Technology Layers (Audio AR)

 

Ambient music in headphones at low volume works well as a foreground-background experience in urban environments where there can be lots of pitched elements: Certain junctures in a piece of music will randomly coincide with a pitched element in the environment. This is essentially "Audio AR" (the headphone sounds augmenting or overlaying what is in the environment (the "Reality").

A useful aspect of Audio AR is that it can be used for alerts at low volume in narrow frequency bands with piquancy. But again, do we want another layer of distraction, and how do alerts or notifications fit in the various cognitive levels?

Never before in history have we been so obsessed with technology layers. The exciting thing is that tech is naturally generative, but might be producing more glut, and not enough time to explore it. For me the best way is to make your own user experience, without the need for interfaces. For me, this involves selecting specific music, then taking the same walks with the same music, without the use of computer algorithms, and more "routines" (which are essentially algorithms).

Audio AR (or just listening to something at low volume while walking) naturally encodes the place memory. Your brain does this as its own routine. 

[12/17/2024: Our experience of the world is spatiotemporal; there are 'place' cells mapped in the hippocampus, and are associated with memory. (I know this is true because listening to music or other sounds while moving, encodes the memory of the place when played again. Audio books will do this, whereas paper books, even though they invoke place in the imagination, don't get replayed in the brain when read again.) Virtual environments are like books read while traveling; it doesn't imprint your memory of the place where you were reading it. If stationary, a virtual experience probably will not invoke place memory. It will be interesting to see the effects of VR and VR audio on 'brain places.']