My first meeting with my supervisor left me very inspired and motivated – I had the feeling to be able to explore almost any direction I wanted while still receiving full support. I communicated that the walking soundscape was definitely my favorite concept and in turn received some further input and keywords to look into.
One of those keywords was RjDj. The company Reality Jockey Ltd., which was founded in 2008, coined the term reactive music, which could be described as music that reacts to its listener or the environment in real time (Barnard et al., 2009). RjDj released a number of apps on iOS, which all seemed to be able to technically do exactly what I wanted to achieve with my walking scape – just in a much more broad sense. They built a framework based on Pure Data that allowed people to create music that reacts to a phone’s sensors. Basically anybody could create music (or “scenes” as they called it) for those apps, with the help of RjDj’s open source library rjlib. Unfortunately, neither the RjDj website, nor its apps are available anymore.