Anne Elise Thomas, Montasir Abbas, Charles Nichols, and Qichao Wang
The Green Light SONATA project originated with a hunch in the engineering domain, but could only materialize through true collaboration of researchers working across disciplines. The project tested the hypothesis that translating simulated traffic information into music could lead to musical resolution of persistent traffic congestion. Our team—consisting of civil engineers, a composer/performer/computer music researcher, and an ethnomusicologist—proceeded to construct a model of an intersection in which each direction of traffic flow was assigned a musical pitch. Hearing these pitches as cues, musicians could interact with the sonified traffic to allow vehicles to proceed through the intersection. The result was a musical “gamification” of traffic flow in which the goal was to minimize the vehicles’ idle time. The next stage of this project will include public demonstration and testing sessions, involving students and additional musicians, to assess the concept’s viability, refine our methods, and gather further data. The team’s multidisciplinary dialogue takes us on productive tangents translating between different domains of musical and technical expertise. Moving forward, we plan to test additional methods of data sonification, manipulating additional musical variables (including pulse and rhythm, sequence, scales, ornaments, and other musical elements) and scaling up to model multiple consecutive intersections.
Since September 2017
Virginia Tech |
Traffic Transportation Systems Civil Engineering Music Computer Music Data Sonification Music Composition Ethnomusicology
Civil Engineering Music Ethnomusicology
The project was partially supported by a Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology SEAD (Science, Engineering, Art, and Design) Major Initiative Program grant, and the Virginia Tech Data and Decisions Destination Area Concept seed grant.