#RotationCreation - Social Sound Design

#RotationCreation

2012-11-25T19:47:11Z

As part of the Europa Cinemas event that took place here in Paris this weekend, I watched a really interesting talk by David Orlic, Creative Director and Co Founder of Volontaire. The discussion was based around a project they developed for the Swedish Institute and Visit Sweden entitled Curators of Sweden.

For those who haven't heard about it, the project saw Sweden become the first country in the world to let go of an official communication channel and hand it over to its citizens. Every week, someone in Sweden became @Sweden and therefore, the sole ruler of the country's official Twitter account. The project trended on Twitter worldwide and, after some controversial comments, gained worldwide media coverage.

Having gained worldwide media coverage, Curators of Sweden has since inspired the launch of many similar projects as well as the term Rotation Creation.

According to Wikipedia:

Rotation Curation, also #RotationCuration, is a social media concept where official and unofficial projects, countries, cities, companies, cultural, and, or other types of groups rotate their spokespersons, curators, every week.

So, has anyone here participated in such a project with a concept of a rotating spokesperson or curator on any level? If so, how did it work out? Is there any scope to develop this idea in a sound design / recording context? We've seen various crowd sourcing projects but I'm wondering how interesting it'd be to try something like this?

Any ideas / thoughts..?

Answer by Mark Durham for #RotationCreation

2012-11-27T10:41:48Z

Not exactly Rotation Curation, but I did take part in a kind of chain patch thread over on the Max/msp forums which perhaps fits under Rotation Creation. Generally I like the idea of lots of people contributing to a creative project, as it then takes on a whole life of its own. If you've not seen it an awesome example of this is the Johnny Cash Project. Totally amazing.

So with the Max thing the idea was that everyone contributed a little bit to the patch a few objects at a time. As you might imagine it got pretty noisy! If there was interest here we could do some collaborative soundscape building or something like that, I'd be well up for it anyway. Not sure how it would work logistically though as file size is quite big. Anyone know of any online environments for this sort of collaboration?

Answer by csaudiodesign for #RotationCreation

2012-11-27T14:30:18Z

In the course of a Max/MSP class I've been taking part of this kind of collaborative work on a bigger piece, each student was writing a small part of it, that was responsible of a specific creative area, like spacialisation, filtering and so on. As @Mark said, not exactly like Rotation Curation, but you get the sense of it. But the fundamental idea are maybe more specific the problems you encounter with the rotation of curation I already experienced there: The distribution is a nice thing, but it would be much more interesting / creative if the decision of combination and artistic fingerprint would change frequently, it would carry on the idea of the collaboration.

Since Max/MSP patches are quite small compared to a DAW-session for sound-design, it shouldn't be a problem to stay with e-mail and FTP or even github (or similar) for the collaboration.

If the solution doesn't exist (I don't know of one) to work on sessions for sound design, it's time to create one. For example by using a public storage for the recorded / sampled material and a session file under version control. A subject to research further upon.