Browser Chance Music (BCM) creates a space for a radically different relationship between user and software. Activating this audiovisual system with your own smartphone gives a sonic and visual presence to the evanescent and imperceptible internet activity that emanates from an object which is often quite personal, but largely unknown. Defamiliarizing the smartphone and revealing the aesthetics of its operation opens the doors to a new relationship with our constant companion.
Interfacing with BCM is as easy as connecting to a specifically configured WiFi network. The device is now connected to the Internet through this WiFi and devices on the Internet use packets to exchange information. While on the network, every packet of internet activity will be registered by the network and passed on to a custom built sonification and visualisation system. Attributes such as who owns the server being communicated with, where the server is located, how much data is being exchanged and how active the connection is are fused into immersive sonic and visual experiences.
Browser Chance Music lets the audience experience the high-frequency, invisible software activity that occurs in our mobile devices when we browse the web. Billions of citizens browse the web every day, everywhere. This activity is powered by billions of software operations that take care of connecting devices to the web and transporting the information from one side of the world to another. Yet, this amazing software activity is invisible, intangible and unknown by most users.
Browser Chance Music explores interactive, spatialized sonification to let users experience this software activity. Through sound, we embody the rich software execution, which is usually disembodied and invisible on a regular interaction with software applications. One challenge we face in this project relates to the significant gap of temporality between the two phenomena: the visible act of browsing is performed at the speed of humans clicking buttons or swiping screens; meanwhile, software that runs in the browser to let humans access the world wide web, operates at a radically different speed, up to thousands of operations per second.