My starting place was simple curiosity: What do 100,000 people chatting on the Internet sound like? Once Mark and I started listening, at first to statistical representations of web sites, and then to actual language from chat rooms, a kind of music began to emerge. The messages started to form a giant cut-up poem, fragments of discourse juxtaposed to form a strange quilt of communication. It reminds me of the nights I spent as a kid listening to the CB radio, fascinated to hear these anonymous voices crackling up out of the static. Now the static is gone, and the words arrive as voiceless packets of data, and the scale is immense. And so my curiosity gave way to my desire to respond to this condition.

Anyone who types a message in a chat room and hits "send" is calling out for a response. Listening Post is our response -- a series of soundtracks and visual arrangements of text that respond to the scale, the immediacy, and the meaning of this torrent of communication.

Every word that enters our system was typed only seconds before by someone, somewhere. The irregular staccato of theses arriving messages form the visual and audible rhythms of the work. The sound-generating systems are constructed almost as wind chimes, where the wind in this case is not meteorological but human, and the particles that move are not air molecules but words. At some level, Listening Post is about harnessing the human energy that is carried by all of these words, and channeling that energy through the mechanisms of the piece.

Listening Post represents the most significant outcome so far of my collaboration with Mark Hansen, the only artist I know whose medium of expression is statistics. Since we began working together, my conceptual vocabulary has grown to include notions like clustering, smoothing, outliers, high-dimensional spaces, probability distributions, and other terms that are a routine part of Mark's day-to-day work. Having glimpsed the world through Mark's eyes, I now hear sounds I would never have thought to listen for.

Mark Hansen: Artist's Statement
5:45am, 11/29/01, Chinatown. On this rainy morning, I am alone in Ben's studio putting the various pieces of Listening Post through their paces. It takes four computers and as many operating systems to generate the pulses of soft blue light and the accompanying waves of synthetic sounds and voices. After a little more coffee I'll check on the data. Thousands of people are waking up and signing on, greeting friends in chat rooms, posting messages, and sparring for the inevitable online debates that will take place once the rest of their world revives.

I met Ben two years ago at a workshop organized by BAM and Lucent Technologies. The event was held in the upper floors of a building at the southern tip of Manhattan. There, with all of Brooklyn spread before us, Ben told me about his life with sound. Given the subject of Listening Post, it seems fitting that this initial conversation took place high above the city. From that vantage point it's hard not to be drawn to the pedestrians, the taxis and subway trains, all in motion - the flow of thousands of lives.

At the workshop, Ben told me about his interest in translating data into sound. He described a community of researchers tapping the human auditory system for new ways to make meaningful observations about data. Can we hear certain patterns in a data set that are difficult to recognize with traditional visualization tools? Ben's eloquence and conviction were hard to dismiss, and so our collaboration began. Our proposal for the BAM/Lucent program was primarily about "data sonification"; it seemed like a natural first step for a statistician and a sound artist.

At that point, my research focused on modeling how people made use of information systems. Think Web sites, search engines and WAP phones. I was accustomed to discovering users through the traces of their activities left behind in (massive) log files captured by various servers in the network. Early in our work together, Ben and I agreed that our projects should have a strong social component. As we considered various data sources, I remember suggesting chat as an ideal candidate. After a couple weeks of observing the dynamics of active online forums, we knew we were onto something. Over the next few months, we refined our ideas through public performances and academic talks and publications.

From its conception, Listening Post has been a product of our combined talents. The space is as much about an artistic expression as it is data analysis. There were no (well, few) disciplinary divides in the process that produced the space you are about to enter. Ben had as much input in data collection and modeling as I did on questions of design and aesthetics.

And that's how I come to find myself sitting here this morning, in the company of so many stray thoughts, appearing and disappearing on the displays, resonating in sound and voice. This installation, its physical presence as well as the underlying intellectual questions, are new for me, as they are for Ben. I suppose it's the mark of a genuine collaboration, that the participants are led in directions they could never have imagined apart.

To the architects of the BAM/Lucent program, Wayne Ashley and Marah Rosenberg, I offer my deepest thanks. I also want to mention my friend and Department Head, Diane Lambert, who gave me the freedom to pursue this incredible opportunity.

Mark H. Hansen is a Member of the Technical Staff, Statistics and Data Mining Research Department, Bell Laboratories. His research concerns methods for data-rich applications, especially those arising in telecommunications networks. His work is interdisciplinary, drawing from numerical analysis, signal processing and information theory. Hansen is an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association and is currently Chair of Computing Section of the American Statistical Association. Hansen received his Ph.D. in statistics from UC Berkeley in 1994.
EMAIL: cocteau@stat.ucla.edu
URL: http://stat.bell-labs.com/who/cocteau

Ben Rubin is a sound designer and multimedia artist whose installations and performance works have been exhibited internationally. Rubin has been a frequent collaborator with Laurie Anderson, Ann Hamilton, Arto Lindsay, Diller+Scofidio, Steve Reich & Beryl Korot, Richard Teitelbaum, and the Builders Association, among others. Rubin teaches at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has been an invited speaker at ACM SIGGRAPH, The School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, the Gessneralle Theater, Zurich, the Bard MFA program, and the International Conference on Acoustic Display. He has been awarded artistic residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and at the STEIM foundation in Holland. Rubin holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Brown University and received his Masters of Science in Visual Studies from the MIT Media Lab in 1989. He is the director of EAR Studio, a multimedia design and technology firm in New York City that he founded in 1993.
EMAIL: benrubin@earstudio.com
URL: http://www.earstudio.com