Samson Graham
Elastic Media
What Is The Future Of Sound?
WaveGen is a speculative sound-based media platform that imagines how emerging technologies could be implemented in generating new types of interactive media. The more you use the service the more the content conforms to your own preferences and reacts to the changing context of the environment around you. Imagine music that matches the rhythm of your body as you exercise. Headphones that instead of cancelling out noise, transforms it into something calming. Your favourite song sounding a bit more sparse and downtempo as it rains outside your window. What would be the shared soundtrack of spending time between your closest friends? The possibilities are endless.
Insight
This project started with the question “what is the future of sound?” Presently, most of our developments in audio technology have been in the shape of accessibility and convenience, with no huge changes in the formal qualities of sound itself. Most of our digital audio content resembles the limitations of when we used analog methods of recording. Even completely computer generated songs behave as if they were recorded in real time, stuck in in the same place. The future of sound exists in what is beyond the conventions created by physical limitations.
Idea
Elastic Media describes a type of digital content not bound by the physical limitations that define the nature of recorded music today. If digital sound is a computer translating lines of code, can’t the code be programmed to never stay the same? The possibilities in our future technology has the potential of a type of interactive media that can assume any shape and is less like a permanent record and more like a score - subject to the uniqueness and the context in which it’s played in.
Impact
The impact of Elastic Media has to do with much more than just digital sound. If some of the ideas behind this speculative project are possible, what else could it be applied to? The underpinning of this project is the development of digital media that is only explicitly possible through a digital platform. It’s looking to find what exactly the texture of data is and leverage it in a way that sets it apart from every other material.
Biography
Samson Graham is a Multi-Disciplinary Designer based in Toronto. Growing up as a child of two deaf parents, Samson grew up with a constant awareness of the parameters and limitations of the built world. Out of this grew a passion for sound, music, storytelling, and eventually design. Samson’s approach to his work is founded on the belief that all creative pursuits operate within the margins of our ability to understand the world through sensory information and the limitations of language.