Xenakis: Experimenting with Data, Cities, and Sounds
This work addresses the loosely-defined problem of 'hearing a city' for visualization researchers and musicians, using an open-ended design study approach.
The researchers tackled the problem of representing urban topology through sound by developing Xenakis, a tool that converts street orientation distributions into musical loops, producing musical tracks as results.
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.