AARON GOCHBERG

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this map says you are here
2022 Sound installation. 

Sonified GPS-satellite transmissions, for vertically-spatialized audio.

Exhibited at müriaadFEST
Tallinn, EE, November 2022 Credits

Aaron Gochberg
Creation

“Looking at the map, we view ourselves from above. Abstracted from time, the map suggests our terrain to be permanent and unchanging. We define our locations by the things that surround us, but our relations to geographical reference points have become increasingly distant and vague. Some 20,000km overhead, GPS satellites form fleeting trios, constructing my position and my course” 






TECHNICAL NOTESGPS satellites transmit pseudo-random binary values through electromagnetic synthesis techniques, called phase shift keying. These signals are decoded by our smartphones and the time delay between transmission and reception is used to measure our distance to the nearest three orbiting satellites, and thus to triangulate our position. 

In this work, I reapplied Binary Phase Shift Keying techniques to sound synthesis, encoding binary messages in audible ‘transmissions’. Rapid oscillations between sine and cosine waves distort the waveform producing rhythmic impulses which serve as the basis of both BPSK and this installation.

Following the creation of this work, I have returned to this synthesis technique and developed a Max/MSP abstraction to encode ASCII characters into binary bitstrings. View the git repository here.