MMT Travel Kit

The Multimedia Thesaurus is a playful tool for exploring sound and its latent and potential correlations with space, light, colour, image and movement. Its design is aimed to stimulate critical discourse about sound and multimedia, and to facilitate discussion between potential collaborators who may not share the same terminology, background experience or conceptual framework for describing sounds and music. Participants explore collections of very short sound and image files through the manipulation of physical objects linked to the files through barcodes. The sounds and images are sorted according to their perceived salient characteristics, whether relating to mood, association, or parameters of the audio signal itself. Each has an associated database entry in the computer with various types of information, updated at each “sorting”. Although the main format of the tool is a room-size installation, the MMT Travel Kit is a portable prototype, where the objects can be sorted into trays and/or on trees by colour, keywords, or diagrams. For this demonstration, most of the clips will be drawn from contemporary electroacoustic and computer music compositions, including the FreeSound collection [4] and works by composers associated with the project.