“It’s like standing in a power station on acid. If you just stand in the middle of a really massive one so you get a really weird presence and you’ve got that hum.You feel electricity around you.That’s totally dreamlike for me.”
Richard James


Electrica is an interactive sound web site, an experimental
sound installation investigating the possibilities
of controlling sound in real time.

The project is a collaboration between Gundula Markeffsky and Peter Mühlfriedel (skop) with Leonard Schaumann (Leonid) and can be accessed on the Internet at . An important component of this audio-visual experiment is its great potential for interaction.
The visitor/listener/player exploring the web site moves through user interfaces that are unusual for the web. Partly intuitively, partly assimilatively, they find their own strategies for use, manipulating the sound cosmos consciously and unconsciously.
The point of departure for the project is a transformer station in Jena that was built in the 30’s by Bauhaus architects and is now a historical monument. This location is reminiscent of the vibrating atmosphere of a mad scientist’s laboratory from 50’s movies.The visual and acoustic material recorded in the transformer station and the circuitry aesthetic of the electricity became the source of both inspiration and material for the project.
Interwoven elements also include samples from old science fiction movies like “Forbidden Planet”and original recordings of electrical experimentation facilities in technical museums.
The web site consists of five different audio environments. Until now, the bandwidth problem of the Internet has presented an almost insurmountable obstacle to he integration of sound in web sites. Sound files are generally very large or become distorted through compression.

With Electrica this reciprocal relation between the amount of data and the sound quality has been solved through the use of a new sound format from the company Beatnik (www.beatnik.com), the socalled “Rich Music Format”(RMF). By way of comparison: a 5-minute RMF file with a size of only 5 KB in 16-bit stereo 44 Khz would need 50 MB of memory in a conventional CD format.

The RMF format makes it possible to use sounds in CD quality and yet still keep downloading time low. An interface of the plug-in Java, the programming language of the WWW, creates a previously unknown potential for the user to manipulate sound in real time.
The Beatnik plug-in and the new possibilities of JavaScript 1.2 form the technical basis of Electrica.