Thom Blum: Soundscraper – live crowdsourced soundscaping

The Soundscraper project, the hair-brained brainchild of composer Thom Blum, will premiere Capsule 1 -inside/outside, a continuous, two-hour, structured improvisation based on live crowdsourced sound feeds.
Soundscraper performances rely on people participating (volunteering), worldwide, providing live sound streams over the Internet from their environments to a mixer-performer. The mixer-performer “re-streams,” processes, and diffuses the incoming sounds, live, within the performance venue.
Inside the venue the live sound feeds are balanced and blended with processed variations of themselves. There is control over the “dry/wet” mix of the inputs, so the mixed soundscape inside the venue will range from being the pure, raw, input sounds to being a sound that bears little or no resemblance to the input.
A Soundscraper score (more of a schedule) gives the participants a sequence of descriptions of “place-sounds,” as well as the times at which the sounds are requested. The types of sound environments that are requested change and progress over the course of a performance. The mixer-performer attempts to shape (more like herd or sweep) the incoming sounds into a kind of narrativemusical expression, with the score/schedule being the sound map. This is “soundscraping” – the mixing, processing, diffusing, and structuring of sounds being streamed in, live, from the world at large.
The two-hour performance can be experienced either seated or roaming the space.