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TRAFIC is a sound installation by Gilles Aubry(CH) & Renata Kaminska (PL), created for the opening of the cultural center STRALAU 68 in Berlin, in march 2003.

The center is located in a former house for train workers, close to the railways and the industrial harbour. STRALAU 68 has been rehabilitated into a cultural center with concert and rehearsal rooms. It is a place for music, performance and visual arts creation, where international individuals can meet and exchange ideas & cultures. The sound of the trains passing periodicaly on the bridge outside is very loud, even inside the building and belongs thus to the sonic identity of the center.

The installation consists in a pair of audio boxes that spread the sound recorded outside of the building with a microphone and processed in realtime by a computer.
A video beamer displays sequences of images that are generated in realtime by a computer, syncronised with the sound.

The core of the installation is a computer programm, written in max/msp/jitter language, which analyses the incoming sound and process it in realtime, with techniques of mapping and feedback, resulting in a never repeating musical and visual stream. The activity of the system follows the one of the outside, peaking when a train passes on the railway that is the closest from the house, every 3-6 minutes.
Different kinds of sounds are sometimes to be recognised, like cars, birds, trains, human voices, rehearsing bands and street workers. All of them are influencing the system in their way and contributing to its diversity…

Pictures of a toy locomotive are used in sequences generated by the computer, where speed, order, contrast, saturation and other parameters are dependent of the music. The use of a toy locomotive is a tribute to one of the first film sequence of history : « Entrée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat», by Louis Lumière in 1897.

>> SOUND EXCERPT 1 >> real audio >> quiet state...

>> SOUND EXCERPT 2 >> real audio >> passage of a train... !!!!LOUD!!!!