Soft Clouding: Curating a New Semantics of Sound Archiving.

Soft Clouding is a blended concept, which describes the aim of a collaborative and transdisciplinary project. The concept is a metaphor implying a blend of cognitive, embodied interaction and semantic web. Furthermore, it is a metaphor describing our attempt of curating a new semantics of sound archiving.

The Soft Clouding Project is part of LARM - a major infrastructure combining research in and access to sound and radio archives in Denmark. In 2012 the LARM infrastructure will consist of more than 1 million hours of radio, combined with metadata who describes the content. The idea is to analyse the concept of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘interface’ on a creative play with the fundamentals of LARM (and any sound archive situation combining many kinds and layers of data and sources).

This paper will present and discuss the Soft clouding project from the perspective of the three practices and competencies brought together in one transdisciplinary process of curating a semantics of sound: Technological, Humanistic /Curatorial, and Design / Action-based practice.