Project: xtet
Turning an audience's mobile handsets into a vast multichannel sound system.
by Daniel Jones and James Bulley
xtet (2013-) is a series of compositions which harness the invisible ubiquity of portable audio devices to create an ephemeral, immersive and participatory field of sound.
By broadcasting real-time audio to the audience's wireless mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, mp3 players, etc), the audience itself becomes a temporary speaker system comprised of countless distributed sound sources, forming a uniquely spatial and participatory experience. The movements of listeners cause the music's spatial formation to shift and grow, akin to the reactive motions of a shoal of fish.
xtet I (α, β, γ, δ, θ, μ), the first piece of the series, maps out the natural rhythms and characteristics of the brain's neural activity, broadcasting audio streams which correspond to individual frequencies of brainwave.