Academic literature on the topic 'JACK Audio Connection Kit'

Introduction As social-distancing mandates in response to COVID-19 restricted in-person data collection methods such as participant observation and interviews, researchers turned to socially distant methods such as interviewing via video-conferencing technology (Lobe et al.). These were not new tools nor methods, but the pandemic muted any bias towards face-to-face data collection methods. Exemplified in crowd-sourced documents such as Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic, researchers were encouraged to pivot to digital methods as a means of fulfilling research objectives, “specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends” (Lupton). The benefits of digital methods for expanding participant cohorts and scope of research have been touted long before 2020 and COVID-19, and, as noted by Murthy, are “compelling” (“Emergent” 172). Research conducted by digital methods can expect to reap benefits such as “global datasets/respondents” and “new modalities for involving respondents” (Murthy, “Emergent” 172). The pivot to digital methods is not in and of itself an issue. What concerns us is that in the dialogues about shifting to digital methods during COVID-19, there does not yet appear to have been a critical consideration of how participant samples and collected data will be impacted upon or skewed towards recording the experiences of advantaged cohorts. Existing literature focusses on the time-saving benefits for the researcher, reduction of travel costs (Fujii), the minimal costs for users of specific platforms – e.g. Skype –, and presumes ubiquity of device access for participants (Cater). We found no discussion on data costs of accessing such services being potential barriers to participation in research, although Deakin and Wakefield did share our concern that: Online interviews may ... mean that some participants are excluded due to the need to have technological competence required to participate, obtain software and to maintain Internet connection for the duration of the discussion. In this sense, access to certain groups may be a problem and may lead to issues of representativeness. (605) We write this as a provocation to our colleagues conducting research at this time to consider the cultural and material capital of their participants and how that capital enables them to participate in digitally-mediated data gathering practices, or not, and to what extent. Despite highlighting the potential benefits of digital methods within a methodological tool kit, Murthy previously cautioned against the implications posed by digital exclusion, noting that “the drawback of these research options is that membership of these communities is inherently restricted to the digital ‘haves’ ... rather than the ‘have nots’” (“Digital” 845). In this article, we argue that while tools such as Zoom have indeed enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID disruptions, this shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In making this argument, we draw on examples from the Connected Students project, a study of digital inclusion that commenced just as COVID-19 restrictions came into effect in the Australian state of Victoria at the start of 2020. We draw on the experiences of these households to illustrate the barriers that such cohorts face when participating in online research. We begin by providing details about the Connected Students project and then contextualising it through a discussion of research on digital inclusion. We then outline three areas in which households would have experienced (or still do experience) difficulties participating in online research: data, devices, and skills. We use these findings to highlight the barriers that disadvantaged groups may face when engaging in data collection activities over Zoom and question how this is impacting on who is and is not being included in research during COVID-19. The Connected Students Program The Connected Students program was conducted in Shepparton, a regional city located 180km north of Melbourne. The town itself has a population of around 30,000, while the Greater Shepparton region comprises around 64,000 residents. Shepparton was chosen as the program’s site because it is characterised by a unique combination of low-income and low levels of digital inclusion. First, Shepparton ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) and the Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD), as reported in 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census”; Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Index”). Although Shepparton has a strong agricultural and horticultural industry with a number of food-based manufacturing companies in the area, including fruit canneries, dairies, and food processing plants, the town has high levels of long-term and intergenerational unemployment and jobless families. Second, Shepparton is in a regional area that ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al.), which measures digital inclusion across dimensions of access, ability, and affordability. Funded by Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, and delivered in partnership with Greater Shepparton Secondary College (GSSC), the Connected Students program provided low-income households with a laptop and an unlimited broadband Internet connection for up to two years. Households were recruited to the project via GSSC. To be eligible, households needed to hold a health care card and have at least one child attending the school in year 10, 11, or 12. Both the student and a caregiver were required to participate in the project to be eligible. Additional household members were invited to take part in the research, but were not required to. (See Kennedy & Holcombe-James; and Kennedy et al., "Connected Students", for further details regarding household demographics.) The Australian Digital Inclusion Index identifies that affordability is a significant barrier to digital inclusion in Australia (Thomas et al.). The project’s objective was to measure how removing affordability barriers to accessing connectivity for households impacts on digital inclusion. By providing participating households with a free unlimited broadband internet connection for the duration of the research, the project removed the costs associated with digital access. Access alone is not enough to resolve the digital exclusion confronted by these low-income households. Digital exclusion in these instances is not derived simply from the cost of Internet access, but from the cost of digital devices. As a result, these households typically lacked sufficient digital devices. Each household was therefore provided both a high speed Internet connection, and a brand new laptop with built-in camera, microphone, and speakers (a standard tool kit for video conferencing). Data collection for the Connected Students project was intended to be conducted face-to-face. We had planned in-person observations including semi-structured interviews with household members conducted at three intervals throughout the project’s duration (beginning, middle, and end), and technology tours of each home to spatially and socially map device locations and uses (Kennedy et al., Digital Domesticity). As we readied to make our first research trip to commence the study, COVID-19 was wreaking havoc. It quickly became apparent we would not be travelling to work, much less travelling around the state. We thus pivoted to digital methods, with all our data collection shifting online to interviews conducted via digital platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While the pivot to digital methods saved travel hours, allowing us to scale up the number of households we planned to interview, it also demonstrated unexpected aspects of our participants’ lived experiences of digital exclusion. In this article, we draw on our first round of interviews which were conducted with 35 households over Zoom or Microsoft Teams during lockdown. The practice of conducting these interviews reveals insights into the barriers that households faced to digital research participation. In describing these experiences, we use pseudonyms for individual participants and refer to households using the pseudonym for the student participant from that household. Why Does Digital Inclusion Matter? Digital inclusion is broadly defined as universal access to the technologies necessary to participate in social and civic life (Helsper; Livingstone and Helsper). Although recent years have seen an increase in the number of connected households and devices (Thomas et al., “2020”), digital inclusion remains uneven. As elsewhere, digital disadvantage in the Australian context falls along geographic and socioeconomic lines (Alam and Imran; Atkinson et al.; Blanchard et al.; Rennie et al.). Digitally excluded population groups typically experience some combination of education, employment, income, social, and mental health hardship; their predicament is compounded by a myriad of important services moving online, from utility payments, to social services, to job seeking platforms (Australian Council of Social Service; Chen; Commonwealth Ombudsman). In addition to challenges in using essential services, digitally excluded Australians also miss out on the social and cultural benefits of Internet use (Ragnedda and Ruiu). Digital inclusion – and the affordability of digital access – should thus be a key concern for researchers looking to apply online methods. Households in the lowest income quintile spend 6.2% of their disposable income on telecommunications services, almost three times more than wealthier households (Ogle). Those in the lowest income quintile pay a “poverty premium” for their data, almost five times more per unit of data than those in the highest income quintile (Ogle and Musolino). As evidenced by the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, this is driven in part by a higher reliance on mobile-only access (Thomas et al., “2020”). Low-income households are more likely to access critical education, business, and government services through mobile data rather than fixed broadband data (Thomas et al., “2020”). For low-income households, digital participation is the top expense after housing, food, and transport, and is higher than domestic energy costs (Ogle). In the pursuit of responsible and ethical research, we caution against assuming research participants are able to bear the brunt of access costs in terms of having a suitable device, expending their own data resources, and having adequate skills to be able to complete the activity without undue stress. We draw examples from the Connected Students project to support this argument below. Findings: Barriers to Research Participation for Digitally Excluded Households If the Connected Students program had not provided participating households with a technology kit, their preexisting conditions of digital exclusion would have limited their research participation in three key ways. First, households with limited Internet access (particularly those reliant on mobile-only connectivity, and who have a few gigabytes of data per month) would have struggled to provide the data needed for video conferencing. Second, households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate devices. Third, and critically, although the Connected Students technology kit provided households with the data and devices required to participate in the digital ethnography, this did not necessarily resolve the skills gaps that our households confronted. Data Prior to receiving the Connected Students technology kit, many households in our sample had limited modes of connectivity and access to data. For households with comparatively less or lower quality access to data, digital participation – whether for the research discussed here, or in contemporary life – came with very real costs. This was especially the case for households that did not have a home Internet connection and instead relied solely on mobile data. For these households, who carefully managed their data to avoid running out, participating in research through extended video conferences would have been impossible unless adequate financial reimbursement was offered. Households with very limited Internet access used a range of practices to manage and extend their data access by shifting internet costs away from the household budget. This often involved making use of free public Wi-Fi or library internet services. Ellie’s household, for instance, spent their weekends at the public library so that she and her sister could complete their homework. While laborious, these strategies worked well for the families in everyday life. However, they would have been highly unsuitable for participating in research, particularly during the pandemic. On the most obvious level, the expectations of library use – if not silent, then certainly quiet – would have prohibited a successful interview. Further, during COVID-19 lockdowns, public libraries (and other places that provide public Internet) became inaccessible for significant periods of time. Lastly, for some research designs, the location of participants is important even when participation is occurring online. In the case of our own project, the house itself as the site of the interview was critical as our research sought to understand how the layout and materiality of the home impacts on experiences of digital inclusion. We asked participants to guide us around their home, showing where technologies and social activities are colocated. In using the data provided by the Connected Students technology kit, households with limited Internet were able to conduct interviews within their households. For these families, participating in online research would have been near impossible without the Connected Students Internet. Devices Even with adequate Internet connections, many households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of suitable devices. Laptops, which generally provide the best video conferencing experience, were seen as prohibitively expensive for many families. As a result, many families did not have a laptop or were making do with a laptop that was excessively slow, unreliable, and/or had very limited functions. Desktop computers were rare and generally outdated to the extent that they were not able to support video conferencing. One parent, Melissa, described their barely-functioning desktop as “like part of the furniture more than a computer”. Had the Connected Students program not provided a new laptop with video and audio capabilities, participation in video interviews would have been difficult. This is highlighted by the challenges students in these households faced in completing online schooling prior to receiving the Connected Students kit. A participating student, Mallory, for example, explained she had previously not had a laptop, reliant only on her phone and an old iPad: Interviewer: Were you able to do all your homework on those, or was it sometimes tricky?Mallory: Sometimes it was tricky, especially if they wanted to do a call or something ... . Then it got a bit hard because then I would use up all my data, and then didn’t have much left.Interviewer: Yeah. Right.Julia (Parent): ... But as far as schoolwork, it’s hard to do everything on an iPad. A laptop or a computer is obviously easier to manoeuvre around for different things. This example raises several common issues that would likely present barriers to research participation. First, Mallory’s household did not have a laptop before being provided with one through the Connected Students program. Second, while her household did prioritise purchasing tablets and smartphones, which could be used for video conferencing, these were more difficult to navigate for certain tasks and used up mobile data which, as noted above, was often a limited resource. Lastly, it is worth noting that in households which did already own a functioning laptop, it was often shared between several household members. As one parent, Vanessa, noted, “yeah, until we got the [Connected Students] devices, we had one laptop between the four of us that are here. And Noel had the majority use of that because that was his school work took priority”. This lack of individuated access to a device would make participation in some research designs difficult, particularly those that rely on regular access to a suitable device. Skills Despite the Connected Students program’s provision of data and device access, this did not ensure successful research participation. Many households struggled to engage with video research interviews due to insufficient digital skills. While a household with Internet connectivity might be considered on the “right” side of the digital divide, connectivity alone does not ensure participation. People also need to have the knowledge and skills required to use online resources. Brianna’s household, for example, had downloaded Microsoft Teams to their desktop computer in readiness for the interview, but had neglected to consider whether that device had video or audio capabilities. To work around this restriction, the household decided to complete the interview via the Connected Students laptop, but this too proved difficult. Neither Brianna nor her parents were confident in transferring the link to the interview between devices, whether by email or otherwise, requiring the researchers to talk them through the steps required to log on, find, and send the link via email. While Brianna’s household faced digital skills challenges that affected both parent and student participants, in others such as Ariel’s, these challenges were focussed at the parental level. In these instances, the student participant provided a vital resource, helping adults navigate platforms and participate in the research. As Celeste, Ariel’s parent, explained, it's just new things that I get a bit – like, even on here, because your email had come through to me and I said to Ariel "We're going to use your computer with Teams. How do we do this?" So, yeah, worked it out. I just had to look up my email address, but I [initially thought] oh, my god; what am I supposed to do here? Although helpful in our own research given its focus on school-aged young people, this dynamic of parents being helped by their dependents illustrates that the adults in our sample were often unfamiliar with the digital skills required for video conferencing. Research focussing only on adults, or on households in which students have not developed these skills through extended periods of online education such as occurred during the COVID-19 lockdowns, may find participants lacking the digital skills to participate in video interviews. Participation was also impacted upon by participants' lack of more subtle digital skills around the norms and conventions of video conferencing. Several households, for example, conducted their interviews in less ideal situations, such as from both moving and parked cars. A portion of the household interview with Piper’s household was completed as they drove the 30 minutes from their home into Shepperton. Due to living out of town, this household often experienced poor reception. The interview was thus regularly disrupted as they dropped in and out of range, with the interview transcript peppered with interjections such as “we’re going through a bit of an Internet light spot ... we’re back ... sorry ...” (Karina, parent). Finally, Piper switched the device on which they were taking the interview to gain a better connection: “my iPad that we were meeting on has worse Internet than my phone Internet, so we kind of changed it around” (Karina). Choosing to participate in the research from locations other than the home provides evidence of the limited time available to these families, and the onerousness of research participation. These choices also indicate unfamiliarity with video conferencing norms. As digitally excluded households, these participants were likely not the target of popular discussions throughout the pandemic about optimising video conferences through careful consideration of lighting, background, make-up and positioning (e.g. Lasky; Niven-Phillips). This was often identified by how participants positioned themselves in front of the camera, often choosing not to sit squarely within the camera lens. Sometimes this was because several household members were participating and struggled to all sit within view of the single device, but awkward camera positioning also occurred with only one or two people present. A number of interviews were initially conducted with shoulders, or foreheads, or ceilings rather than “whole” participants until we asked them to reposition the device so that the camera was pointing towards their faces. In noting this unfamiliarity we do not seek to criticise or apportion responsibility for accruing such skills to participating households, but rather to highlight the impact this had on the type of conversation between researcher and participant. Such practices offer valuable insight into how digital exclusion impacts on individual’s everyday lives as well as on their research participation. Conclusion Throughout the pandemic, digital methods such as video conferencing have been invaluable for researchers. However, while these methods have enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID-19 disruptions, the shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In this article, we have drawn on our research with low-income households to demonstrate the barriers that such cohorts experience when participating in online research. Without the technology kits provided as part of our research design, these households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate data and devices. Further, even with the kits provided, households faced additional barriers due to a lack of digital literacy. These experiences raise a number of questions that we encourage researchers to consider when designing methods that avoid in person interactions, and when reviewing studies that use similar approaches: who doesn’t have the technological access needed to participate in digital and online research? What are the implications of this for who and what is most visible in research conducted during the pandemic? Beyond questions of access, to what extent will disadvantaged populations not volunteer to participate in online research because of discomfort or unfamiliarity with digital tools and norms? When low-income participants are included, how can researchers ensure that participation does not unduly burden them by using up precious data resources? And, how can researchers facilitate positive and meaningful participation among those who might be less comfortable interacting through mediums like video conferencing? In raising these questions we acknowledge that not all research will or should be focussed on engaging with disadvantaged cohorts. Rather, our point is that through asking questions such as this, we will be better able to reflect on how data and participant samples are being impacted upon by shifts to digital methods during COVID-19 and beyond. As researchers, we may not always be able to adapt Zoom-based methods to be fully inclusive, but we can acknowledge this as a limitation and keep it in mind when reporting our findings, and later when engaging with the research that was largely conducted online during the pandemic. Lastly, while the Connected Students project focusses on impacts of affordability on digital inclusion, digital disadvantage intersects with many other forms of disadvantage. Thus, while our study focussed specifically on financial disadvantage, our call to be aware of who is and is not able to participate in Zoom-based research applies to digital exclusion more broadly, whatever its cause. Acknowledgements The Connected Students project was funded by Telstra. This research was also supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researchers Award funding scheme (project number DE200100540). References Alam, Khorshed, and Sophia Imran. “The Digital Divide and Social Inclusion among Refugee Migrants: A Case in Regional Australia.” Information Technology & People 28.2 (2015): 344–65. Atkinson, John, Rosemary Black, and Allan Curtis. “Exploring the Digital Divide in an Australian Regional City: A Case Study of Albury”. Australian Geographer 39.4 (2008): 479–493. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Census of Population and Housing: Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), Australia, 2016.” 2016. <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2033.0.55.001~2016~Main%20Features~SOCIO-ECONOMIC%20INDEXES%20FOR%20AREAS%20(SEIFA)%202016~1>. ———. “Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD).” 2016. <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2033.0.55.001~2016~Main%20Features~IRSAD~20>. Australian Council of Social Service. “The Future of Parents Next: Submission to Senate Community Affairs Committee.” 8 Feb. 2019. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612014954/https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ACOSS-submission-into-Parents-Next_FINAL.pdf>. Beer, David. “The Social Power of Algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20.1 (2017): 1–13. Blanchard, Michelle, et al. “Rethinking the Digital Divide: Findings from a Study of Marginalised Young People’s Information Communication Technology (ICT) Use.” Youth Studies Australia 27.4 (2008): 35–42. Cater, Janet. “Skype: A Cost Effective Method for Qualitative Research.” Rehabilitation Counselors and Educators Journal 4.2 (2011): 10-17. Chen, Jesse. “Breaking Down Barriers to Digital Government: How Can We Enable Vulnerable Consumers to Have Equal Participation in Digital Government?” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612015130/https://accan.org.au/Breaking%20Down%20Barriers%20to%20Digital%20Government.pdf>. Commonwealth Ombudsman. “Centrelink’s Automated Debt Raising and Recovery System: Implementation Report, Report No. 012019.” Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2019. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612015307/https://www.ombudsman.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/98314/April-2019-Centrelinks-Automated-Debt-Raising-and-Recovery-System.pdf>. Deakin Hannah, and Kelly Wakefield. “Skype Interviewing: Reflections of Two PhD Researchers.” Qualitative Research 14.5 (2014): 603-616. Fujii, LeeAnn. Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach. Routledge, 2018. Helsper, Ellen. “Digital Inclusion: An Analysis of Social Disadvantage and the Information Society.” London: Department for Communities and Local Government, 2008. Kennedy, Jenny, and Indigo Holcombe-James. “Connected Students Milestone Report 1: Project Commencement". Melbourne: RMIT, 2021. <https://apo.org.au/node/312817>. Kennedy, Jenny, et al. “Connected Students Milestone Report 2: Findings from First Round of Interviews". Melbourne: RMIT, 2021. <https://apo.org.au/node/312818>. Kennedy, Jenny, et al. Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life. Oxford UP, 2020. Lasky, Julie. “How to Look Your Best on a Webcam.” New York Times, 25 Mar. 2020 <http://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/realestate/coronavirus-webcam-appearance.html>. Livingstone, Sonia, and Ellen Helsper. “Gradations in Digital Inclusion: Children, Young People and the Digital Divide.” New Media & Society 9.4 (2007): 671–696. Lobe, Bojana, David L. Morgan, and Kim A. Hoffman. “Qualitative Data Collection in an Era of Social Distancing.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 19 (2020): 1–8. Lupton, Deborah. “Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic (Crowd-Sourced Document).” 2020. <http://docs.google.com/document/d/1clGjGABB2h2qbduTgfqribHmog9B6P0NvMgVuiHZCl8/edit?ts=5e88ae0a#>. Murthy, Dhiraj. “Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research”. Sociology 42.2 (2008): 837–855. ———. “Emergent Digital Ethnographic Methods for Social Research.” Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research. Ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Oxford UP, 2011. 158–179. Niven-Phillips, Lisa. “‘Virtual Meetings Aren’t Going Anywhere Soon’: How to Put Your Best Zoom Face Forward.” The Guardian, 27 Mar. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2021/mar/27/virtual-meetings-arent-going-anywhere-soon-how-to-put-your-best-zoom-face-forward>. Ogle, Greg. “Telecommunications Expenditure in Australia: Fact Sheet.” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200612043803/https://accan.org.au/files/Reports/ACCAN_SACOSS%20Telecommunications%20Expenditure_web_v2.pdf>. Ogle, Greg, and Vanessa Musolino. “Connectivity Costs: Telecommunications Affordability for Low Income Australians.” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2016. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200612043944/https://accan.org.au/files/Reports/161011_Connectivity%20Costs_accessible-web.pdf>. Ragnedda, Massimo, and Maria Laura Ruiu. “Social Capital and the Three Levels of Digital Divide.” Theorizing Digital Divides. Eds. Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn Muschert. Routledge, 2017. 21–34. Rennie, Ellie, et al. “At Home on the Outstation: Barriers to Home Internet in Remote Indigenous Communities.” Telecommunications Policy 37.6 (2013): 583–93. Taylor, Linnet. “What Is Data Justice? The Case for Connecting Digital Rights and Freedoms Globally. Big Data & Society 4.2 (2017): 1–14. Thomas, Julian, et al. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2018. Melbourne: RMIT University, for Telstra, 2018. ———. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2019. Melbourne: RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology, for Telstra, 2019. ———. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. Melbourne: RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology, for Telstra, 2020. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75–89.

Preamble: Medium/Format/Marker Medium/Format/Marker (M/F/M) was a visual-aural improvisational performance involving myself, and musicians Joe Sorbara, and Ben Grossman. It was formed through my work as a PhD candidate at the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research initiative at the University of Guelph. This performance was conceived as an attempted intervention against the propensity to reify the “new.” It also sought to address the proliferation of the screen and question how the increased presence of screens in everyday life has augmented the way in which an audience is conceived and positioned. This conception is in direct conversation with my thesis, which is a practice-based research project exploring what the experimental combination of intermediality, improvisation, and the cinema might offer towards developing a reflexive approach to "new" media, screen culture, and expanded cinemas. One of the ways I chose to explore this area involved developing an interface that allowed an audio-visual ensemble to improvise with a film's audio-visual projection. I experimented with different VJ programs. These programs often utilize digital filters and effects to alter images through real-time mixing and layering, much like a DJ does with sound. I found a program developed by Chicago-based artist Ontologist called Ontoplayer, which he developed out of his practice as an improvisational video artist. The program works through a dual-channel interface where two separate digital files could be augmented, with their projected tempo capable of being determined by musicians through a MIDI interface. I conceptualized the performance around the possibility of networking myself with two other musicians via this interface. I approached percussionist Joe Sorbara and multi-instrumentalist Ben Grossman with the idea to use Ontoplayer as a means to improvise with Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962, 28 mins). The film itself would be projected simultaneously in four different formats: 16mm celluloid, VHS, Blu-ray, and Standard Definition video (the format the ensemble improvised with) projected onto four separate screens. From left to right, the first screen contained the projected version of La Jetée that we improvised with, next to it was its Blu-ray format, next to that, a degraded VHS copy of the film, and next to that, the 16mm print. The performance materialized through performing a number of improvisatory experiments. A last minute experiment conceived a few hours before the performance involved placing contact microphones overtop of the motor on a Bell & Howell 16mm projector. The projector was tested in the days leading up to the performance and it ran as smoothly as could be expected. It had a nice cacophonous hum that Ben Grossman intended to improvise with using some contact mics attached directly over the projector’s motor, a $5 iPad app, and his hurdy-gurdy. Fifteen minutes before the performance began, the three of us huddled to discuss how long we'd like to go. We had met briefly the day before to discuss the technical setup of the performance but not its execution and length. I hadn't considered duration. Joe broke the silence by asking if we'd be "finding beginnings and endings." I didn't know what that entailed, but nodded. We started. I turned on the projector and it immediately started to cough and chew on the 40 year old 16mm print I found online. My first impulse was to intervene, to try to save it. The film continued and I sat frozen for a moment. Joe started playing and Ben, expecting me to send him the audio track from La Jetée, prompted me to do so. I let the projector go and began. Joe had a digital kick-drum and two contact mics on his drum kit hooked into a MIDI hub, while Ben's hurdy-gurdy had a contact mic inside it, wired into the hub. The hub hooked into my laptop and allowed for an intermedial conversation to emerge between the three of us. While the 16mm, VHS, and Blu-Ray formats proceeded relatively unimpeded alongside each other on their respective screens, the fourth screen was where this conversation took place. I digitally reordered different image sequences from La Jetée. The fact that it’s a film (almost) comprised entirely of still images made this reordering intriguing in that I was able control the speed of progressing from each image to the next. The movement from image to image was structured between Ben and Joe’s improvisations and the kind of effects and filters I had initialized. Ontoplayer has a number of effects and filters that push the base image into more abstract territories (e.g.: geometric shapes, over pixelation) I was uninterested in exploring. I utilized effects that to some degree still kept the representational content of the image intact. The degree to which these effects took hold of the image were determined by whether or not Ben and Joe decided to use the part of their instrument that would trigger them. The decision to linger on an image, colour it differently, or skip ahead in the film’s real-time projection destabilized my sense of where I was in the film. It became an event in the sense that each movement, both visual and aural was happening with an indeterminate duration. La Jetée opens with the narrator proclaiming: “this is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.” The story itself is situated around a man in a post-apocalyptic world, haunted by the persistent memory of a woman he saw as a child while standing on the jetty at Orly Airport in Paris. The man was a soldier, now captured, and imprisoned in an underground camp. The prison guards have been conducting experiments on the prisoners, attempting to use the prisoner’s memories as a mechanism to send them backwards and forwards in time. The narrator explains, “with the surface of the planet irradiated … The human race was doomed. Space was off limits. The only link with survival passed through time … The purpose of the experiments was to throw emissaries into time to call the past and future to the aid of the present.” La Jetée is visually structured as a photomontage, with voice-over narration, diegetic and non-diegetic sound existing as component parts to the whole film. I decided to separate these components for the sake of isolating them before the performance as instruments of the film to be improvisationally deployed through the intermedial connection between Ben, Joe, and myself. The resulting projections that emerged from our interface became a kind of improvised "grooving" to La Jetée that restricted the impulse to discriminately place sound beneath and behind the image. I selected images from different points in the film that felt "timely" given the changing dynamic between the three of us. I remember lingering on an image of the woman's face, her hand against her mouth, her hair being blown back by the wind. I looked and listened for the moment when the film would catch and then catch fire. It never came. We let the reel run to the end and continued on improvising until we found an ending. But the sound of that film catching but never breaking, the intention and tension of the film being near death the entire time made everything we did more precious, teetering on the brink of failure. We could never have predicted that, and it gave us something I continue to ponder and be thankful for. Celluloid junkies in the room commented on how precipitous the whole thing was, given how rare it is to encounter the sound of celluloid film travelling through a projector inside a cinematic space. An audiophile mused over how there wasn’t any document, his mind adequately blown by how “funky” the projector sounded. With there being no document of the performance, I'm left with my own memories. In mining the aftermath of this performance, I hope to find an addendum that considers how improvisation might negotiate with augmentation in ways that speak to Walter Benjamin's assertion that the "camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action” (Benjamin 236-7).Images to be Determined I got a job working in a photo lab eight years ago, right around the time digital cameras started becoming not only affordable, but technologically-comparable alternatives to film cameras. The photo printer in the lab was setup to scan and digitize celluloid filmstrips to allow for digital “touchups” by the technician. It was also hooked into touchscreen media stations that accepted a variety of memory card formats so that customers could “touchup” their own images. Celluloid film meant that as long as their format was chemical, touching up their images remained the task of the technician. Against the urging of the lab’s manager, I resisted altering other people’s images. It felt like a violation, despite the fact that almost every customer was unaware of this process. They assumed a degree of responsibility for a chemically-exposed image. I still got blamed for a lot of bad photography, but an image chemically under or overexposed was irreparable. Digital cameras changed all of that. I still preferred an evenly exposed celluloid print to a digital, but the allure was the ability for these images to be augmented. Augmentation is synonymous with "enhancement," "prosthesis," "addition," "amplification," "enrichment," "expansion,” and "extension" (to name a few). For the purpose of this essay, I am situating augmentation as an agential act engaging with a static form to purposefully alter its aesthetic and political relation to a reality. To what extent can we say that the digital image is itself, an augmentation? If Instagram is any indication, the digital image's existence is bound by its perpetual augmentation. A digital image is only as good as its capacity to be worked on. The ubiquity of digitally applying lomographic filters to digital images, as a defining step in their distributive chain, is indicative of the discursive impact remediating the old into the new has on digital forms. These digitally-coded filters used to augment “clear” digital images are comprised of exaggerated imperfections that existed to varying degrees, as unforeseen side effects of working with comparatively more unstable celluloid textures. The filtered images themselves are digital distortions of a digital original. The filters augment this original through obscuring one or a number of components. Some filters might exaggerate the green values or sharpen a particular quadrant within the frame that might coincide with the look of a particular film stock from the past. The discourse of “film” and “vintage” photography has become a synonymous component of the digital aesthetic, discursively warming up what is often considered to be a cold, and disembodied medium. Augmentation works to re-establish a congruous relationship between the filmic and the digital, attempting to reconcile the aesthetic distance between granularity and pixelation. This is ironic because this process is encapsulated through digitally encoding and applying these filters for the sake of obscuring clarity. Thus, the object is both hailed as clear and clearly manipulable. Another example a bit closer to the cinema is the development of digital video cameras offering RAW, or minimally compressed file formats for the sole purpose of augmenting the initial recording in post-production workflows in an attempt to minimize degradation in the image. The colour values and dynamic range of these images are muted, or flattened so that the human can control their elevation after the fact. To some degree the initial image, in itself, is an augmentation of its filmic relative. From early experiments with video synthesizers to the present digital coding of film effects, digital images have tantalized video artists and filmmakers with possibility shrouded in instantaneity and malleability. A key problem with this structure remains the unbridled proliferation and expansion of the digital image, set free for the sake of newness. How might improvisation work towards establishing an ethics of augmentation? An ethics of this kind must disrupt the popular notion of the digital image existing beyond analogical constraints. The belief that “if you can imagine it, you can do it” obfuscates the reality that to work with images, whatever their texture, is a negotiation with constraint. Part of M/F/M’s fruition emerged from a conversation I'd had with Canadian Animator Pierre Hébert last summer. Now obvious, but for Hébert, the first obstacle he needed to overcome as an improviser was developing an instrument that he could gig with. Through the act of designing an instrument I immediately became aware of what wasn't possible, and so the work leading up to the performance involved attempting to expand the possibilities of that instrument. How might I conceive of my own treatment of images simultaneously treated by Joe and Ben as a kind of cinematic extended technique we collaboratively bring into being? Constraint necessitates the need for extension, for finding new ways to sound and appear. Constraint is also consistently conceived as shackling progress. In scientific methodologies it is often arbitrarily imposed to steer an experiment into a desired direction. This sort of experimental methodology is in the business of presupposing outcomes, which I feel is often the case with what ultimately becomes the essay of end result in Humanities research. Constraint is an important imposition in improvisation only if the parties involved are willing to find new ways to move in consort with it. The act of improvisation is thus an engagement with the spatio-temporal constraints of performance, politics, memory, texture, and difference. My conception of the cinema is that of an instrument, whose past is what I work with to better understand its future. Critic Gene Youngblood, in his landmark book, Expanded Cinema, theorized a new conception of the cinema as a global planetary phenomenon suffused inside a space of intermedia, where immersive, interactive, and interconnected realms necessitated the need to critically conceptualise the cinema in cosmic terms. At around the time of Youngblood's writing, another practitioner of the cosmic way, improviser and composer Sun Ra was staking a similar claim for music's ability to uplift the species cosmically. Ra's popular line “If we came from nowhere here, why can’t we go somewhere there?” (Heble 125), articulated the problematic racial politics in post-WWII America, that fixed African-American identity into a static domain with little room to move upward. The "somewhere there" to Ra was a non-space, created from "a desire to opt out of the very codes of representation and intelligibility, the very frameworks of interpretation and assumption which have legitimated the workings of dominant culture" (Heble 125). Though Youngblood's and Ra's intellectual and creative impulses formed from differing political circumstances, the work and thinking of these two figures remain significant articulations of the need to work from and towards the cosmic. In 2003, Youngblood published a follow-up essay in a reprint of Expanded Cinema entitled Cinema and the Code. In it, he defines cinema as a “phenomenology of the moving image.” Rather than conceiving of it through any of its particular media, Youngblood advocates for a segregated conception of the cinema: Just as we separate music from its instruments. Cinema is the art of organizing a stream of audiovisual events in time. It is an event-stream, like music. There are at least four media through which we can practice cinema – film, video, holography, and structured digital code—just as there are many instruments through which we can practice music. (Youngblood cited in Marchessault and Lord 7) Music and cinema are thus conceived as the exterior consequences of creative and co-creative instrumental experimentation. For Ra and Youngblood, the planetary stakes of this project are infused with the need to manufacture and occupy an imaginative space (if only for a moment) outside of the known. This is not to say that the action itself is transcendental. But rather this outside is the planetary. For the past year I've been making a documentary with Joe Sorbara on the free improv scene in Toronto. Listening to musicians talk about improvisation in expansive terms, as this ethereal and ephemeral experience, that exists on the brink of failure, that is as much an act of memory as renewal, reverberated with my own feelings surrounding the cinema. Improvisation, to philosopher Gary Peters, is the "entwinement of preservation and destruction", that "invites us to make a transition from a closed conception of the past to one that re-thinks it as an endlessly ongoing event or occurrence whereby tradition is re-originated (Benjamin) or re-opened (Heidegger)” (Peters 2). This “entwinement of preservation and destruction” takes me back to my earlier discussion of the ways in which digital photography, in particular lomographically filtered snapshots, is structured through preserving the discursive past of film while destroying its standard. The performance of M/F/M attempted to connect the augmentation of the digital image and the impact this augmentation had on conceptualizing the past through an improvisational approach to intermediality. The issue I have with the determination of images concerns their technological standardization. As long as manufacturers and technicians control this process then the practice of gathering, projecting, and experiencing digital images is predetermined by their commercial obligation. It assures that augmenting the “immense and unexpected field of action” comprising the domain of images is itself a predetermination. References Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Heble, Ajay. Landing on the Wrong Note. London: Routledge, 2000. Marker, Chris, dir. La Jetée. Argos Films. 1962. Marchessault, Janine, and Susan Lord. Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Peters, Gary. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

IntroductionThis short article examines contemporary artistic use of walkie-talkies across two projects: Saturday (2002) by Sabrina Raaf and Walk That Sound (2014) by Lukatoyboy. Drawing on Dominic Pettman’s notion of sonic intimacy, I argue that both artists incorporate walkie-talkies as part of their explorations of mediated wandering, and in ways that seek to capture sonic ambiances and intimacies. One thing that is striking about both these works is that they rethink what’s possible with walkie-talkies; both artists use them not just as low-tech, portable devices for one-to-one communication over distance, but also—and more strikingly—as (covert) recording equipment for capturing, while wandering, snippets of intimate conversation between passers-by and the “voice” of the surrounding environment. Both artworks strive to make the familiar strange. They prompt us to question our preconceived perceptions of, and affective engagements with, the people and places around us, to listen more attentively to the voices of others (and the “Other”), and to aurally inhabit in new ways the spaces and places we find ourselves in and routinely pass through.The walkie-talkie is an established, simple communication device, consisting of a two-way radio transceiver with a speaker and microphone (in some cases, the speaker is also used as the microphone) and an antenna (Wikipedia). Walkie-talkies are half-duplex communication devices, meaning that they use a single radio channel: only one radio on the channel can transmit at a time, but many can listen; when a user wishes to talk, they must turn off the receiver and turn on the transmitter by pressing a push-to-talk button (Wikipedia). In some models, static—known as squelch—is produced each time the push-to-talk button is depressed. The push-to-talk button is a feature of both projects: in Saturday, it transforms the walkie-talkie into a cheap, portable recorder-transmitter. In Walk That Sound, rapid fire exchanges of conversation using the push-to-talk button feature strongly.Interestingly, walkie-talkies were developed during World War Two. While they continue to be used within certain industrial settings, they are perhaps best known as a “quaint” household toy and “fun tool” (Smith). Early print ads for walkie-talkie toys marketed them as a form of both spyware for kids (with the Gabriel Toy Co. releasing a 007-themed walkie-talkie set) and as a teletechnology for communication over distance—“how thrilling to ‘speak through space!’”, states one ad (Statuv “New!”). What is noteworthy about these early ads is that they actively promote experimental use of walkie-talkies. For instance, a 1953 ad for Vibro-Matic “Space Commander” walkie-talkies casts them as media transmission devices, suggesting that, with them, one can send and receive “voice – songs – music” (Statuv “New!”). In addition, a 1962 ad for the Knight-Kit walkie-talkie imagines “you’ll find new uses for this exciting walkie-talkie every day” (Statuv “Details”). Resurgent interest in walkie-talkies has seen them also promoted more recently as intimate tools “for communication without asking permission to communicate” (“Nextel”); this is to say that they have been marketed as devices for synchronous or immediate communication that overcome the limits of asynchronous communication, such as texting, where there might be substantial delays between the sending of a message and receipt of a response. Within this context, it is not surprising that Snapchat and Instagram have also since added “walkie-talkie” features to their messaging services. The Nextel byline, emphasising “without asking permission”, also speaks to the possibilities of using walkie-talkies as rudimentary forms of spyware.Within art practice that explores mediated forms of wandering—that is, walking while using media and various “remote transmission technologies” (Duclos 233)—walkie-talkies hold appeal for a number of reasons, including their particular aesthetic qualities, such as the crackling or static sound (squelch) that one encounters when using them; their portability; their affordability; and, the fact that, while they can be operated on multiple channels, they tend to be regarded primarily as devices that permit two-way, one-to-one (and therefore intimate, if not secure) remote communication. As we will see below, however, contemporary artists, such as the aforementioned earlier advertisers, have also been very attentive to the device’s experimental possibilities. Perhaps the best known (if possibly apocryphal) example of artistic use of walkie-talkies is by the Situationist International as part of their explorations in urban wandering (a revolutionary strategy called dérive). In the Situationist text from 1960, Die Welt als Labyrinth (Anon.), there is a detailed account of how walkie-talkies were to form part of a planned dérive, which was organised by the Dutch section of the Situationist International, through the city of Amsterdam, but which never went ahead:Two groups, each containing three situationists, would dérive for three days, on foot or eventually by boat (sleeping in hotels along the way) without leaving the center of Amsterdam. By means of the walkie-talkies with which they would be equipped, these groups would remain in contact, with each other, if possible, and in any case with the radio-truck of the cartographic team, from where the director of the dérive—in this case Constant [Nieuwenhuys]—moving around so as to maintain contact, would define their routes and sometimes give instructions (it was also the director of the dérive’s responsibility to prepare experiments at certain locations and secretly arranged events.) (Anon.) This proposed dérive formed part of Situationist experiments in unitary urbanism, a process that consisted of “making different parts of the city communicate with one another.” Their ambition was to create new situations informed by, among other things, encounters and atmospheres that were registered through dérive in order to reconnect parts of the city that were separated spatially (Lefebvre quoted in Lefebvre and Ross 73). In an interview with Kristin Ross, Henri Lefebvre insists that the Situationists “did have their experiments; I didn’t participate. They used all kinds of means of communication—I don’t know when exactly they were using walkie-talkies. But I know they were used in Amsterdam and in Strasbourg” (Lefebvre quoted in Lefebvre and Ross 73). However, as Rebecca Duclos points out, such use “is, in fact, not well documented”, and “none of the more well-known reports on situationist activity […] specifically mentions the use of walkie-talkies within their descriptive narratives” (Duclos 233). In the early 2000s, walkie-talkies also figured prominently, alongside other media devices, in at least two location-based gaming projects by renowned British art collective Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now? (2001) and You Get Me (2008). In the first of these projects, participants in the game (“online players”) competed against members of Blast Theory (“runners”), tracking them through city streets via a GPS-enabled handheld computer that runners carried with them. The goal for online players was to move an avatar they created through a virtual map of the city as multiple runners “pursued their avatar’s geographical coordinates in real-time” (Leorke). As Dale Leorke explains, “Players could see the locations of the runners and other players and exchange text messages with other players” (Leorke 27), and runners could “read players’ messages and communicate directly with each other through a walkie-talkie” (28). An audio stream from these walkie-talkie conversations allowed players to eavesdrop on their pursuers (Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?).You Get Me was similarly structured, with online players and “runners” (eight teenagers who worked with Blast Theory on the game). Remotely situated online players began the game by listening to the “personal geography” of the runners over a walkie-talkie stream (Blast Theory, You Get Me). They then selected one runner, and tracked them down by navigating their own avatar, without being caught, through a virtual version of Mile End Park in London, in pursuit of their chosen runner who was moving about the actual Mile End Park. Once their chosen runner was contacted, the player had to respond to a question that the runner posed to them. If the runner was satisfied with the player’s answer, conversation switched to “the privacy of a mobile phone” in order to converse further; if not, the player was thrown back into the game (Blast Theory, You Get Me). A key aim of Blast Theory’s work, as I have argued elsewhere (Wilken), is the fostering of interactions and fleeting intimacies between relative and complete strangers. The walkie-talkie is a key tool in both the aforementioned Blast Theory projects for facilitating these interactions and intimacies.Beyond these well-known examples, walkie-talkies have been employed in productive and exploratory ways by other artists. The focus in this article is on two specific projects: the first by US-based sound artist Sabrina Raaf, called Saturday (2002) and the second by Serbian sound designer Lukatoyboy (Luka Ivanović), titled Walk That Sound (2014). Sonic IntimaciesThe concept that gives shape and direction to the analysis of the art projects by Raaf and Lukatoyboy and their use of walkie-talkies is that of sonic intimacy. This is a concept of emerging critical interest across media and sound studies and geography (see, for example, James; Pettman; Gallagher and Prior). Sonic intimacy, as Dominic Pettman explains, is composed of two simultaneous yet opposing orientations. On the one hand, sonic intimacy involves a “turning inward, away from the wider world, to more private and personal experiences and relationships” (79). While, on the other hand, it also involves a turning outward, to seek and heed “the voice of the world” (79)—or what Pettman refers to as the “vox mundi” (66). Pettman conceives of the “vox mundi” as an “ecological voice”, whereby “all manner of creatures, agents, entities, objects, and phenomena” (79) have the opportunity to speak to us, if only we were prepared to listen to our surroundings in new and different ways. In a later passage, he also refers to the “vox mundi” as a “carrier or potentially enlightening alterity” (83). Voices, Pettman writes, “transgress the neat divisions we make between ‘us’ and ‘them’, at all scales and junctures” (6). Thus, Pettman’s suggestion is that “by listening to the ‘voices’ that lie dormant in the surrounding world […] we may in turn foster a more sustainable relationship with [the] local matrix of specific existences” (85), be they human or otherwise.This formulation of sonic intimacy provides a productive conceptual frame for thinking through Raaf’s and Lukatoyboy’s use of walkie-talkies. The contention in this article is that these two projects are striking for the way that they both use walkie-talkies to explore, simultaneously, this double articulation or dual orientation of sonic intimacy—a turning inwards to capture more private and personal experiences and conversations, and a turning outwards to capture the vox mundi. Employing Pettman’s notion of sonic intimacy as a conceptual frame, I trace below the different ways that these two projects incorporate walkie-talkies in order to develop mediated forms of wandering that seek to capture place-based sonic ambiances and sonic intimacies.Sabrina Raaf, Saturday (2002)US sound artist Sabrina Raaf’s Saturday (2002) is a sound-based art installation based on recordings of “stolen conversations” that Raaf gathered over many Saturdays in Humboldt Park, Chicago. Raaf’s work harks back to the early marketing of walkie-talkie toys as spyware. In Raaf’s hands, this device is used not for engaging in intimate one-to-one conversation, but for listening in on, and capturing, the intimate conversations of others. In other words, she uses this device, as the Nextel slogan goes, for “communication without permission to communicate” (“Nextel”). Raaf’s inspiration for the piece was twofold. First, she has noted that “with the overuse of radio frequency bands for wireless communications, there comes the increased occurrence of crossed lines where a private conversation becomes accidentally shared” (Raaf). Reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974), in which surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) records the conversation of a couple as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco, Raaf used a combination of walkie-talkies, CB radios, and “various other forms of consumer spy […] technology in order to actively harvest such communication leaks” (Raaf). The second source of inspiration was noticing the “sheer quantity of non-phone, low tech, radio transmissions that were constantly being sent around [the] neighbourhood”, transmissions that were easily intercepted. These conversations were eclectic in composition and character:The transmissions included communications between gang members on street corners nearby and group conversations between friends talking about changes in the neighbourhood and their families. There were raw, intimate conversations and often even late night sex talk between potential lovers. (Raaf)What struck Raaf about these conversations, these transmissions, was that there was “a furtive quality” to most of them, and “a particular daringness to their tone”.During her Saturday wanderings, Raaf complemented her recordings of stolen snippets of conversation with recordings of the “voice” of the surrounding neighbourhood—“the women singing out their windows to their radios, the young men in their low rider cars circling the block, the children, the ice cream carts, etc. These are the sounds that are mixed into the piece” (Raaf).Audience engagement with Saturday involves a kind of austere intimacy of its own that seems befitting of a surveillance-inspired sonic portrait of urban and private life. The piece is accessed via an interactive glove. This glove is white in colour and about the size of a large gardening glove, with a Velcro strap that fastens across the hand, like a cycling glove. The glove, which only has coverings for thumb and first two fingers (it is missing the ring and little fingers) is wired into and rests on top of a roughly A4-sized white rectangular box. This box, which is mounted onto the wall of an all-white gallery space at the short end, serves as a small shelf. The displayed glove is illuminated by a discrete, bent-arm desk lamp, that protrudes from the shelf near the gallery wall. Above the shelf are a series of wall-mounted colour images that relate to the project. In order to hear the soundtrack of Saturday, gallery visitors approach the shelf, put on the glove, and “magically just press their fingertips to their forehead [to] hear the sound without the use of their ears” (Raaf). The glove, Raaf explains, “is outfitted with leading edge audio electronic devices called ‘bone transducers’ […]. These transducers transmit sound in a very unusual fashion. They translate sound into vibration patterns which resonate through bone” (Raaf).Employing this technique, Raaf explains, “permits a new way of listening”:The user places their fingers to their forehead—in a gesture akin to Rodin’s The Thinker or of a clairvoyant—in order to tap into the lives of strangers. Pressing different combinations of fingers to the temple yield plural viewpoints and group conversations. These sounds are literally mixed in the bones of the listener. (Raaf) The result is a (literally and figuratively) touching sonic portrait of Humboldt Park, its residents, and the “voice” of its surrounding neighbourhoods. Through the unique technosomatic (Richardson) apparatus—combinations of gestures that convey the soundscape directly through the bones and body—those engaging with Saturday get to hear voices in/of/around Humboldt Park. It is a portrait that combines sonic intimacy in the two forms described earlier in this article. In its inward-focused form, the gallery visitor-listener is positioned as a voyeur of sorts, listening into stolen snippets of private and personal relationships, experiences, and interactions. And, in its outward-focused form, the gallery visitor-listener encounters a soundscape in which an array of agents, entities, and objects are also given a voice. Additional work performed by this piece, it seems to me, is to be found in the intermingling of these two form of sonic intimacy—the personal and the environmental—and the way that they prompt reflection on mediation, place, urban life, others, and intimacy. That is to say that, beyond its particular sonic portrait of Humboldt Park, Saturday works in “clearing some conceptual space” in the mind of the departing gallery visitor such that they might “listen for, if not precisely to, the collective, polyphonic ‘voice of the world’” (Pettman 6) as they go about their day-to-day lives.Lukatoyboy, Walk That Sound (2014)The second project, Walk That Sound, by Serbian sound artist Lukatoyboy was completed for the 2014 CTM festival. CTM is an annual festival event that is staged in Berlin and dedicated to “adventurous music and art” (CTM Festival, “About”). A key project within the festival is CTM Radio Lab. The Lab supports works, commissioned by CTM Festival and Deutschlandradio Kultur – Hörspiel/Klangkunst (among other partnering organisations), that seek to pair and explore the “specific artistic possibilities of radio with the potentials of live performance or installation” (CTM Festival, “Projects”). Lukatoyboy’s Walk That Sound was one of two commissioned pieces for the 2014 CTM Radio Lab. The project used the “commonplace yet often forgotten walkie-talkie” (CTM Festival, “Projects”) to create a moving urban sound portrait in the area around the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Walk That Sound recruited participants—“mobile scouts”—to rove around the Kottbusser Tor area (CTM Festival, “Projects”). Armed with walkie-talkies, and playing with “the array of available and free frequencies, and the almost unlimited amount of users that can interact over these different channels”, the project captured the dispatches via walkie-talkie of each participant (CTM Festival, “Projects”). The resultant recording of Walk That Sound—which was aired on Deutschlandradio (see Lukatoyboy), part of a long tradition of transmitting experimental music and sound art on German radio (Cory)—forms an eclectic soundscape.The work juxtaposes snippets of dialogue shared between the mobile scouts, overheard mobile phone conversations, and moments of relative quietude, where the subdued soundtrack is formed by the ambient sounds—the “voice”—of the Kottbusser Tor area. This voice includes distant traffic, the distinctive auditory ticking of pedestrian lights, and moments of tumult and agitation, such as the sounds of construction work, car horns, emergency services vehicle sirens, a bottle bouncing on the pavement, and various other repetitive yet difficult to identify industrial sounds. This voice trails off towards the end of the recording into extended walkie-talkie produced static or squelch. The topics covered within the “crackling dialogues” (CTM Festival, “Projects”) of the mobile scouts ranged widely. There were banal observations (“I just stepped on a used tissue”; “people are crossing the street”; “there are 150 trains”)—wonderings that bear strong similarities with French writer Georges Perec’s well-known experimental descriptions of everyday Parisian life in the 1970s (Perec “An Attempt”). There were also intimate, confiding, flirtatious remarks (“Do you want to come to Turkey with me?”), as well as a number of playfully paranoid observations and quips (“I like to lie”; “I can see you”; “do you feel like you are being recorded?”; “I’m being followed”) that seem to speak to the fraught history of Berlin in particular as well as the complicated character of urban life in general—as Pettman asks, “what does ‘together’ signify in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation?” (92).In sum, Walk That Sound is a strangely moving exploration of sonic intimacy, one that shifts between many different registers and points of focus—much like urban wandering itself. As a work, it is variously funny, smart, paranoid, intimate, expansive, difficult to decipher, and, at times, even difficult to listen to. Pettman argues that, “thanks in large part to the industrialization of the human ear […], we have lost the capacity to hear the vox mundi, which is […] the sum total of cacophonous, heterogeneous, incommensurate, and unsynthesizable sounds of the postnatural world” (8). Walk That Sound functions almost like a response to this dilemma. One comes away from listening to it with a heightened awareness of, appreciation for, and aural connection to the rich messiness of the polyphonic contemporary urban vox mundi. ConclusionThe argument of this article is that Sabrina Raaf’s Saturday and Lukatoyboy’s Walk That Sound are two projects that both incorporate walkie-talkies in order to develop mediated forms of wandering that seek to capture place-based sonic ambiances and sonic intimacies. Drawing on Pettman’s notion of “sonic intimacy”, examination of these projects has opened consideration around voice, analogue technology, and what Nick Couldry refers to as “an obligation to listen” (Couldry 580). In order to be heard, Pettman remarks, and “in order to be considered a voice at all”, and therefore as “something worth heeding”, the vox mundi “must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static” (Pettman 83). In both the projects discussed here—Saturday and Walk That Sound—the walkie-talkie provides this means of “intimate arrival”. As half-duplex communication devices, walkie-talkies have always fulfilled a double function: communicating and listening. This dual functionality is exploited in new ways by Raaf and Lukatoyboy. In their projects, both artists turn the microphone outwards, such that the walkie-talkie becomes not just a device for communicating while in the field, but also—and more strikingly—it becomes a field recording device. The result of which is that this simple, “playful” communication device is utilised in these two projects in two ways: on the one hand, as a “carrier of potentially enlightening alterity” (Pettman 83), a means of encouraging “potential encounters” (89) with strangers who have been thrown together and who cross paths, and, on the other hand, as a means of fostering “an environmental awareness” (89) of the world around us. In developing these prompts, Raaf and Lukatoyboy build potential bridges between Pettman’s work on sonic intimacy, their own work, and the work of other experimental artists. For instance, in relation to potential encounters, there are clear points of connection with Blast Theory, a group who, as noted earlier, have utilised walkie-talkies and sound-based and other media technologies to explore issues around urban encounters with strangers that promote reflection on ideas and experiences of otherness and difference (see Wilken)—issues that are also implicit in the two works examined. In relation to environmental awareness, their work—as well as Pettman’s calls for greater sonic intimacy—brings renewed urgency to Georges Perec’s encouragement to “question the habitual” and to account for, and listen carefully to, “the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the background noise” (Perec “Approaches” 210).Walkie-talkies, for Raaf and Lukatoyboy, when reimagined as field recording devices as much as remote transmission technologies, thus “allow new forms of listening, which in turn afford new forms of being together” (Pettman 92), new forms of being in the world, and new forms of sonic intimacy. Both these artworks engage with, and explore, what’s at stake in a politics and ethics of listening. Pettman prompts us, as urban dweller-wanderers, to think about how we might “attend to the act of listening itself, rather than to a specific sound” (Pettman 1). His questioning, as this article has explored, is answered by the works from Raaf and Lukatoyboy in effective style and technique, setting up opportunities for aural attentiveness and experiential learning. However, it is up to us whether we are prepared to listen carefully and to open ourselves to such intimate sonic contact with others and with the environments in which we live.ReferencesAnon. “Die Welt als Labyrinth.” Internationale Situationiste 4 (Jan. 1960). International Situationist Online, 19 June 2019 <https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/diewelt.html>Blast Theory. “Can You See Me Now?” Blast Theory, 19 June 2019 <https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/>.———. “You Get Me.” Blast Theory, 19 June 2019 <https://wwww.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/you-get-me/>.Cory, Mark E. “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art.” Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde. Eds. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992. 331–371.Couldry, Nick. “Rethinking the Politics of Voice.” Continuum 23.4 (2009): 579–582.CTM Festival. “About.” CTM Festival, 2019. 19 June 2019 <https://www.ctm-festival.de/about/ctm-festival/>.———. “Projects – CTM Radio Lab.” CTM Festival, 2019. 19 June 2019 <https://www.ctm-festival.de/projects/ctm-radio-lab/>.Duclos, Rebecca. “Reconnaissance/Méconnaissance: The Work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture and Performance. Eds. Aura Satz and Jon Wood. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 221–246. Gallagher, Michael, and Jonathan Prior. “Sonic Geographies: Exploring Phonographic Methods.” Progress in Human Geography 38.2 (2014): 267–284.James, Malcom. Sonic Intimacy: The Study of Sound. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming.Lefebvre, Henri, and Kristin Ross. “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview.” October 79 (Winter 1997): 69–83. Leorke, Dale. Location-Based Gaming: Play in Public Space. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.Lukatoyboy. “Walk That Sound – Deutschlandradiokultur Klangkunst Broadcast 14.02.2014.” SoundCloud. 19 June 2019 <https://soundcloud.com/lukatoyboy/walk-that-sound-deutschlandradiokultur-broadcast-14022014>.“Nextel: Couple. Walkie Talkies Are Good for Something More.” AdAge. 6 June 2012. 18 July 2019 <https://adage.com/creativity/work/couple/27993>.Perec, Georges. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Trans. Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010.———. “Approaches to What?” Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Rev. ed. Ed. and trans. John Sturrock. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1999. 209–211.Pettman, Dominic. Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Or, How to Listen to the World). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2017.Raaf, Sabrina. “Saturday.” Sabrina Raaf :: New Media Artist, 2002. 19 June 2019 <http://raaf.org/projects.php?pcat=2&proj=10>.Richardson, Ingrid. “Mobile Technosoma: Some Phenomenological Reflections on Itinerant Media Devices.” The Fibreculture Journal 6 (2005). <http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-032-mobile-technosoma-some-phenomenological-reflections-on-itinerant-media-devices/>. Smith, Ernie. “Roger That: A Short History of the Walkie Talkie.” Vice, 23 Sep. 2017. 19 June 2019 <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb7vk4/roger-that-a-short-history-of-the-walkie-talkie>. Statuv. “Details about Allied Radio Knight-Kit C-100 Walkie Talkie CB Radio Vtg Print Ad.” Statuv, 4 Jan. 2016. 18 July 2019 <https://statuv.com/media/74802043788985511>.———. “New! 1953 ‘Space Commander’ Vibro-Matic Walkie-Talkies.” Statuv, 4 Jan. 2016. 18 July 2019 <https://statuv.com/media/74802043788985539>.Wikipedia. “Walkie-Talkie”. Wikipedia, 3 July 2019. 18 July 2019 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie>.Wilken, Rowan. “Proximity and Alienation: Narratives of City, Self, and Other in the Locative Games of Blast Theory.” The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge, 2014. 175–191.

Hidden away at the ends of streets, behind suburban parks and community assets, there remain remnants of the coastal wallum heathlands that once stretched from Caloundra to Noosa, in Queensland, Australia. From late July to September, these areas explode with colour, a springtime wonderland of white wedding bush, delicate ground orchids, the pastels and brilliance of pink boronias, purple irises, and the diverse profusion of yellow bush peas. These gifts of nature are still relatively unknown and unappreciated, with most locals, and Australians at large, having little knowledge of the remarkable nature of the wallum, the nutrient-poor sandy soil that can be almost as acidic as battery acid, but which sustains a finely tuned ecosystem that, once cleared, cannot be regrown. These heathlands and woodlands, previously commonplace beyond the beach dunes of the coastal region, are now only found in a number of national parks and reserves, and suburban remnants.Image 1: The author wildflowering and making art (Photo: Judy Barrass)I too was one of those who had no idea of the joys of the wallum and heathland wildflowers, but it was the creative works of Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright that helped initiate my education, my own wanderings, wildflowering, and love. Learning country has been a multi-faceted experience, extended and tested as walking becomes an embodied encounter, bodies and landscapes entwined (Lund), an imaginative reimagining, creative act and source of inspiration, a form of pilgrimage (Morrison), forging an intimate relationship (Somerville).Image 2: Women wildflowering next to Rainbow Beach (Photo: Susan Davis)Wandering—the experience shares some similar characteristics to walking, but may have less of a sense of direction and destination. It may become an experience that is relational, contemplative, connected to place. Wandering may be transitory but with impact that resonates across years. Such is the case of wandering for McArthur and Wright; the experience became deeply relational but also led to a destabilisation of values, where the walking body became “entangled in monumental historical and social structures” (Heddon and Turner). They called their walking and wandering “wildflowering”. Somerville said of the term: “Wildflowering was a word they created to describe their passion for Australian wildflower and their love of the places where they found them” (Somerville 2). However, wildflowering was also very much about the experience of wandering within nature, of the “art of seeing”, of learning and communing, but also of “doing”.Image 3: Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright “wildflowering” north of Lake Currimundi. (Photo: Alex Jelinek, courtesy Alexandra Moreno)McArthur defined and described going wildflowering as meaningdifferent things to different people. There are those who, with magnifying glass before their eyes, looking every inch the scientist, count stamens, measure hairs, pigeon-hole all the definitive features neatly in order and scoff at common names. Others bring with them an artistic inclination, noting the colours and shapes and shadows in the intimate and in the general landscape. Then there are those precious few who find poetry in a Helmut Orchid “leaning its ear to the ground”; see “the trigger-flower striking the bee”; find secrets in Sun Orchids; see Irises as “lilac butterflies” and a fox in a Yellow Doubletail…There are as many different ways to approach the “art of seeing” as there are people who think and feel and one way is as worthy as any other to make of it an enjoyably sensuous experience… (McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 52-53)Wildflowering thus extends far beyond the scientific collector and cataloguer of nature; it is about walking and wandering within nature and interacting with it; it is a richly layered experience, an “art”, “a sensuous experience”, “an artistic inclination” where perception may be framed by the poetic.Their wildflowering drove McArthur and Wright to embark on monumental struggles. They became the voice for the voiceless lifeforms within the environment—they typed letters, organised meetings, lobbied politicians, and led community groups. In fact, they often had to leave behind the environments and places that brought them joy to use the tools of culture to protest and protect—to ensure we might be able to appreciate them today. Importantly, both their creativity and the activism were fuelled by the same wellspring: walking, wandering, and wildflowering.Women Wandering and WildfloweringWhen McArthur and Wright met in the early 1950s, they shared some similarities in terms of relatively privileged social backgrounds, their year of birth (1915), and a love of nature. They both had houses named after native plants (“Calanthe” for Wright’s house at Tambourine, “Midyim” for McArthur’s house at Caloundra), and were focussed on their creative endeavours—Wright with her poetry, McArthur with her wildflower painting and writing. Wright was by then well established as a highly regarded literary figure on the Australian scene. Her book of poetry The Moving Image (1946) had been well received, and later publications further consolidated her substance and presence on the national literary landscape. McArthur had been raised as the middle daughter of a prominent Queensland family; her father was Daniel Evans, of Evans Deakin Industries, and her mother “Kit” was a daughter of one of the pastoral Durack clan. Kathleen had married and given birth to three children, but by the 1950s was exploring new futures and identities, having divorced her husband and made a home for her family at Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She had time and space in her life to devote to her own pursuits and some financial means provided through her inheritance to finance such endeavours.Wright and McArthur met in 1951 after McArthur sent Wright a children’s book for Judith and Jack McKinney’s daughter Meredith. The book was by McArthur’s cousins, Mary Durack (of Kings in Grass Castles fame) and Elizabeth Durack. Wright subsequently invited McArthur to visit her at Tambourine and from that visit their friendship quickly blossomed. While both women were to become known as high-profile nature lovers and conservationists, Wright acknowledges that it was McArthur who helped “train her eye” and cultivated her appreciation of the wildflowers of south-east Queensland:There are times in one’s past which remain warm and vivid, and can be taken out and looked at, so to speak, with renewed pleasure. Such, for me, were my first meetings in the early 1950s with Kathleen McArthur, and our continuing friendship. They brought me joys of discovery, new knowledge, and shared appreciation. Those “wild-flowering days” at Tamborine Mountain, Caloundra, Noosa or Lake Cootharaba, when I was able to wander with her, helped train my own eye a little to her ways of seeing and her devotion to the flowers of the coast, the mountains, and the wallum plains and swamps. (Wright quoted in McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 7)It was through this wandering and wildflowering that their friendship was forged, their knowledge of the plants and landscape grew and their passion was ignited. These acts of wandering were ones where feelings and the senses were engaged and celebrated. McArthur was to document her experiences of these environments through her wildflower paintings, cards, prints, weekly articles in the local newspapers, and books featuring Queensland and Australian Wildflowers (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers; Living; Bush; Australian Wildflowers). Wright wrote a range of poems featuring landscapes and flora from the coastal experiences and doubtless influenced by their wildflowering experiences. These included, for example, Judith Wright’s poems “Wildflower Plain”, “Wonga Vine”, “Nameless Flower”, and “Sandy Swamp” (Collected Works).Through these acts of wildflowering, walking, and wandering, McArthur and Wright were drawn into activism and became what I call “wild/flower” women: women who cared for country, who formed a deep connection and intimate relationship with nature, with the more-than-human world; women who saw themselves not separate from nature but part of the great cycles of life, growth, death, and renewal; women whose relationship to the country, to the wildflowers and other living things was expressed through drawing, painting, poetry, stories, and performances—but that love driving them also to actions—actions to nurture and protect those wildflowers, places, and living things. This intimate relationship with nature was such that it inspired them to become “wild”, at times branded difficult, prompted to speak out, and step up to assume high profile roles on the public stage—and all because of their love of the small, humble, and often unseen.Wandering into Activism A direct link between “wildflowering” and activism can be identified in key experiences from 1953. That was the year McArthur devoted to “wildflowering”, visiting locations across the Sunshine Coast and South-East Queensland, documenting all that was flowering at different times of the year (McArthur, Living 15). She kept a monthly journal and also engaged in extensive drawing and painting. She was joined by Wright and her family for some of these trips, including one that would become a “monumental” expedition. They explored the area around Noosa and happened to climb to the top of Mt Tinbeerwah. Unlike many of the other volcanic plugs of the Sunshine Coast that would not be an easy climb for a family with young children, Tinbeerwah is a small volcanic peak, close to the road that runs between Cooroy and Tewantin, and one that is a relatively easy walk. From the car park, the trail takes you over volcanic lava flows, a pathway appearing, disappearing, winding through native grasses, modest height trees and to the edge of a dramatic cliff (one now popular with abseilers and adventurers). The final stretch brings you out above the trees to stunning 360-degree views, other volcanic peaks, a string of lakes and waterways, the patchwork greens of farmlands, distant blue oceans, and an expanse of bushland curving north for miles. Both women wrote about the experience and its subsequent significance: When Meredith was four years old, Kathleen McArthur, who was a great wildflower enthusiast and had become a good friend, invited us to join her on a wildflower expedition to the sand-plains north of Noosa. There the Noosa River spread itself out into sand-bottomed lakes between which the river meandered so slowly that everywhere the sky was serenely mirrored in it, trees hung low over it, birds haunted them.Kathleen took her little car, we took our converted van, and drove up the narrow unsealed road beyond Noosa. Once through the dunes—where the low bush-cover was white with wedding-bush and yellow with guinea-flower vines—the plains began, with many and mingled colours and scents. It was spring, and it welcomed us joyfully. (Wright, Half 279-280)McArthur also wrote about this event and its importance, as they both realised that this was territory that was worth protecting for posterity: ‘it was obvious that this was great wildflower country in addition to having a fascinating system of sand mass with related river and lakes. It would make a unique national park’ (McArthur, Living 53). After this experience, Kathleen and Judith began initial inquiries to find out about how to progress ideas for forming a national park (McArthur, Living). Brady affirms that it was Kathleen who first “broached the idea of agitating to have the area around Cooloola declared a National Park” (Brady 182), and it was Judith who then made inquiries in Brisbane on their way back to Mount Tambourine:Judith took the idea to Romeo Lahey of the National Parks Association who told her it was not threatened in any way whereas there were important areas of rainforest that were, and his association gave priority to those. If he had but known, it was threatened. The minerals sands prospectors were about to arrive, if not already in there. (McArthur, Living 53)These initial investigations were put on hold as the pair pursued their “private lives” and raised their children (McArthur, Living), but reignited throughout the 1960s. In 1962, McArthur and Wright were to become founding members of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (along with David Fleay and Brian Clouston), and Cooloola was to become one of one of their major campaigns (McArthur, Living 32). This came to the fore when they discovered there were multiple sand mining leases pending across the Cooloola region. It was at McArthur’s suggestion that a national postcard campaign was launched in 1969, with their organisation sending over 100,000 postcards across Australia to then be sent back to Joh Bjelke Peterson, the notoriously pro-development, conservative Queensland Premier. This is acknowledged as Australia’s first postcard campaign and was reported in national newspapers; The Australian called the Caloundra branch of WPSQ one of the “most militant cells” in Australia (25 May 1970). This was likely because of the extent of the WPSQ communications across media channels and persistence in taking on high profile critics, including the mining companies.It was to be another five years of campaigning before the national park was declared in 1975 (then named Cooloola National Park, now part of the Great Sandy). Wright was to then leave Queensland to live on a property near Braidwood (on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales) and in a different political climate. However, McArthur stayed in Caloundra, maintaining her deep commitment to place and country, keeping on walking and wandering, painting, and writing. She campaigned to protect beach dunes, lobbied to have Pumicestone Passage added to the national heritage register (McArthur, Pumicestone), and fought to prevent the creation of canal estates on the Pumicestone passage. Following the pattern of previous campaigns, she engaged in detailed research, drawing on expertise nationally and internationally, and writing many submissions, newspaper columns, and letters.McArthur also advocated for the plants, the places, and forms of knowing that she loved, calling for “clear thinking and deep feeling” that would enable people to see, value, and care as she did, notably saying:Because our flowers have never settled into our consciousness they are not seen. People can drive through square miles of colourful, massed display of bloom and simply not see it. It is only when the mind opens that the flowers bloom. (McArthur, Bush 2)Her belief was that once you walked the country and could “see”, become familiar with, and fall in love with the wildflowers and their environment, you could not then stand by and see what you love destroyed. Her conservation activities and activism arose and was fed through her wildflowering and the deep knowledge and connections that were formed.Wildflowering and Wanderings of My OwnSo, what we can learn from McArthur and Wright, from our wild/flower women, their wanderings, and wildflowering?Over the past few years, I have walked the wallum country that they loved, recited their poetry, shared their work with others, walked with women in the present accompanied by resonances of the past. I have shared these experiences with friends, artists, and nature lovers. While wandering with one group of women one day, we discovered that a patch of wallum behind Sunshine Beach was due to be cleared for an aged care development. It is full of casuarina food trees visited by the endangered Glossy Black Cockatoos, but it is also full of old wallum banksias, a tree I have come to love, influenced in part by writing and art by McArthur, and my experiences of “wildflowering”.Banksia aemula—the wallum banksia—stands tall, often one of the tallest trees of our coastal heathlands and after which the wallum was named. A range of sources, including McArthur herself, identify the source of the tree’s name as an Aboriginal word:It is an Aboriginal word some say applied to all species of Banksia, and others say to Banksia aemula. The wallum, being up to the present practically useless for commercial purposes provides our best wildflower shows… (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers 2)Gnarled, textured bark—soft grey and warm red browns, in parts almost fur—the flower heads, when young, feed the small birds and honeyeaters; the bees collect nectar to make honey. And the older heads—remnants on the ground left by glorious black cockatoos, whose beaks, the perfect pliers, crack pods open to recover the hidden seeds. In summer, as the new flowers burst open, every stage of the flower stem cycle is on show. The trees often stand together like familiar friends gossiping, providing shelter; they are protective, nurturing. Banksia aemula is a tree that, according to Thomas Petrie’s reminiscence of “early” Queensland, was significant to Aboriginal women, and might be “owned” by certain women:but certain men and women owned different fruit or flower-trees and shrubs. For instance, a man could own a bon-yi (Auaurcaria Bidwilli) tree, and a woman a minti (Banksia aemula)… (Petrie, Reminiscences 148)Banksia, wallum, women… the connection has existed for millennia. Women walking country, talking, observing, collecting, communing—and this tree was special to them as it has become for me. Who knows how old those trees are in that patch of forest and who may have been their custodians.Do I care about this? Yes, I do. How did I come to care? Through walking, through “wildflowering”, through stories, art, and experience. My connections have been forged by nature and culture, seeing McArthur’s art and reading Wright’s words, through walking the country with women, learning to know, and sharing a wildflowering culture. But knowing isn’t enough: wandering and wondering, has led to something more because now I care; now we must act. Along with some of the women I walked with, we have investigated council records; written to, and called, politicians and the developer; formed a Facebook group; met with various experts; and proposed alternatives. However, our efforts have not met with success as the history of the development application and approval was old and complex. Through wandering and “wildflowering”, we have had the opportunity to both lose ourselves and find ourselves, to escape, to learn, to discover. However, such acts are not necessarily aimless or lacking direction. As connections are forged, care and concern grows, and acts can shift from the humble and mundane, into the intentional and deliberate. The art of seeing and poetic perceptions may even transform into ecological action, with ramifications that can be both significant monumental. Such may be the power of “wildflowering”.ReferencesBrady, Veronica. South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998.Heddon, Deirdre and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review 22.2 (2012): 224–236.Lund, Katrín. “Landscapes and Narratives: Compositions and the Walking Body.” Landscape Research 37.2 (2012): 225–237.McArthur, Kathleen. Queensland Wildflowers: A Selection. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1959.———. The Bush in Bloom: A Wildflower Artist’s Year in Paintings and Words. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1982.———. Pumicestone Passage: A Living Waterway. Caloundra: Kathleen McArthur, 1978.———. Looking at Australian Wildflowers. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1986.———. Living on the Coast. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1989.Morrison, Susan Signe. “Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past.” M/C Journal 21.4 (2018). 12 Aug. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1437>.Petrie, Constance Campbell, and Tom Petrie. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. 4th ed. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Somerville, Margaret. Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942 to 1985. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2016.———. Half a Lifetime. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999.

The mobile phone found its way to the Philippines when the first generation of Global Systems for Mobile Communication or GSM handsets was introduced in the country in 1994. This GSM protocol eventually developed to introduce a faster and more efficient means of storing, manipulating, and transmitting data by allowing data to be translated into a series of ones and zeroes. Digital technology furthered the mobile phone’s potentials from being a mere “talking device on the move” (Leung and Wei 316) to a more dynamic participant in the new information age. The capacity to merge all forms of binary data enabled mobile phones to allow convergent services such as chatting, voice-mail, news updates, e-mailing, Internet browsing, and even the dissemination of image and audio files. Apart from the allure of the possibilities of digital communication, the mobile phone was also welcomed in the Philippines because of its convenience; it provided the country, especially the rural areas where telephones are unavailable or inaccessible, with a modern means of communication. A survey conducted by the Social Weather Station (SWS) in 2001 reveals the extent of the dissemination of this technology in the Philippines: “Out of the 15 million households in the Philippines, an estimated 2.5 million have a cellular phone, of which 2.3 million have text-messaging capacity. For the entire nation, text-messaging is available to 15% of all households in general, but it is available to 53% of ABC households in particular. Of the 2.3 million text-capable households in the nation, 800 thousand are in Metro Manila.” Of the 80 million Filipinos, there are now 22 million mobile phone owners in the country compared to only 6.7 million subscribed landlines (Lallana 1). Of the various digital applications of the mobile phone, text messaging is still considered to be the most exploited service in the Philippines. A voice call placed through the mobile phone would typically cost around six to seven pesos per minute while a text message costs a peso per message. Corollary, a typical Filipino now sends an average of ten messages every day, contributing to a daily traffic of over 300 million text messages (Pertierra 58). This has led to the popular notion of the Philippines as the “texting capital of the world” (Pertierra et al. 88). In Text-ing Selves, a study that examines the use of mobile phones in the country, Pertierra and other researchers argue that texting has made it possible to create new unsurveilled and unconventional human relationships. In one case cited in the book, for example, a male and a female texter met after an accidental exchange of text messages. Although initially they were very reserved and guarded, familiarity between the two was fostered greatly because the medium allowed for an anonymous and uncommitted communication. Eventually, they met and shortly after that, got engaged. A second instance involved a person who exchanged phone numbers with his friends to pursue strangers and win new friends by texting. He engaged in virtual or text-based “affairs” with women, which would later on result to actual physical sex. Another case examined was that of an 18-year old bisexual who met “textmates” by participating in interactive Text TV chatrooms. Although he eventually met up with individuals to have sex, he professed to use the Text TV mainly to create these virtual relationships with persons of the same sex. (Pertierra et al. 64-89) It is because of the considerable popularity of the medium and the possible repercussions of such curious relationships and interpersonal communication patterns that the phenomenon of mobile phone use, particularly that of texting, in the Philippines is worthy of systematic scrutiny. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the relational context being created through this wireless messaging system. An exploratory study, this research examines the contributions of the texting technology that allowed development of romantic relationships among its users. Ultimately, this paper aims to identify what makes texting a novel romantic device in the Philippines. The framework in the understanding of relationship development through texting incorporates Malcolm Parks’ theory of relationship life cycle and network (352). In his proposal, interpersonal relationships of all types are usually conceptualized as developing from the impersonal to the personal along a series of relatively specific dimensions: increases in interdependence, in the variety and intimacy of interaction, in interpersonal predictability and understanding, in the change toward more personalized ways of communicating and coordinating, in commitment, and in the convergence of the participants’ social networks. According to Parks (359-68), relationships move within the constructive character of communication that involves the interaction of the structure and content of communication between the participants. Thus, the researcher would like to identify the relationship between these seven factors of relationship development and the texting technology. This research identified the attributes of the texting technology along the seven dimensions of Park’s theory of relational development. Qualitative data was obtained and explored in the light of the concepts presented in the related literature, particularly the theoretical discourses of Paul Levinson and Raul Pertierra et al. A total of 43 respondents, 21 males and 22 females, were selected through purposive sampling to derive exploratory data through the in-depth interview method. Texting and Interdependence Unwritten Rule of Texting Respondents revealed that their relationships developed with their respective partners because texting made them more dependent on each other. “It became a habit” (Emmy). Partners texted each other as often as they could, until they have established themselves as regular textmates. One respondent’s day would also be influenced by his partner’s text message: “Kapag hindi siya nakakapagtext, nami-miss ko siya (If she doesn’t text, I miss her). Her simple ‘good morning’s’ can really help me start my day right.” At this level of the relationship, texters always had the compulsion to keep the communication constantly moving. One respondent attributed this to the “unwritten rule of texting.” Clara elaborated: You know there’s this unwritten rule in texing: once a person has texted you, you have to reply. If you don’t reply, the person will automatically think you ignored him or her on purpose. So you have to reply no matter what. Even when you really have nothing to say, you’re forced to come up with something or give your opinion just to keep the conversation going. Immediacy and Accessibility Some respondents exhibited interdependence by “reporting” or informing each other of the happenings in their individual lives. Arnel shared: Ang ilang pinakanatulong sa amin ng texting ay to inform each other kung saan na kami at kung anong pinagkakaabalahan namin at a specific time, especially kung hindi kami magkasama. (One of the greatest aid of texting in our relationship is that it enables us to inform each other about where we are and what we are doing at a specific time, especially if we are not together). He also added that texting allows them to organize their schedules as well as to logistically set meeting times or inform the other of one’s tardiness. Texting also allowed for the individuals in the relationship to influence each other’s thoughts, behaviors, and actions. “Kapag nagkukuwento siya kung anong nangyari sa kaniya tapos tingin ko mali, pinagsasabihan ko siya (If she tells me stories about what happened to her and then I see that there’s something wrong with it, I admonish her)” (Jesus). Jack summarized how the texting technology facilitated these indicators of interdependence between romantic partners: There’s a feeling of security that having a cellphone gives to a certain person, because you know that, more often than not, you can and will be reached by anyone, anywhere, anytime, and vice versa. So when I need comfort, or someone to listen, or I need to vent, or I need my boyfriend’s opinion, or I need his help in making a decision, it’s really relieving to know that he’s just a text or phone call away. These responses from the participants in a texting romantic relationship confirm Paul Levinson’s arguments of the mobile phone’s feature of accessibility. In the book Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How it has Transformed Everything! he mentions that the mobile phone technology, particularly texting, permits users to make instant, immediate and direct delivery of messages. He further explains that texting can be a romancing tool because before there was the mobile phone, people placing call through the telephone had to make sure that the persons they are asking out on a date are at home when the phone rings (Levinson 97). Texting and Depth: Privacy and Levinson’s Silence Texting also facilitated an efficient exchange of a variety of important, intimate, and personal topics and feelings for most of the respondents. A number of respondents even confessed that they could go as intimate as exchanging sexual messages with their partners. One respondent revealed that he could text his partner anything “kahit nga text sex pwede rin eh (even ‘sex text’ is allowed).” But mostly, the text exchanges consisted of intimate romantic feelings that one could not manage to say in person. Richard shared: “For example, through text we can say ‘I love you’ to each other. Aside from that, nasasabi ko rin yung mga problems na hindi ko masabi ng harapan (I could tell her about my problems that I could not say face-to-face).” Arnel, a homosexual, attributed this ease of transmitting intimate and personal topics and feelings to the texting technology’s unique feature of privacy. “Kasi wari bang nakakalikha ng pribadong espasyo yung screen ng phone mo na kahit na magkalayo kayo” (Because the mobile phone screen is able to create a private space that even if you are far from each other) physically, the virtual space created by that technology is apparent. Because no one can hear you say those things or no one else can read [them], assuming na hindi pinabasa sa ibang tao o hindi nakita (that it is not allowed to be read or seen by others) (Arnel). Arnel’s discussion of the private space that allows for intimate exchanges links up with Paul Levinson’s silence as one of the biggest benefit of the texting technology. Texting permits receivers to view their messages in private as opposed to having others in the environment hear and know about their particular communication or simply even just the fact that they are communicating (Levinson 112-14). Anonymity RJ would associate this capability to swap intimate information between partners to texting’s provision for anonymity. In texting, there is the element of anonymity, thus, you can feel more comfortable with sharing more intimate messages. As opposed to a face-to-face conversation wherein you would tend to hold back some feelings or thoughts because of fear of outright rejection. Personally, I consider that factor as a very important element in the development of our relationship. Because I am not really the aggressive-frank type of guy, I tend to hold back in telling her intimate things face to face. The feature of anonymity that the respondents mentioned seems to refer to one characteristic that Pertierra, et al. (91) outlined in their book. They wrote that communication through texting has also efficiently incorporated meaning, intention, and expressions allowing texters to say what is normally unsayable in face-to-face contexts. This clearly points to the comfort that the respondents identified when they’d share about intimate details like their exes and other information that a typical “non-aggressive-frank guy, who fears outright rejection,” would. Autonomy Perhaps an additional feature that might be closely related to privacy and anonymity is the autonomous nature of the texting technology. Homosexuals like Jetrin took advantage of this feature to facilitate unconventional same-sex affairs: “Unlike pagers, mobile phones are not monitored, therefore I can pretty much say what I want to the other person. I get to express myself more clearly and intimate[ly]”. Because of this absence of censorship, texters can confidently say “’I love you’ or ‘I want to throw you against the wall and make you feel like a cheap whore’ (Jetrin)” without having to concern themselves about a third-party processing their messages. Texting and Breadth Expressing Real and Virtual Emotions Because of these various constraints, respondents started to locate other avenues to communicate with their partners. Thus, the breadth of the relationship increased. Other means of communication that the respondents mentioned are face-to-face encounters, voice phone calls (either landline or mobile phone), e-mail, chat (YM, ICQ, Web cam, etc.), and even snail mail. However way they decided to extend their communication beyond texting, almost all of them declared that it is still texting that instigated this movement to another medium. One respondent said “Of course text ang taga-initiate (initiates) and then more ways [follow] after.” Although texting employs a dualistic nature of beneficial anonymity and uncertainty between exchanging partners, a number of respondents still express optimism about the texting technology’s capacity to bridge the gap between expressing real and virtual emotions. Some claimed that “even [in] text [there is] personality; smiling face, exclamation points, feelings are still communicated.” RG also expressed that “yung mga smileys nakakatulong sa pag-express ng emotions (smileys help in expressing emotions).” Jake added that “qualities like the smiley faces and sad faces you can make using the punctuation marks, etc. can really add warmth and depth to text messages.” Texting and Commitment Regularity Since most of the couples in a romantic relationship did not have the luxury of time to meet up in person or talk over the phone regularly, the frequency of texting became a distinct indication about their commitment to their relationships. “To commit is to be there for the person, 24/7. Texting helps in achieving that despite of the barriers in time and distance” (Von). Didith showed the other end of this phenomenon: “When he texted less and less in the course of the relationship, it made me doubt about … his commitment.” This regularity of texting also provided for strengthening the bond and connection between partners that ultimately “As we share more and more of our lives with each other, more trust develops…and the more trust you instill in each other, the more you expect the relationship to be stronger and more lasting” (Jack). Convenience and Affordability Some respondents pointed out texting’s convenient nature of linking partners who are rather separated by physical and geographical limits. Richard used texting to contact his partner “kasi malayo kami sa isa’t-isa, lalo na kapag umuuwi siya sa Bulacan. Texting ang pinakamadali, cheapest, and convenient way para makapag-communicate kami (because we are far from each other, especially if she goes home to Bulacan. Texting is the fastest, cheapest, and convenient way for us to communicate).” This “presence” that strengthens the commitment between partners, as suggested by most of the respondents, indicates the capacity of the mobile phone to transform into an extension of the human body and connect partners intimately. Texting, Predictability and Understanding Redundancy Some of the respondents agreed that it is the regularity of texting that enabled them to become more capable of understanding and predicting their partner’s feelings and behaviors. Tina articulated this: “Probably due to redundancy, one can predict how the other will react to certain statements.” Jake also expressed the same suggestion: Texting in our relationship has become a routine, actually. Texting has become like talking for us. And the more we text/talk, the more we get to know each other. Nagiging sanay na kami sa ugali at pag-iisip ng isa’t-isa (We become used to each other’s attitudes and thinking). So it’s inevitable for us to be able to predict one another’s reactions and thoughts to certain topics. Because we get to a point wherein we feel like we know each other so well, that when we are able to correctly predict a feeling or behavior, we find it amusing. In the end, the regularity of the interaction brought about learning. “I’ve learned much of her from texting. I knew that she becomes disappointed with certain things or she really appreciates it when I do certain things. It became easier for me to learn about her thoughts, feelings, etc.” (RJ) Managing of Contextual Cues A lot of the respondents mentioned that their understanding and predictability of their partners was also heightened by the context of the construction of the messages that were being transmitted. “If there are smiley faces, then we’re okay. No cute expressions mean we’re in a serious mode” (Didith). “Either an added word, a missing word, or a word out of place in the message gives me the clue” (Jake). The textual structure and signs became instrumental into the translation of how to perceive another’s feelings or reactions. “For example, pag normal, sweet words yung nasa text, may mga ‘I love you,’ mga ganon. Pero kung galit siya, may iba. Minsan ‘Oo’ lang yung sagot. Kaya mas nakikilala ko pa siya through text (For example, on a normal circumstance, her text would contain sweet words like ‘I love you.’ But if she’s mad, it’s different. At times, she would just reply with a mere ‘yes.’ That’s why I get to know her more through text)” (Richard). Texting and Communicative Change Own Private World Texting allowed respondents to create special languages that they used to interact with their own partners. It is an inherent characteristic of texting that limits messages up to 360 characters only, and it becomes almost a requirement to really adapt a rather abbreviated way of writing when one has to send a message. In this study however, it was found that the languages that respondents created were not the usual languages that the general public would use or understand in texting – it even went beyond the usual use of the popular smileys. Respondents revealed that they created codes that only they and their respective partners understood in their “own private world” (Jackie, Emma). “How I text him is different from how I text other people so I don’t think other people would understand what I’m telling him, and why the manner is so if they read our messages” (Anika). Leana shared an example: My partner and I have created special nicknames and shortcuts that only the two of us know and understand. Kunyari (For example), we have our own way of saying ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you.’ To send a kiss… we use a set of characters different from the usual. Basta secret na namin ‘yon (It is our secret). Fun Majority of the respondents identified communicative code change as the most exciting and fun part in texting. “It is one of the best things about relating with someone through texting. It is one of the most fun things to do” (Mario). And the amusement that this interaction caused was not only limited in the virtual environment and the textual context. “It is one of the fun things about our texting and it even carries over when we are together personally” (Justin). “Since words are what we have, we play with them and try to be creative. Para masaya, exciting (So that it is fun and exciting)” (Charm). Incidentally, this sense of fun and excitement is also one of the attributes that Pertierra and his co-authors mentioned in their book Txt-ing Selves (Pertierra et al. 140): “Many see texting as an opportunity for fun.” Texting and Network Convergence Texting also made network convergence possible among partners, and their respective social circles, in a romantic relationship. Because the respondents engaged in non-stop texting, their friends and family started to notice their change in behavior. “People become curious… They want to know the person I text with every minute of every day… I guess people can tell when a person’s in love, even when it has only developed through texting” (Clara). Jake shared a very likely scenario: “If you get text messages when you’re with your friends/family and you laugh at the message you receive, or just react to whatever you receive, you’d have to make kwento (tell) who you’re texting to make sense of your reactions.” Others though, readily announced their relationships to everyone: “I’ll text my friends first na ‘Uy, may bago ako.’ (I will text my friends first that: ‘Hey, I have a new girlfriend.’)” (Richard). But sometimes, texters also introduced their partners to people outside their friends and family circles. “Sometimes, it even goes beyond personal. Example, if my ‘new partner’ who has never met any of my friends and family need help with something (business, academic, etc.) then I introduce him to someone from my circle who can be of help to him” (Jetrin). Network convergence could also take place through and within the medium itself. Respondents revealed that their family and friends actually interact with each other through texting without necessarily having the opportunity to meet in person. Pauline shared: “Ate (My older sister)… used to send text messages to him before to ask where I am. And my mom stole his number from my phone ‘just in case’.” Didith and her boyfriend also experienced having their friends involved in the dynamics of their relationship: “During our first major quarrel, he texted and called my friend to ask what I was mad about. Likewise, when we have a minor spat, I call his friend to vent or ask about him.” Conclusion This study establishes the texting technology’s capacity as a romancing gadget. As the interview participants pointed out, because of the technology’s capacity to allow users to create their own world capable of expressing real and virtual emotions, and managing contextual cues, texters were able to increase their dependence and understanding of one another. It also allowed for partners to exchange more personal and intimate information through an instant and private delivery of messages. The facilitation of communicative change made their relationship more exciting and that the texting medium itself became the message of commitment to their relationship. Finally, texting also led the partners to introduce one another to their families and friends either through the texting environment or face-to-face. Ultimately, texting became their means to achieving intimacy and romance. Texting offered a modern communication medium for carrying out traditional gender roles in pursuing romance for the heterosexual majority of the respondents. However, the messaging tool also empowered the homosexuals and bisexuals involved in the study. The highly private and autonomous textual environment enabled them to explore new and unorthodox romantic and even sexual relations. Moreover, texting may be considered as a venue for “technological foreplay” (Nadarajan). Almost all of those who have used texting to sustain their intimacy indicated the choice to expand to other modes of communication. Although relationships set in a purely virtual environment actually exist, the findings that these relationships rarely stay virtual point to the idea that the virtual setting of texting becomes simply just another place where partners get to exercise their romance for each other, only to be further “consummated” perhaps by a face-to-face contact. Data gathering for this research revealed a noteworthy number of respondents who engage in a purely virtual textual relationship. A further investigation of this occurrence will be able to highlight the capacity of texting as a relationship gadget. Long distance relationships sustained by this technology also provide a good ground for the exploration of the text messaging’s potentials as communication tool. References Lallana, Emmanuel. SMS, Business, and Government in the Philippines. Manila: Department of Science and Technology, 2004. Leung, Louis, and Ran Wei. “More than Just Talk on the Move: Uses and Gratifications of the Cellular Phone.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (2000): 308-320. Levinson, Paul. Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything! New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Mangahas, Malou. “For the Little History of EDSA-2.” Social Weather Station 26 Jan. 2001. 31 Jan. 2005 http://www.sws.org.ph/>. Nadarajan, Gunalan. Personal communication with the author. 2004. Parks, Malcolm. “Communication Networks and Relationship Life Cycles.” Handbook of Personal Relationships: Theory, Research, and Interventions. 2nd ed. Ed. Steve Duck. London: John Wiley, 1997. 351-72. Pertierra, Raul. Transforming Technologies: Altered Selves – Mobile Phone and Internet Use in the Philippines. Manila: De La Salle UP, 2006. Pertierra, Raul, et al. Text-ing Selves: Cellphones and Philippine Modernity. Manila: De La Salle UP, 2002. Solis, Randy Jay. “Mobile Romance: An Exploration of the Development of Romantic Relationships through Texting.” Asia Culture Forum, Gwangju, South Korea: 29 Oct. 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Solis, Randy Jay C. "Texting Love: An Exploration of Text Messaging as a Medium for Romance in the Philippines." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/05-solis.php>. APA Style Solis, R. (Mar. 2007) "Texting Love: An Exploration of Text Messaging as a Medium for Romance in the Philippines," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/05-solis.php>.

Several available free software audio solutions were analyzed, and Jackdmp—a C++ reimplementation of the renowned JACK Audio Connection Kit—was selected as the most appropriate solution for a real-time audio architecture on DROPS. The JACK sound architecture provides the lowest processing latency possible on a desktop computer for a given set of sound card parameters. It reduces the latency jitter caused by software to zero and synchronizes streams at sample accuracy. A real-time admission scheme for JACK clients is proposed. The execution time of different typical JACK clients was analyzed with measurements to validate the assumptions the proposal is based on, but also to gain further knowledge about their timing behavior. The measurements showed that the condition set by Paul Davis—the time to process a client must be a linear function of the buffer size—holds for all tested clients. Jackdmp was ported to DROPS. The developed design of the port and its implementation is documented here. Measurements showed that—although the real-time performance of the Linux kernel is continuously being improved in the mainline and on special external branches—DROPS can provide a signaling latency that is two times lower on average than the values that can be achieved on the same machine running with a low latency patched Linux kernel. Thus, it can be stated that DROPS is well-suited for real-time audio processing and that the pursued path to use it as the foundation of a truly real-time capable audio workstation should be followed
Wenn man heute digitale Audiotechnik zum Aufnehmen oder Abmischen von Musik oder anderen Audiodaten verwenden möchte, steht man vor der Wahl, entweder auf eine sehr spezialisierte Hardwarelösung zurückzugreifen oder aber sich eines gewöhnlichen Desktopsystems mit entsprechender Audiosoftware zu bedienen. Der Vorteil eines Desktopsystems ist neben seinem deutlich niedrigeren Preis vor allem die Flexibilität. Bezüglich seines Echtzeitverhaltens bietet ein Computer mit einem Standard-Desktop-Betriebssystem aber bei weitem nicht dieselbe Verlässlichkeit einer spezialisierten Hardwarelösung oder analoger Technik. Die Architektur von DROPS --- mit dem echtzeitfähigen Fiasco- Mikrokern auf der einen Seite sowie der Unterstützung von Legacy-Anwendungen durch L4Linux auf der anderen Seite --- birgt die Hoffnung, die Vorteile von den beiden eben beschriebenen Welten auf einem System mit DROPS kombinieren zu können. Die Motivation meiner Arbeit war es, für dieses langfristige Ziel einen ersten Grundstein zu legen. Dazu war es meine Aufgabe, verschiedene Open-Source- Lösungen hinsichtlich ihrer Eignung als Echtzeit-Audioarchitektur für DROPS zu analysieren und die am besten geeignete auf L4Env zu portieren. Meine Wahl fiel dabei auf das in der Linux-Audio-Szene wohlbekannte Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK). Desweiteren konnte ich in der Arbeit untersuchen, wie sich die JACK Audioarchitektur in ein globales Echtzeit-Scheduling --- z.B. eines von DROPS --- einbetten ließe, und schlage eine generische Methode dafür vor