Browser Chance Music

Browser Chance Music lets the audience experience the high-frequency, invisible software activity that occurs in our mobile devices when we browse the web. Billions of citizens browse the web every day, everywhere. This activity is powered by billions of software operations that take care of connecting devices to the web and transporting the information from one side of the world to another. Yet, this amazing software activity is invisible, intangible and unknown by most users.

Browser Chance Music explores interactive, spatialized sonification to let users experience this software activity. Through sound, we embody the rich software execution, which is usually disembodied and invisible on a regular interaction with software applications. One challenge we face in this project relates to the significant gap of temporality between the two phenomena: the visible act of browsing is performed at the speed of humans clicking buttons or swiping screens; meanwhile, software that runs in the browser to let humans access the world wide web, operates at a radically different speed, up to thousands of operations per second.

Team

Benoit Baudry, KTH, baudry@kth.se .
Henrik Frisk, KMH.