Real Time is a software system for installations that plays selected MIDI scores by capturing ambient sounds in real time from geographically distant devices. It plays the track's silent notes by replacing them with the closest acoustic frequencies.
The project, conceived by Alessio de Girolamo, was developed in collaboration with LIM (Laboratory of Musical Informatics at the University of Milan) and the Department, as the subject of Jacopo Silvestri's Bachelor's Thesis.
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The research initiated through Real Time is now being further developed within Alessio de Girolamo’s PhD in Electroacoustic Composition and Sound Arts at the “Umberto Giordano” Conservatory of Foggia. It investigates the relationship among environmental sound, computational systems, and compositional processes, exploring how an acoustic environment can shape the behavior and form of a musical work.
Real Time represents an early stage of this investigation: a system in which environmental sound is treated as an active agent that can influence the emergence of a pre-existing musical structure. The research has since expanded toward the concept of Environmental Sonic Agency, examining forms of composition in which listening, computation, and environmental contingency operate together.
Current developments extend these principles into live performance and rhythmic structures, investigating how sounds captured from the environment can generate or influence musical processes in real time. The research increasingly focuses on systems in which the surrounding world participates not only as sonic material but also in organizing rhythm, timbre, and musical form itself.
Time and Numbers
“[...] The experience of sound unfolding in time seems to flow beyond the very notion of number. Listening occurs in the moment in which it creatively generates itself within us, each time as if for the first time. It is an event that never truly repeats, even when listening in a loop to an old recording played back through any analog or digital device. [...]”
“[...] What would happen if the computational dimension were aimed simply at creating the conditions for a sonic incident in which space, time, and listener themselves become the sonic material?
How could a calculation loosen its dependence on number, in order to enable a fusion between person, landscape, and time? [...]”
(A. de Girolamo)
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