Sound Sticker
Transient Embedded Audio and the Rescoring of Social Space

Benjamin Bratton

An MP3 player housed in a small, inexpensive, powerful plastic disc that can be surreptitiously placed on any environmental surface, Sound Sticker is a new medium for both digital audio and for the populist détournement of the architectonics of everyday sound and structure.

Sound Sticker is a three-step program: download an audio file (MP3) into the disc, plan a site and situation for its placement, and affix loaded player to any surface. Quickly, gracefully, and anonymously, the given flows of that social scene have been called to attention, called into question, and temporarily suspended and redesigned by the introduction of the disc. What happens next is unpredictable, uncontrollable and unlimited.

\Social space is a sonic habitat; it is always already a scene for an auditory program of some sort, and therefore for some potential counter-program. In recent history, cultural interventions in the scope of that program can be traced from Stockhausen to pirate radio, from Eno to the Arecibo radio telescope.

Sound Stickers are a cheap, anonymous medium for grass roots reprogramming. By creating/choosing a (MP3) file, loading it into the Sound Sticker disc and actively introducing that disc onto a surface and into an environment, the user is empowered to literally re-architect that space with her unexpected auditory intervention. Any site is an appropriate scene for this medium (a police station, an amusement park, an airline seat, a sidewalk, perhaps even an art gallery) because every site always already animated by multiple trajectories of power, and is therefore available for multiple contestations.

Sound Sticker is an inexpensive, standardized medium for the willful reorientation of a given socio-auditory place by the introduction of an alternate ‘sound track,’ not so unlike how a composer illuminates the image-space of a film with her score. But it is also something both more and less than the stylized, complimentary, aesthetic gesture of the film score. Its purpose is not the animation of fiction, but the revelation of alternative scenes of real habitaiton. Discovering what Sound Sticker "is" is the primary agenda of the project as it is proposed for your consideration.

I have commissioned several test users (composers, programmers, filmmakers, sociologists, performance artists, architects and political activists) to construct short pieces (5 seconds to 10 minutes) specifically for the Sound Sticker medium, and for each to plan for installation in a specific location. While certainly appropriate to musical composition, Sound Sticker is by no means limited to that logic of sound; and while particularly appropriate to contestational intervention, Sound Sticker equally well allows the adventitious illustration of a site’s ambient beauty.

Any new medium can only truly realize its potential after some phase of formal experimentation. The combination of intentionally composed audio, the development of a architectonic program for its location in a given space, and the real social event of its interrelation with the publics that encounter it, is a technology that is open to several heterological and incongruous practices. This undecidness, the range of possible applications and ramifications, must be deliberately defended at this early stage in its development. For this reason, I have asked each participating 'test user’ to keep the nature of their project secret from each of the other users, and to keep their plans sequestered from outside critical review. Even the media engineers with whom I am designing alternate prototype designs of the discs themselves are kept at an enforced distance from the composers’ plans and creative prejudices.

How should Sound Sticker be situated in the minor history of audio-spatial programming? The notions of sub-perceptual audio-spatial programming and deliberate deception of the collective ear are by no means unprecedented. With a nod to Stanley Milgram’s test/demonstrations of authority-deference and fictional electrocution, William S. Burroughs famously described the potential of pre-recorded sounds of a riot to effectively spark a riot if played amongst a receptive crowd at just the right time. Conversely, the Muzak Corporation and Disney Park engineers seek to soothe and motivate crowds to passivity.

Conversely, Sound Sticker is a far more populist and democratic medium. Today revolutionarily inexpensive digital chips together with powerful data compression technologies allow everyone to reprogram the audio tracks of their social worlds site-by-site, sound-by-sound, if only for a few memorable minutes. Instead of a professional’s apparatus (Artistic or Corporate) Sound Sticker is, now, differentially useful to everyday people and their boundless needs to communicate. However profound a user’s program, Sound Sticker remains a modest device. Like a car alarm, it is a profane contraption. A car alarm is a sonic broadcast medium that is both essentially portable and deeply embedded in the spatial fabric of the social world. Sound Sticker radicalizes both that portability and that embeddedness.

Part audio-graffiti, part DIY-architecture, Sound Sticker is an easy-to-use, inexpensive medium for active digital interventions into the material fabric of the collective sensorium.