Urban Remix: a collaborative and locative sound project

 The Public Art Program and UrbanRemix, invited the public to explore, share, and remix the sounds of Times Square throughout April and May. Urban Remix combined location-based cellphone technology, a database, and a web application to allow citizens to record and store media such as sound, images, and ultimately videos in their city and position them in a digital map.

We invited the publice to capture and contribute sounds from Times Square using UrbanRemix's free mobile phone software for iPhone/iOS and Android devices. These sounds were tagged with geo-location, timestamp, and keywords and stored in our server’s database. Using our web-based software application, anyone anywhere was able to explore the contributed sounds, view them on a virtual map of Times Square, and mix and share their own soundscapes. At the conclusion of the project, UrbanRemix performed a remix of the collected sounds in a public space in Times Square, and made the remix available for download and distribution. In addition, we developed and supported an online remix contest and ring-tone generator as alternative performance and distribution formats.