The Memory Cloud

You have a new memory

The Memory Cloud is a granular synthesizer that uses your own cloud media library. It is an intensely personal and radically small scale instrument that repositions our personal media as something to be played with. In doing so it challenges the dominant paradigms of growth and technological “innovation” in musical instrument design.

I’ve written a paper about this instrument for NIME, you can have a read for a lot more details.

The instrument is essentially a physical build of the ys.granular synthesis system I have used for a number of different projects. The main defining characteristic that makes it the Memory Cloud is that the instrument is loaded with all of the sounds from a single person’s cloud media library. To achieve this, all of the videos in the cloud library are exported and the audio is stripped from the file. The files are all converted into the same format and then loaded into the instrument. This is quite an involved multi-step process that takes longer than you’d think, especially when doing it for someone else. For my own Memory Cloud this resulted in about 1200 sounds taken from videos dating back about 12 years. These represent an odd snapshot of my life, a mixture of rehearsals, playing in the park, happy birthday videos, documentation of projects, and more.

One sound can be loaded into the granular engine at a time to be played with. This is achieved by pressing a button on the instrument which will select a random sound from your library. A sound will not be loaded a second time until you have loaded all of the other sounds in the library, so pressing the button means leaving your current sound behind.