Marco Donnarumma

Golden Shield Music is a generative sound composition for eight audio channels sitting between net.art and sound art. The work is inspired by the Golden Shield Project, sometimes referred to as the Great Firewall of China. This is a censorship and surveillance project operated by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) division of the Communist government of China. The project started in 1998 and began operations in November of 2003. Golden Shield Music collects the twelve website’s IP that are most screened by the Golden Shield. Then, IP numbers are listed in a text file which feeds an automated MIDI polyphonic synthesizer. The latter translates each IP in a single note formed by four voices with a specific velocity.

The resulting notes are ordered by the amount of pages that the Golden Shield has obscured for each IP address: the website’s IP obtaining the highest page result on Google.com becomes the first note of the score and the others follow in decreasing order. Data organizes the musical notation, establishing an abstract relationship between Internet information and musical algorithms which sounds harmonious and almost handcrafted.

The Great Firewall of China involves the massive use of web technologies such as IP (Internet Protocol address, a computer’s network address) blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, Packet filtering, Connection reset) to censor specific contents – mostly, but not only, political or historical subjects – through web search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Msn. This same technology has been semantically displaced and re-used by the author to create a generative piece of music which doesn’t focus on the structure or aesthetic of the composition, but simply makes a free, creative use of a technology originally created to subtly constrain the freedom of the Internet as a global Network.