The Sound of New Media Poetry

" . . . the artists today that are exploring the new possibilities for expression that audio-visual Web technologies make available are still subject to limitations. Looping is easier than it's ever been to create, but lengthy compositions are a major challenge. The mp3 file format greatly improved the audio quality of Web sound, but the file size is still huge compared to that of text and images.

In addition, adding interactivity to sound work often involves importing the sound files into another software program like Flash or Director. Subjecting the work to the rules of another layer of software programming shapes the possibilities of the final composition.

The three works featured in this Sound issue of PTG were all created using Flash software. We might see this as a limitation imposed by a proprietary technology (as some Flash naysayers might point out), but it also allows us to see a structured investigation of the software as medium, and the way these works are expressed through the sound capabilities of Flash." -- from The Sound of New Media Poetry, Poems that GO, Spring 2003