Stumbled across this beautiful paper as part of the University of California - Irvine project "Digital Voices" the other day... It's talking about the pervasiveness of digital communications in this day and age, and about the beauty (or lack of) that is contained in these transmissions (remember the old-school acoustic modems?).
The pertinent idea presented here is that the digital transmissions (especially in Ubiquitous Computing applications) need not be aesthetically displeasing; and in fact could be quite musical with the relevant information encoded within. Some example schemes for audible-range encoding are presented within the paper...
The beauty here is that no new technology or hardware is required, many devices around the home already have the required speaker/mic for audible range transmissions.
An interesting fundamental component of this 'acoustic modem' idea is that there is inherently a trade-off between data rate and aesthetic - the faster the transfer the more likely the sounds are to be 'annoying'...
Perhaps most interesting though, is the opening of the data-communications fields to sound designers, composers and HCi developers, creating a new form of art and expression. Quite possibly, the digital communications could be encoded in a form that also, as the authors suggest, 'leaks' some of the information to people - allowing a two way communication channel to develop with our machines....
...sharing and documenting the design and construction process of the 2011 USyd Interaction Design & Electronic Arts (M.IDEA) Device Lab major work
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