Sonic Archeology
From Sonic Archeology - Sonic Archaeology
On 27th of Sept. 2007 a secret 1972 paper from the National Security Agency’s in-house journal Cryptologic Spectrum with the title "TEMPEST: A Signal Problem." was declassified. "To state the general problem in brief: Any time a machine is used to process classified information electrically, the various switches, contacts, relays, and other components in that machine may emit radio frequency or acoustic energy."[1]
Sonic Archeology is an open collaborative research and knowledge-base project, which investigates into hidden sonic properties of operational processes occurring permanently in our artificial everyday environment pervaded by electromagnetic waves, but also in our hi-tech electronic gadgets, which store, transmit and manipulate/ calculate information.
All interested persons and institutions can participate by creating an user account. The main idea is a collaborative writing project (following wikipedia etc.), where different people can work and contribute their knowledge on one area of similar study and interest.
The initiators of the project (Shintaro Miyazaki, Michael T. Chinen and Martin Howse) propose two main methods for an "auscultation" of everyday informational devices, environments and logics.
- A, a hardware based approach, where audificating hardware tools like electromagnetic coils, differential amplifier, HF-Modulators&Detectors, logic analyzers and other devices are used to reveal the hidden sounds and rhythms of our - mainly digital - information systems like the portable computers, Netbooks, Smart Mobile Phones, Mp3-Playes, Digital Cameras and so on.
- B, software based methods, which make crucial informational processes in computational processors (CPUs on motherboards, microcontrollers etc.) audible by attaching to applications and reading their opcodes, thread states, and memory space at runtime. Much of the software work is possible because the open-source movement has already provided much of the code to do this through programs like gdb/binutils. All we need to do is peel off the relevant sections of code and share.
- And C, some case studies where both methods get combined for achieving useful and meaningful surplus knowledge about our machinic environments.
As a guideline and pre-structure for the collaborative writing/editing process we propose some book-like chapters and categories on the left/bottom sidebar to keep an order and avoid too much entropy.
Sonic Archeology is a project of "Institute for Algorhythmics" and in close relation to "Detektors" (in collaboration with Martin Howse).
Next: Read the Preliminary Definitions and Methods for more.