Your life as a soundtrack

Ed Vielmetti suggests a music player that plays music based on your location.

…a mobile music device like an iPod that has GPS location on it, so that it knows where you are and selects or offers up things to listen to based on where you are or what’s coming up. Some of it is totally ideosyncratic, like playing tunes from bands you saw at concert venues when you go past or near the venue. Some of it is obvious, like playing Mystery Spot Polka when you’re on US-2 heading west out of St Ignace, or Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on M-123 north of M-28 near Whitefish Bay.

Prentiss Riddle builds on the idea and suggests a collaborative soundrack…

If you combined it with GeoURLs (and some method of doing wireless downloads of music to an iPod, a bit of a stretch given 2003 infrastructure and copyright law) you could construct a collaborative musical geography….
A “songlines” system would require a GeoURL engine with hooks to CDDB or an equivalent music database, preferably with a bit more annotation capability than GeoURLs offer; a way to plan a route and query the GeoURL engine to produce a playlist; preferably some capability in the playlist generator to filter CDDB info for genre (no death metal, thanks) and song density (the songs associated with Graceland or Times Square or Austin’s Sixth Street would run into the thousands, while some highways would be lucky to have one song per 50 miles). The hard part would be a discovery agent to trawl various file-sharing systems for the MP3s.

Wow. All kinds of opportunities for collaborative performance art.
This would be cool for reunions… “they’re playing our song.” Or creating a mix tape for a friend programmed for a favorite walk. All you need are lighting effects cued to emotional dynamics and life becomes a movie.

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