simple body movements and gestures."

"The Navigator Game uses communication technology to link children together, allowing them to play simple games such as hide-and-seek and follow-the-leader."

"New Nomads illustrates the research that Philips Design, together with Philips Research, has carried out on wearable electronics.

"This garments uses mobile phone and camera technology to help parents pin point their kids' position, but also fabric antennas, radio tagging and miniature remote cameras to allow children to play exciting games outdoors."

"Imagine having a projector inside your cell phone or PDA, what can you do with it? Researchers from University of Toronto made a cool demo."

"An innovative product appropriate to this new millennium, Soundwalk is a new form of media, whereas one virtually interacts with his or her surroundings. How is it done? Easy, you purchase the walk, go to the starting point, put your headphones on, press

"Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space."

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible."

"3 models for communication: information transfer, storytelling, and presence. While analysis of communication has tended to employ first 2, the 3rd provides a better orientation for recognizing & organizing useful knowledge about sensuous choices in comm

"...is already on the horizon. A screen perhaps without a screen, without contact even, or on the contrary connected through a multitude of extensions....that will highlight the evolution towards more autonomy and more mobility"

"3 basic modes of communication: presence (sensuous sense of the other person being with you, social bonding); storytelling (narrative of a game, lyrics/emotions of song, scenes of movie); pure information transfer (want a taxi! tomorrow’s weather?)"

"As he abandoned his Nokia S60 phone for an iPhone, he found himself missing the presence-enabled phonebook we created for the Nokia handsets."

"I was very happy to have the opportunity to hop up and share my thoughts on Ambient Intimacy at the Future of Web Apps conference in London yesterday. The slides are above."

"we're expending almost no energy at all on getting to grips with this info, it's just there to take it all in if we want. These are the kind of things that represent ambient intimacy that are really lightweight powerful ways to communicate: twitter, flic