Making audio this summer

[Dave Lester]

At SXSW in 2008 I saw a demo that used Processing to generate audio
based on data from an email spam filter (it was *so* cool). They took
a year's worth of spam data (when messages were received, how many
message, etc) and condensed it into a timeline of a few minutes.
Audio was then generated using a processing library based upon that
data, and you could literally *hear* spam arriving at his inbox. The
composition of sound was unique, and has gotten me thinking for a
while now. Is anyone familiar with this project? I think the
presenter may have worked for Yahoo.

I've been playing with ideas to indicate simple physical relationships
to historical places (pitches and velocity representing distance), and
I think that I could start (rather crudely to begin, but as a proof of
concept) to create a prototype for how that spatial relationship could
be represented.

It's very possible that this will take 8 weeks to learn, or exceed the
8 weeks.. but you don't know until you try! If there's time, I'd like
to think of ways of mashing up an arduino and gps to the processing
code that I develop -- so as you walk physically through space, your
spatial relationship to sites will be indicated via audio. Even if I
don't get to any huge arduino development, I look forward to following-
along and learning the basics.

If you have any suggestions for where I to start, let me know.
Thanks!

Dave