Soundspotting, plundermatics and the art of audio-visual appropriation

Talk by Prof. Michael Casey
To be presented Friday December 5th, 2008
New York University, NYC

Abstract

Soundspotting is a new approach to creating musical streams by
selecting and concatenating source segments from a large audio
database using methods from music information retrieval. Sometimes
called plundermatics, audio mosaics or concatenative synthesis,
soundspotting computes a similarity score between a target audio
segment and all the available segments in the source database and
selects close-matching sources to concatenate to the audio-output
stream forming a real-time response to the target. Examples of target
signals are: acoustic instruments, signals generated by a synthesis
algorithm, or a previous output of the soundspotting process thus
yielding an audio information feedback circuit. Soundspotting enhances
the techniques of sampling, plunderphonics, re-mixing and mashups by
adding automatic audio organization and an external driving target
signal.

Soundspotting opens up new possibilities for audio-visual composition,
admitting control from live audio sources and organization via
deterministic ordering and selection criteria. In this talk, I will
discuss the techniques, technologies and musical possibilities for
soundspotting and present the work of several artists who have
appropriated the technique of soundspotting into their own work.