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SoundTours by Livingston Sound use GPS on any mobile device to deliver any media to the location of the user. We use sound files geolocated in a particular environment to provide a musical experience, storytelling, snippets of history, or local birds in flight. The power of the SoundTour is the ability to layer lots of information through sound files, and make them explorable, discoverable, and unique to each visitor. Want to learn about history? Geology? Edible wild plants? Choose that tour. A composer's interpretation of the landscape? Meditative experience for strolling? A jogging soundtrack? All selectable on demand. Be sure to read about SoundWalks and SoundDrives!

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SoundWalks and SoundDrives by Livingston Sound

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SoundWalks and SoundDrives by Livingston Sound

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The Soundwalk has a long history by some of the world's most interesting composers and sound artists. It is important to understand that there are two kinds of soundwalk: one is best described as a listening tour, with a guide leading a group into interesting places to use their ears, and understand their environment through discovered 'native' sonic experience. The other type of soundwalk uses prepared sound experience, whether musical composition or narrative text, to follow a visitor through a site. This is most commonly delivered over headphones. There are also interesting hybrids of the two experiences, to make sure visitors listen to the live soundscape they are visiting. We have created our own innovations with SoundDrives, designed to accompany a much larger-scale tourism experience. Read about our sonoTour in Wisconsin which was 62 miles of sound adventure!

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Ask Us About a Sound Tour Created for your Open Space, Downtown, or Park!

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Ask Us About a Sound Tour Created for your Open Space, Downtown, or Park!

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Affordable, evergreen, and universally appealing. Inquire Here

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Market Focus: SoundTours for Open Space, Parks, Land Conservancy

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Market Focus: SoundTours for Open Space, Parks, Land Conservancy

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For 2021 and the particular requirements of covid-era projects, we are pleased to announce a special initiative to meet the educational and promotional and community needs of open space management organizations. In short, we create apps that connect people to the land. Our artistry is primarily collecting sounds to tell the story, but the apps can contain all the photo and video media that you would like to use, built around the dynamics of an interactive map and the ability to use real-time GPS data to locate the user.

All of the apps are available for virtual use, at home with the device, or from the comfort of a desktop computer or any web browser.

How is this useful to your organization? We can build relationships directly with the land and its ecology, wherever most convenient for your constituency. There is often a triumphant announcement of land acquisition, heralding the generosity of donors and the addition of large or small plots of land to the conservation management. But that announcement is often followed with the news that public access may be months or years away.

But what if the followers were immediately connected with an app that promises to relate the narrative up close and in great detail, with collections of nature sounds, streaming brooks, dawn choruses, coyote calls? What if video clips showed the views, the magnificence of oak groves and tall redwoods? The end user could take a virtual hike, and get to know the land well in advance of its opening. Your staff experts could provide seasonal stories, with regular updates, that come right to the constituent within the intimacy of their device.

Our main artistic expression is through soundscapes and musical compositions built upon environmental sources, so that could be an additional layer of entertainment and discovery for the audience, or it could be a purely scientific depiction of the sound environment, which we do with a soundscape recording protocol designed for accurate reference recordings for documenting differences over time.

Based in Oakland and Sonoma, we are well-qualified and well-situated to create this project to enhance your outreach and education, all at a remarkably low cost when measured by audience connection. We even know of some particularly appropriate grants that could bring such a project to fruition rapidly. Talk to us now so we can have our microphones deployed in the woods as spring arrives!

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Market Focus: SoundTours for Art Trails, Open Studios, Agricultural Festivals, Hiking Weekends

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Market Focus: SoundTours for Art Trails, Open Studios, Agricultural Festivals, Hiking Weekends

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If you are organizing a weekend event, with potentially many visitors new to the region, a customized SoundTour is the perfect unifying factor. It contains a map, all the necessary information for visiting sites, photographs that help people find their way, and even our proprietary "Route Response" which lets the driver know if they have made a turn. We develop ideal content for visitors to delve into during the drive from one site to another, which can include historical information, route data, local dining advice, or just a unique soundscape to listen to, with sources drawn from the region, whether nature or appropriate music. One of our trademarks is a little bubbly sound every time the route crosses a creek or culvert: just a friendly reminder of the infrastructure which crisscrosses the built environment.

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Sauk County, Wisconsin
Download the tour to your phone or simulate the 62-mile drive on the website without leaving your desk!

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The 2020 DTour has a soundscape layered onto the landscape! Downloada GPS-based Sound Experience by Hugh Livingston to your iPhone or Android. Need help? Click here for instructions provided by the artist.

The Experience does not require WiFi to work once downloaded. Download the SonoTour before you leave home, at either Trailhead (Map Stop # 1 in Plain or #21 in Sauk City), or at the Food Chain (Map Stop #15)

An evolving soundscape will emerge as you travel the beautiful hills & valleys and working landscapes of Sauk County. Be sure to listen to special Field Notes tagged with local farmer interviews, organized in collaboration with Grassland 2.0 and graduate students at UW-Madison.

Artist Hugh Livingston designed a soundscape layered onto the landscape for the 2020 Farm/Art DTour in Sauk County, WI.

CREDITS

Sound collection, composition and soundscape design by Hugh Livingston ( www.livingstonsound.com )

Musical contributions from Joshua Pablo Rosenstock and the Fermentophone, Tory Tepp, Michael Bell and Eleanor Mayerfeld, Sr Christina Marie and voices from The Cistercian Nuns of Valley of Our Lady Monastery. Thanks for the gracious assistance in discovering sounds from Scott Manning at Vintage Brewing Company, Bob Wills and Scott Barker at Cedar Grove Cheese, Hausner Farms, Sarah Lloyd and Nels Nelson at Nelson Dairy Farms, Curt Meine, the Grass Cats, and John Hegner. Texts from Ben Logan, The Land Remembers and Frank Lloyd Wright, Why I Love Wisconsin.

DESCRIPTION

This composition with space, a 62-mile Sauk symphony, explores responses and contributions of human machine and human nature across a rolling landscape where stream, forest, corn, beans, and hay divide into individual movements, with cross-fertilizations, connecting tendons and textures, and even a little humor. Listen for alerts that anticipate or accompany your driving: crossing creeks, skipping schools, clanging churches, shucking corn. Weather is unpredictable; futures prices variable. Both are probably expired. There might be brews and bubbling, cheddaring of cheese, an intonation of sisters, chewing of cud, and eight maids a-milking.

We respectfully acknowledge that we are making our artwork on land that is the traditional territory of the Sauk and Meskwaki, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Myaamia, and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ.

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The 2020 DTour has a soundscape layered onto the landscape! Downloada GPS-based Sound Experience by Hugh Livingston to your iPhone or Android. Need help? Click here for instructions provided by the artist. The Experience does not require WiFi to work once downloaded.

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From Sauk County, Wisconsin, listen (or read transcript) of short feature on the DTour and my featured sonoTour (a dynamic and humorous 62-mile driving sound experience).
Click the photo to reach the link.

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Fermentation Fest has been celebrating all things live culture for more than a decade. The festival's Farm/Art DTour sends people on a 50-mile journey, teaching them about microbes and showcasing artwork and roadside poetry - all while socially distant.

"Fermentation is about abundance and transformation," said Donna Neuwirth, executive director of Wormfarm Institute, the group responsible for the tour. "So whether it's from milk to cheese or grain beer or from one sort of community to another, it's about that kind of abundance and transformation. How one thing turns into another thing and has greater value and longer shelf life. So what we were trying to do is invite people to come closer. But the 40 stops on that 50-mile route are interspersed with what farmers do every day."

My wife, Heike, and I had heard of Fermentation Fest and thought driving through the Farm/Art DTour would be a fun excuse to get out of the house. Driving to Sauk City from Madison, we had no idea what we were getting into.

We meandered through small towns, churchyards, and farm fields set against the gorgeous backdrop of Sauk County's dynamic countryside. After a quick stop in Sauk City to pick up a tour map, we discovered a website that plays a tour length sound symphony. Following a GPS in an app, it plays sound and music at different locations. Designer Hugh Livingston drove the tour route twice a day for two weeks, logging 18 hundred miles to make sure the sounds played at precise spots along the journey. The result created a stunning soundtrack for the tour.

Just outside of Sauk City, Voices of Cistercian nuns from Valley of Our Lady Monastery filled the car as we passed a poem printed on a series of signs along the road.

"From rot to riches

Composts Holy work

To worship

I go to church with a pitchfork"

- Poem by Woody Leslie

A few miles later, we passed an old fire truck by the side of the road and heard the sound of a small stream as we crossed a bridge. In the distance, the Baraboo hills rolled across the horizon as a voice recited the words of Frank Lloyd Wright, commenting on the beauty of Sauk county.

Along the route, art creations dotted the landscape. We stopped at an earthwork sculpture in the form of a ship's prow, emerging from the side of a gently sloping hill in a field of kernza. Kernza is a perennial grain that can be made into flour.

Tory Tepp, the creator of this art project, explains how this work came about.

"This is called the 'Sauk County Ark' and it is that stands for the agricultural recon craft," said Tepp. "But my collaborating partner is the Gasser family, and they own Tower Rock Bakery just down the street. So this is kind of an experiment for us both. And when we harvest next summer, we're going to see if we can incorporate some of the kernza into their bread-making or pastry making. Then, the earthwork itself is kind of in the form of a ship or a shipwreck. All of this is from old agriculture. The ideas that ryegrass and all of these little gardens of cover crops and the kernza - it is an opportunity to move forward with new agriculture."

The tour continued from farm to farm and valley to valley with various art displays along the way. The soundscape moved from natural sounds to discussions of dairy farming and oral collages of farming sounds.

Fifty miles later, we found ourselves back in Sauk City. Reflecting on all that we'd seen and heard.

"It's reknitting together urban and rural concerns around land and nourishment," Donna Neuwirth said, summarizing what Fermentation Fest participation is all about. "I think that those things will always be critical. And this is just a fun, exciting way to kind of bring people into that experience."

The 2020 Fermentation Fest ran from September 26 to October 4.

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Abundance and Transformation: A Trip Through Fermentation Fest's Farm/Art DTour | Wisconsin Life

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Fermentation Fest has been celebrating all things live culture for more than a decade. The festival's Farm/Art DTour sends people on a 50-mile journey, teaching them about microbes and showcasing artwork and roadside poetry - all while socially distant. "Fermentation is about abundance and transformation," said Donna Neuwirth, executive director...

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Sauk County, Wisconsin
September 2020
collaboration with WormFarm Institute. Double-click to zoom in and enjoy the unusual details of my working musical score/regional map!

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Take the sonoTour virtually. Instructions in the box to the right if you have any trouble with the simulation.

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Congratulations to Wormfarm Institute of Reedsburg for receiving the 2021 Wisconsin Governor's Tourism Award for Arts, Culture and Heritage for producing DTour, including the sonoTour, which had 2100 downloads in 2 days!

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Detailed instructions for visiting the sonoTour on the web

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Some sketches for an 'architectural' approach to a moving sound experience at Fort Mason. Created for the SOUNDWAVE Sonic Architecture festival. Parameters vary with location, as well as altitude, walking speed, and x,y,z accelerometer data from the phone.

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Created in May 2017 under a commission from the City of Salem. A stroll through the historic center of town. Uses Mobile Music Platform and libpd to manage location services and real-time audio processing. Not currently available for new downloads but will soon be recreated using a more current and adaptable platform.

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Created in May 2019 with echoes.xyz.

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Making a SoundTour for Every No. 1 Bus Route in the World

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Making a SoundTour for Every No. 1 Bus Route in the World

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Hugh Livingston teaches an annual intensive on Soundscape and Landscape at the SFAI. Past years' platforms have included echoes.xyz and Sonic Maps for everyone to make walkable sonic experiences outdoors.

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The transect is a landscape architect or ecologist's tool to systematically study an environment by taking biological samples at regular geographical distances. The audio transect takes this idea and samples the sound experience across a landscape in order to understand the whole.