Compositions
Julia Bloom, Sukanya Aneja, Michael Hsu
View Project
Data is an act of imagination. When we see data, we imagine a world. How close is the data to reality? How far? We are interested in exploring the distance between the New York we experience and the New York we imagine through data. Compositions is an online soundboard that allows participants to play and compare field recordings of select street corners with soundscapes generated algorithmically using data from NYC Open Data.
Users can toggle between field recordings and generated soundscapes, and read some words that help them feel or understand what they are hearing. They can also visit the locations in person to ground truth the fidelity of the generated soundscapes for themselves.
In some cases, listeners may find that the artificial NYC soundscape heightens their awareness of certain noises of the city. They may notice the presence or absence of birds chirping, diners laughing over lunch, the wind, the rain, or the rumbling of a train passing underfoot. The artificial soundscapes may also exaggerate the frequency and intensity of “nuisance” noises like construction, loud pedestrian conversation, street traffic, and so on. They might even find that there is some agreement between the computer-generated soundscapes and the field recordings. Perhaps they will find, as we did, that so much of the character of a city depends, in fact, on the time of day, the weather, or the moods of passersby—the countless coincidences from which emerges the sounds of life.
DATASETS
311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present
Street Construction Permits
DOB Permit Issuance
Sidewalk Café Licenses and Applications
Open Restaurant Applications
Bi-annual Pedestrian Counts
Traffic Volume Counts (2014-2019)
Land Cover Raster Data (2017) – 6in Resolution