by Xiaomin Fan and Juice
Project Overview:
Acoustic Property is a speculative sound trading system inspired by the transaction model of The Landlord’s Game by Lizzie Magie. In this system, the city is divided into different soundscape zones, where telephone booths function as local trading hubs for urban sound.
Musicians are invited through an open call to compose locational music inspired by the surrounding environment. Their compositions are uploaded to the Music Bank app and distributed to telephone booths, where each track is randomly assigned a number from 0–9 as a music blind box.
Using the Music Bank app, players explore the city and visit telephone booths to interact with the system. They can purchase music blind boxes as assets, listen to music by paying a listening fee, or trade music assets with other players through the app.
Listening fees are distributed between the musicians who created the tracks and the players who own the music assets. Through this system, urban soundscapes become tradable cultural assets, creating new income streams for musicians while encouraging citizens to explore and reconnect with the city through sound.
