Music in the Age of Digital Surveillance

Music in the Age of Digital Surveillance is a Chrome browser extension which keeps track of cookies placed in the browser when visiting a website. For each page that is browsed, Music in the Age plays an algorithmically generated melody utilizing Tone.js framework based on the number of domain-specific cookies that each web page has. It adds a delay for each cookie from a domain, resulting in a unique intermingling of notes for each page.

Music is a powerful medium to convey raw, unfiltered emotion. The emotional context of different note intervals is evident throughout history - just the introduction of the different scales has prompted intense outrage. Music and sound are also used to very strong ends in film to give emotional cues to viewers. Similarly, a variety of notification sounds often evoke and inform our responses in our digital interactions.

Music in the Age aims to use this human quality to combine repeated exposure to sonic content which frames the emotional context by concretizing our understanding of the methodologies tracking our behavior that encapsulates our reality. The sense of hearing thus augmenting our browsing experience and allowing the users to subconsciously map concretized patterns to domains.