Sound Drifter conceives of sounds as living beings in a dynamic system. One could compare Sound Drifter to an aquarium where many different kinds of fish can be observed as they live, grow, breed and die.

The sound drifter was in operation 24 hours a day for the 9 days of the sound drifting project. The role of the sound drifter was to create the sound ambience of the Media deck in Linz by processing the sounds from the other locations in the network and to provide a live sound stream from Linz for the other locations.

The Sound Drifter consisted of three connected virtual chambers; The Stream Drifter where the live streams are received from the network; the Room Drifter where samples from the streams circulate as sound-objects and the Radio Drifter where the sound-objects are heard for the last time before entering the archive.

Stream Drifter:
was where the live streams from all the 15 network locations were introduced into the Sound Drifter system. It was a virtual chamber in which the streams were constantly circulating, being randomly sampled in real time and processed into loops at the interface to the Room Drifter. Each new loop then became another sound-object among the existing population of sound objects in the Room Drifter.

Room Drifter:
was a virtual composition-space in which the sound-objects lived in constant interaction and movement. The roomdrifter contained 16 virtual microphones which picked up the signals from the sound-objects as they passed by. The reconstructed sounds were then amplified and fed into one or more of the 16 loudspeakers in the OK Media Deck. The duration of the presence of any individual sound-object in the Room Drifter was about 6-8 hours, within which time it would have migrated into the Radio Drifter.

Radio Drifter:
was the last stage in the life of the sound-objects. As with the Room Drifter, but with only a single virtual microphone, the signals from the sound objects were randomly recorded. They were then encoded into an MP3 live stream which was fed into the internet and, at the same time, back into the Stream Drifter to repeat the cycle - like every other live stream in the network. The Radio Drifter also had an opening to an archive into which the sound-objects passed and disappeared from the system.

For the live mixes for the "Long Radio Night" the artists in Linz could access the sounds from all three chambers of the Sound Drifter, the streams from the other locations and from two microphones located in the installation in the OK Media Deck.

The Sound Drifter was closed down at the end of the project and the sound objects were allowed to slowly die. Even after more than 9 hours some sounds could still be faintly heard from the loudspeakers as the system was being dismantled.

Sound design and installation (Linz):
- Gerhard Wieser
- Winfried Ritsch

The Sound Drifter was designed and installed with the support of IEM - Institut für Elektronische Musik, Graz