Terrible as many urbanists have argued to be, contemporary urban design orients the traffic web into a direction that is less human-friendly. With the growth of vehicles per capita, traffic congestion happens all the time, and it would get even more intense during the rush hours. Traffic status may trigger emotional change. When you are driving on the road and trapped in a block, it is highly possible that you would get anxious, angry, and even mad especially if you have an emergency. If you always see green lights whenever you meet a road crossing, and the traffic is expedited all the time, it is also highly possible that you would be pleasant. Music or melody, as I would argue, also embody human emotion. A series of tones with high tempo arouses anxiety, and for those with low tempo may express a relaxing feeling. In light of such a connection, I associate the urban traffic status as a kind of symphony that is composed of anxious congestion or pleasant expediteness.
As for my final project, I propose to visualize and audiblize the real-time traffic status within the area out of the user’s choice in the city of Shanghai as an Internet Art. On the website, there would be two parallel squares in the center. One on the left would be the map, and the other on the right would be a board telling the audience how the traffic in the selected area in the map is crowded via an index in 1-10 scale (10 means super crowded). The sound, as well as the background color in the index board, would change according to where the users would move their map on the screen. The piece that the audience would hear would be a composition combined with the audience’s subjective choice as well as what the urban traffic has granted to the web page. The visualization and audiblization of the traffic status offers us a new angle to see the things happening in the urban environment, and
My project idea is mainly inspired by Listen to Wikipedia (http://listen.hatnote.com/) by Mahmoud Hashemi and Stephen LaPorte. In that project, the artists connected the API from Wikipedia, and visualized real-time updates as well as their sizes, with sounds accompanied. It inspired me to use a similar way in connecting the map API, visualize the data and audibilize the information on the website. Another inspiration comes from Matthew N. Le-Bui’s mapping project (http://usc-annenberg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=dfdf73b1faa64daea9cb7835d62ce1can) where the author mapped the artisanal coffee shops and connected that idea with gentrification. This is a drawable, clickable, and scrollable interactive map. Although I would not do one webpage as complex as such, the idea to have a scrollable, scalable, and drawable map is what I want.
In this project, I would use JavaScript and API based on HTML and CSS to frame the webpage. Gaode Map (https://www.amap.com/) shares its API with real-time traffic status with the users, and I could incorporate that in my project with the guidance and help from Leon. As for the audio part, I would look out for sound libraries if there is any that I may use. Otherwise, I would record some scaled sounds from instruments including piano, guitar, drum, etc. The user would interact with the web page by dragging or scrolling (to resize) the map. The audio, or the symphony piece made by the traffic, would be generated from what is on the user’s screen.