The arrow of time

[I've lent the book to a friend - when I get it back I'll insert the relevant quotations]

The concept of the "silent scene" from Night Sessions is to have a night club dancing scene (in the book it's more than little on the side of goth & associated styles which though beautiful, is not as important) where the music is not distributed via audio waves (aka the air) but electronically, wirelessly directly to individual patrons. The end result of this is a club full of nicely clad people coherently dancing more-or-less in silence! I know - this is not everyone's idea of fun, and it's probably not even practical, but the concept, the visualisation of such a scene seems strangely attractive to me :)

What is more interesting now is that it can be done, and even more - I could probably make something like that :) It would have to rely on a common technology like wireless Bluetooth A2DP distrubution of sound because custom hardware is expensive, and this is actually the most limiting part (BT in general sucks as a user-friendly technology). The whole setup would probably involve clusters of BT dongles strategically placed around the club, connected to some kind of small form factor computer which would also use wireless (WiFi) to talk to the master node (which would push music through).

This opens up some whole new possible experiences. If positional control could be implemented accurately enough, one side of the room could have it's music delivered with emphasis on an alternating beat or with various time-based modification to the score - making one half of the room jump in the air on alternating beats to the other, or similar audio-visual-wetware-experience things!  An even more perverse idea would be to have a silent band - with electronic instruments they get a feed to their headphones anyway, and the distribution then goes on wirelessly :)

I suppose this is more avant-garde than would be acceptable for todays club goers (if even because not everyone has BT headphones) but it can be done, event if only as an art installation. I still think it would be fun, especially with the "full experience" as described in the book, which also includes animations synced to the music.