Sound-of-eBay.com website: @2008 UBERMORGEN.COM sound-of-ebay.com

The Sound of eBay

the sound of eBay is part 3 of the EKMRZ-trilogy by UBERMORGEN.COM.

The story: “Within this global grid a company named eBay became the largest marketplace, with very local marketplaces. eBay is romantic and seductive, not like the local flea markets in Paris (Le marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen) but sexed up a million times bigger and spherically transcended, much more effective and thoroughly commercialized. We love it! ‘The Sound of eBay’ is the affirmative high-end low-tech contribution to the atomic soundtrack of the new peer-to-peer hyper-catastrophic shock-capitalism.”
For the project I have written a program named the eBay-Generator. The program is written utilizing a highly customizable software for realtime-audio synthesis named SuperCollider, which, unlike usual, commercial software, allowed me to interact with data retrieved from the internet. The program queries a web-based MySQL-database, which stores requests for new “songs” that have been set via the project’s website. Any time there is a request the program will go to the regarding website on eBay.com and analyse the user-data stored on eBay. The data will then be transformed into a stochastic composition that finally get’s stored as an MP3-file on
www.sound-of-ebay.com/200.php

The project has gone through two stages:

The Sound of Mercadolibre – a preliminary version using the South American eBay-clone mercadolibre.com, presented in fall 2007 at transitionmx festival, Mexico City.

The Sound of eBay– unlike “The Sound of Mercadolibre” this version utilizes a non-realtime sound-generation, which made it stable enough to produce more than 2.300 tracks by user-request so far. The project has been presented in exhibitions and festivals in Spain, France, USA, Germany, Iceland
The Sound of eBay

Release on cronicelctronica.org (2009):