An internet-based architecture for live audio interaction worldwide with participation open to the public at large. http://www.auracle.org/, a networked sound instrument, controlled by the voice and played over the Internet
'I started in another direction which I now call Networks; these are inter-connections of lay people again, having a dialogue with sound that is beyond language. I did the first one, also in the middle of the sixties, with a radio station in New York City. It involved doing something which was unheard of at that time: I plugged the telephone system into the radio station. I installed ten telephone lines at the station and asked people to call in during a two-hour period with whatever sounds they wanted. It created a live sound collage made with the participation of anybody within a twenty-mile radius the ten million people who were living there. These Networks gradually progressed into a series of radio/telephone events, in different cities. In the middle of the seventies I realized one for the whole of the USA with two hundred radio stations and five cities where people called into. I made huge trans-continental loops to transform their sounds.It was called Radio Net. At that time the word ‘network’ wasn’t a word in general us; it was a word that engineers knew but if you mentioned ‘network’ in a cultural context or any kind of conversation except with an engineer, no-one would know what it was. With these network ideas, I was also trying to go beyond the event and make them into entities. I was trying to figure out how I could take over a radio station twenty-four hours a day, or a network of radio stations. Fortunately, though, the Internet arrived. As of last year there is a work, Auracle, which is there twenty-four hours a day at a site called www.auracle.org. It is a point of meeting to create a network of people who play an instrument together using their voice'.
Max Neuhaus
Photo: Max Neuhaus, Auracle
This interview was conducted via email in Spring 2005 for the article “Sounding the Net: Recent Sonic Works for the Internet and Computer Networks.” The article was published in the Contemporary Music Review in the Summer of 2005: PeterTraub.htm