Open SongBleach Festival

Open Song is the world’s first real-time, user generated, geolocated song platform.

Inkahoots’ interactive sound-based installation was commissioned for the Gold Coast’s arts festival, Bleach. Its inaugural staging was in the hinterland town of Mudgeeraba, and was free to all 24/7.

Open Song allows participants to compose a song based on their chosen route through a space – they can also record and upload their own samples as they go – contributing to the collective composition of the song in real time. It uses the participant’s web-connected device to reference geolocated nodes that automatically trigger random samples, building a unique sonic composition relative to their passage through the space.

COMPOSING AN OPEN SONG

OPEN SONG APP

KEV CARMODY CONTRIBUTED SAMPLES FROM HIS FARM

STUDENTS’ WORKSHOP IDEAS

THE SUMMERSET COLLEGE STUDENT WORKSHOP

MUDGEERABA RESIDENTS, JUNE 1917. PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN

Inkahoots collaborated with local primary school students in workshops to create sounds for a foundation track which was produced by Inkahoots and Brisbane hip hop group Tailor Made. Revered Australian songwriter Kev Carmody also contributed a library of samples recorded in an old shearing shed on his property on Queensland’s Granite Belt. Recordings of Mudgeeraba residents speaking about local history were also included.

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The work explores ideas of composing with chance based on the Dadaists découpé, and the cut-up technique’s later development by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. It combines these ideas with the Situationists’ notions of psychogeography and dérive – touring through urban landscapes directed by the feelings evoked by the surroundings, experiencing the “specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”

Open Song harnesses digital technologies to extend these principles towards collective and collaborative experiences.

At Mudgeereeba, Gold Coast, March 4-20, 2016

Thank you to: Kev Carmody, Tailor Made, year 6 Mudgeereeba State School and Sommerset College Students, and Savaltore Cantello for pioneers’ stories. Louise Bezzina and Claire Oldfield at Bleach Festival.

Presented in association with Bleach Festival.

Photography Inkahoots
Videography Jarred Beasly.

See more images of the student workshops.