Interactive Recording

Motion Access (for quartet and phones) was commissioned and recorded by Hub New Music.

Motion Access has a participatory component featuring motion-controlled electronic sound generated on and played from mobile devices. Here's how to play along with this recording:

1. Open this site (ryancarter.org/interactive) on a device that is NOT your phone.

2. Open the following interactive site on your phone: ryancarter.org/hub2

3. Practice! (Practicing is optional, but the participatory site that you've loaded on your phone has two practice modes that correspond to the two modes of interactivity in this piece.)

4. When you're ready to play, start the recording below at exactly the same time that you tap the "start" button on your phone.


Program notes

Perhaps briefly the internet was made entirely of cats. These cats were free to view, and maybe that was the problem. With the best of intentions, early decisions shaping the architecture of the internet privileged openness and free access to these new technologies, but building the web is hard work and the people developing it needed to somehow get paid. The conventional solution has been to fund web development through advertising. Advertisers quickly realized that marketing on the web can target individuals much more precisely than traditional media like newspapers or television. So an entire industry was built around extracting as much data as possible from internet users, toward the goal of gaining a maximally full portrait of a prospective customer.

Like many composers today, my music frequently addresses how emerging technologies effect our experience of music. My program notes tend to function less as a listening guide to a piece and more as a snapshot of what was on my mind as I composed the work. Since 2011 I’ve composed motion-controlled interactive electronic music for mobile devices, beginning with iMonkeypants (an iOS app album that I released in 2012). This music is generated from code that incorporates data from a phone or tablet’s built-in accelerometer, which reports the position in which the device is being held. As a result, listeners can shape the sound by tilting their phones as the music plays. For the last two years, I’ve been working on building a web-based platform for similar interactivity, inviting audience participation from concertgoers who don’t need to prepare for the performance in any way (or even know in advance that they will participate). This relies on accessing accelerometer data within a mobile web browser, which worked fine until last March.

With the release of iOS 12.2, Apple restricted access to motion sensor data in the mobile version of Safari by adding a privacy setting called “Motion & Orientation Access,” which is off by default. As it turns out, advertisers had begun using this data in an attempt to infer browsing history, which can be used to refine targeted marketing because a visitor to some type of website may be more amenable to a certain kind of advertisement on another website. In an article called “Privacy Implications of Accelerometer Data: A Review of Possible Inferences,” Jacob Leon Kröger, Philip Raschke, and Towhidur Rahman Bhuiyan write “[c]alibration errors in accelerometers, which are caused by imperfections in the manufacturing process, have been found sufficient to uniquely identify their encapsulating device. Such a ‘fingerprint’ can be used, for instance, to track users across repeated website visits, even when private browsing is activated and other tracking technologies, such as canvas fingerprinting or cookies, are blocked.”

I promise I’m not using your data in any nefarious way (you can see the code here). In fact, I prefer building my own websites from scratch and distributing my work on them to avoid advertising entirely. I’m just trying to make fun interactive music. But art can also exist to push us beyond our comfort zones and to broaden, reorient, and recontextualize our understanding of the rapidly evolving technologies we use so frequently.