Radio Waves Music. (2020)
Description:
In 1920, composer Erik Satie proposed Furniture Music — music designed to blend seamlessly into everyday life as ambient interior sound. One hundred years later, in 2020, what is it that has truly dissolved into the fabric of modern life? Perhaps radio waves are one answer. How might the ambient music and BGM that evolved in Satie's wake continue to develop through AR technology?
AR expands the very concept of "indoors." What do we feel when we listen to music that resounds in the "indoors" of 2020 — a space that transcends the boundaries of what was once defined as interior?
Radio Waves Music AR Experience → [LINK] (※Styly app required on mobile)
Motivation:
I wanted to update the experience of music through AR. Rather than VR, I chose AR deliberately — I wanted the listener to experience music through an exchange with the real world, not an escape into a virtual one. The key interaction I arrived at was walking. The music shifts not through taps on a screen — the familiar gesture of smartphone apps — but through the act of moving through space. This was intentional: I wanted the experience to remain a dialogue between one's own body and physical space. Tapping, I felt, would shift that dialogue toward one's own body and virtual space — so I chose to avoid it entirely.
As a result, the particles born from music and ripples, and the audio-visualizers that shift as you walk, change in response to movement through the surrounding environment. The audio-visualizer — constructed from external particles and the sounds reaching the listener's ears — holds the potential to make one aware of their own body, here and now. I wanted to create something through which embodiment itself could be reconfirmed — through the body, and through what the body has created.
The sound source draws from what is known as ambient music — a genre widely considered to have evolved from Satie's Furniture Music. Exactly one hundred years after Satie's proposal, this work invites reflection on what it means to experience ambient music today. The title Radio Waves Music is itself a reference to Satie's Furniture Music. And through AR, the work extends not only the concept of "indoors" — it extends the very modes of interference through which ambient and environmental music exist in space.
Satie's Furniture Music is described as "indoor music" — music meant to be played indoors. In this work, as one moves beyond the audio-visualizers surrounding the space, the sound fades and the waves and particles cease. This expresses a kind of pseudo-indoors. In other words, what AR has expanded here is not space itself — but the possibility of where "indoors" can exist.
Exhibition:
November 2020: Social Innovation Week Shibuya 2020 @ Miyashita Park
January 2021: NEWVIEW EXHIBITION 2020 in Taipei @ Huashan 1914 (Taiwan)
Duration:
3 weeks
Gallery:
