"MyCity, MySounds" Application
"MyCity, MySounds" is a georeferencing app for iOS- and Android-based smart devices developed by ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics in 2014. "MyCity, MySounds" can be used to create site-specific miniature compositions, media-supported Soundwalks or audio- and video-walks and share them with a growing community. In 2017, for example, Thomas M. Siefert and Lasse-Marc Riek's "rhein_strom" project was realized, in which a section of the Rhine - from the source of the Rhine to the port of Karlsruhe - was mapped in a variety of sounds. For "100 Sounds", the French sound artist Sébastien Roux as early as 2015 transferred a grid measuring 250 m x 200 m to the city map of Karlsruhe and created a transitory soundcape composition for Karlsruhe's urban space. "MyCity, MySounds" was developed further in 2017 by ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in cooperation with the Athens institutions Onassis Stegi and Medea Electronique as part of the Interfaces project.
Find more projects related to the app HERE.

open call for 4 residencies
Four scholarships of 1500€ each will be awarded. Within the framework of an Artist Residency at ZKM, the selected artists will be able to work on their project ideas and sketches over a period of one month and realize a new artistic work. Over the one-month-scholarship period, the artists have no obligation to reside in Karlsruhe, although sporadic stays at the ZKM | Karlsruhe have to be scheduled. Any travel and accommodation costs incurred are to be borne by the artists themselves or paid out of the scholarship amount. The residency is sceduled in the second half of 2018 and must have been completed by the end of 2018.

The Artist-in-Residence programme is part of the INTERFACES project and is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Find out more about the open call here.

Selected Artists in Residency: 

The ZKM | Center for Art and Media  received more than 70 entries for the open call, "MyCity, MySounds", which ran until May 20th, 2018.

The following artists were selected for implementation starting in September, 2018:

Thomas Butler: "Karlsruhe Survey"
"Karlsruhe Survey" is a series of short electro-acoustic compositions that illustrate important locations of power-generation in the city. A mixture of field recordings and synthesis, each composition considers a single piece of energy infrastructure, the real or imaginary ether. Together, these pieces form an acoustic figuration of the energy potential.

Amble Scuse: "Normalised Interfacing Karlsruhe"
"My project was inspired by the notion that my body is an interface between myself and my environment. I can only experience that environment through my body. What happens when you do not posses the body that the city was built for? My disability creates a unique interface on a practical and social level. My proposal for this project was to map and document the process of a disabled body interfacing with a new city via a series of body sensors (EEG & ECG), a sound recorder, video, photo stills, improvised spoken blog posts and a location tracker. What impact does a city have on a sick body? I then reworked excerpts from the documentation into a soundscape controlled by the body sensors. EEG and ECG sensors attached to my body processed the different layers of the recording in real time during the performance events."

Nicolas Melmann: "Spread – A sound cartography of the Jewish diaspora"
The project seeks to explore the cultural heritage and part of the history of the Jewish people, its cultural diversity as a result of multiple expulsions, forced migration processes and infinite pilgrimage through sound. Integrating field recordings, interviews and historical testimonies, a sound archive is built reflecting the routes of the diaspora and thinking the geography and the urban space as narrative of the history and the sonorous representation of its landscapes in the present.
This online sound archive is hosted on an interactive sound map, where the sounds are located in the specific geographical coordinates where they has been recorded and they can be heard through the app "MyCity, MySounds".

Rahel Kraft & Tomoko Hojo: "Shinonome"
For the audio walk Shinonome Tomoko Hojo and Rahel Kraft explored the acoustics of dawn in relationship to walking and light during their residency at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany. Due to reduced visual inputs our auditory sensibility is and we perceive sounds which are normally overheard. Dawn is a transition between night and day, dreaming and being awake, light and dark, and loudness, natural and supernatural, a daily phenomenon which is rarely connected to the sonic but rather to the visual impact during the blue hour.
The exchange of recorded dawn-diaries, as well as Japanese, Chinese, English and German literature related the theme, made a starting point for shared perceptions and memories. In search for a site with various transitions, Hojo+Kraft chose the Schlossgarten in Karlsruhe as a place between, animals/humans, /silence, center/periphery. Several sonic interventions and listening walks in response to the structure and atmosphere of the Schlossgarten were conducted. Field and voice recordings melted into a collection of audible traces and boundaries, the trembling feeling towards unidentified sounds and the perception of time during twilight. In the compositional process Hojo+Kraft travelled to northern Norway to experience an extended dawn during the polar lights. The observation of the inspiring light transitions intertwine with fictional entities, the mythology of Aura and miniature text fragments of Ezra Pound, Sei Shonagon, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, Chü-, Carlo Rovelli and Hilde Domin to create a dreamlike, state. Twelve compositions with a total length of 50 minutes are leading listeners through time, traces, tremor and transformation to open alternative perspectives to the Schlossgarten. Shinonome expands our auditory sensibility which often has been forgotten in the noisy city life.