Kronospaces is an interactive sound installation that lets you explore decades of recordings by the Kronos Quartet. Created in 2018, it uses bits and pieces sampled from the quartet’s massive catalog of over 40 years of music. It also includes some experimental recordings the quartet made during a residency at MIT.
The system works by analyzing all these audio clips to extract key auditory features. These features are then used to cluster the clips into six different categories or "spaces." When you interact with the visual interface, the software stitches together clips on the fly using concatenative synthesis (the real-time component was implemented with the MuBu toolkit). This creates a continuous mosaic of sound that evolves as you move through the spaces.
The result is a fun, intuitive way to navigate the quartet’s diverse repertoire. You can uncover musical connections across genres and eras. As you traverse the spaces, the music shifts between contrasting textures and styles. It’s an interactive audio tour through the quartet’s illustrious history. Overall, the goal was to explore how new interactive designs can make vast archives of cultural material reachable and engaging.