Musical Smart Cities: Functional Feedback, Perceptual Coupling, Real-Time Synthesis
Holon is mobile system for ubiquitous music based on places, contexts and environmental factors. It creates a synthesised accompaniment from your activities and location data.
Through the interplay of sensor data, spatial configuration, and real-time synthesis, the Holon app transforms everyday experiences into opportunities for introspection and social connection. Coupling music with real-world phenomena empowers listeners with agency and ownership while allowing emergent, poetic and personally relevant sonic experiences to happen.
Socio-spatial, Physical Computing: Spacial Dynamics, Space Syntax, Persistent Affordances
Holon showcases features of the Holonic geospatial computing platform for music, such as onboard synthesis of data mapped to Land Use/Land Cover, Points Of Interest and user activities, including vehicle speed, body movement and other users.
Holon currently works in 500 regions in 90 countries and features 20 million musical affordances. These places, objects and areas become possibilities for transient, ephemeral and inherently meaningful musical moments. See the coverage map and request areas to be added.
Active Sensing, Passive Operation for Active Listening and Active Commuting
Holon employs a data-driven bottom-up approach where listener activities and their environment create expressive, real-time synthetic accompaniments, turning listeners into improvising performers through increased musical agency and functional feedback or entrainment.
Artists and sound designers can use the Holonist editor and the modular miRack™ Engine to develop top-down compositional strategies, musical frameworks and rule bases for real-world mobile scenarios, allowing audiences to explore musical interactions through their everyday activities.
No screen interaction or wearables are required, as the service relies on on-device sensors and GPS. Instead, the city itself becomes a collaborative entity.
Holon is a mobile system for adaptive music creation based on activities, contexts and environmental factors. The Holon app for iPhone showcases features of the Holonic spatial computing platform for music, such as onboard synthesis of data mapped to Land Use/Land Cover and PointsOfInterest and user movement including vehicle speed and body movement.
Integrations: Modular, Virtual, Physical
Holon.ist editor connects to our cloud backend, which allows interactions with real world data to be mapped to musical information. We support MaxForLive, VCV, Reaktor and wearables like Apple Watch, AirPods Pro/Max, Movesense - and of course OSC with autodiscovery, Ableton Link, embedded PureData and now, as an exclusive first, embedded miRack patches!
User created mappings and synthesis patches for miRack can be shared as .holonist presets for distribution with the free Holon app!
Adaptive Location-based Synthesis
The Holonic platform provides a way to develop personalised and engaging music that adapts to the user's environment, activity, and other contextual factors - ubiquitous music.
With Holonic’s spatial computing solution, artists can create highly responsive electronic music experiences that are informative, expressive, and social. Spatial computing uses large scale movement and civic data as inputs.
- Dynamic inputs, mappings, outputs for input prioritisation, autoscaling and adaptive onboard synthesis.
- Proxemic feature for automatically detected objects and places imported from Open Street Map.
- 20 million places provide musical affordances in 500 regions and 90 countries.
- LULC/POI features in Holon.ist are available now, view the coverage map and request areas to be added.
- Support for user created content with integrated miRack synthesis engine, exclusively licensed from mifki.
Social Musical Communication (Beta): Autodetect, Proxemics, Shared Parameters
The latest Holonic innovation is a social musical communication feature that allows nearby users to influence each other’s music through physical proximity and orientation.