Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the soundscape recordings people have made and are making — from soundwalks, to radio captures, to ambiences — were available as GPS-pegged audiostreams that could be accessed, say, on one’s phone, a la the “locative art” in Gibson’s Spook Country?
A step further (if away from the curatorial), the right software application, given a decent pool of geo-tagged audio files, could offer quite a realtime collage of places’ past soundscapes. Assuming, that is, that this is something one would want to do: to listen in/to two (or more) moments at once.
I think I would. I’ve attempted similar exercises, seen.
[audio:http://wayneandwax.com/org/blog/february/sunday-radio-ja.mp3]
Anyone working on this? Or some piece of such a project?
hey wayne! Bernie krause is doing something along these lines – http://earth.wildsanctuary.com/ Part of his thing is to use sound to document degradation of the sonic environment…been talking with wolfie from soundgoods (who is a geographer in “real” life) about this quite a bit – using the metadata in an mp3 to tag it with geographical information. bo
interesting! i’m not suprised to hear that preservationist soundscapers (a la the neologist himself, murray schafer) are thinking along these lines. of course, i’m open to hearing our noisy, mass mediated soundscapes too, but it can be a BIG ol tent, for sure.
I made a soundscape of Granada grafitti from images and sounds recorded on a walk when I first got to Spain two years ago, with bitsotext from Audio Culture.
That sunday morning Jamaican radio mix of your’s appears briefly in my Dubious Bredren mix @ 1:16 — and, as you already know, the smashacre recently relocated to the 206
is that a city full of sounds?
Ask and ye shall receive. This is pretty amazing, along these lines —
http://www.davosoundscape.ch/index.html
thx @madebyrobot
there’s a few graf kinda projects like that –
http://www.google.com/search?q=geotag+audio+graffiti
Hi Wayne, I’m interested in/working on superimposing geographical and sonic spaces as well. Let us know if you come across anything cool…
My work so far consists of two directions, the SyncWalk urban-route-as-reactive-playlist project described on my homepage) and the smaller-scale audio terrain interface described here. Come by the Lab sometime and say hi!
Hey Wayne,
the topic as well reminds me always of a great art project of Michael Wesely and Kalle Lahr even it’s not a digital thing. They recorded the sound and took a long-exposure photograph at the same time at the same spot in big cities. The foto and the recorded sound is then put together on a same medium: a picture vinyl disc.
Cheers,
Wolfie
found another cool soundscape resource @ http://www.freesound.org/geotagsView.php [googlemaps mashups are the truth! Best graffiti in Granada and Tony Hawks’ skate spots and and and
this seems like an interesting application —
GPS Beatmap from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.
via http://crashroots.com/2009/09/03/gps-locative-driving-control-surface/
(via maga bo, via wolfie)
A few more addenda, mostly from a conversation among the Sound Studies Google group:
From Ashon Crawley:
From Bill Boyer:
From Ben Tausig:
Also, just stumbled upon this interesting soundwalk/artproject, presenting a parallax audition of NYC-Baghdad:
See also, Ben Tausig’s blog, where he rounds up all these ex.s (& more) and offers a typology too —
http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/01/10/atlas-sound-a-typology-of-sound-maps/
Here’s yet another interesting/promising project along these lines:
http://www.thesmalls.com/StreetSounds/
One of these days, though, a lot of these projects will benefit from being somehow “merged” — or at least cross-browsable/searchable/layerable.
Thanks Wayne. Your platform delivers.
Here’s an interesting post talking about the difficulties/impossibilities of accessing soundscapes of our (relatively) distant past:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/the-quest-to-find-the-first-soundscape/62842/
Of course, I’m as much interested in using the tools we have now so that The People of The Future will be able to listen back, even if we can’t do so ourselves right now. Along those lines, here’s another roundup of soundwalks/soundmaps:
http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/blog/sound-maps
And here’s another round-up:
http://soundcities.com/
Pretty late, I know, but anyway. There is a tool doing exactly what you are looking for: the ‘miniatures for mobiles’ app by Udo Noll, based on the aporee ::: maps soundmap, see http://aporee.org/maps/
The app enables you to create a network of GPS-located sounds to be browsed by walking. Or you can just tune in and listen to sounds nearby that have been archived on aporee maps before.
I used the minatures for mobiles in two projects, http://sonicagents.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/walking-in-the-city/ and http://sonicagents.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/miniature-for-mobiles/
Both the network and the app are free and accessable.