# data[].attributes.body
Petter Alexandersson "Soundscapes"

Palle Dalhstedt (Chalmers)

Anders-petter Andersson (verksam i Norge)

# data[].attributes.headline
Season and Weather Effects on Travel-Related Mood and Travel Satisfaction

# data[].attributes.subject
Season and Weather Effects on Travel-Related Mood and Travel Satisfaction

# data[].attributes.body
Metod att använda för utvärdering?

# data[].attributes.headline
Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies

# data[].attributes.subject
Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This paper argues for expanded listening in geography. Expanded listening addresses how bodies of all kinds, human and more-than-human, respond to sound. We show how listening can contribute to research on a wide range of topics, beyond enquiry where sound itself is the primary substantive interest. This is demonstrated through close discussion of what an amplified sonic sensibility can bring to three areas of contemporary geographical interest: geographies of landscape, of affect, and of geotechnologies.

Everything that is resounds ... The landscape resounds; facades, caricatures, halos, shadows dance across it. ( Lingis, 1998: 100)

I Introduction

This paper makes the case for radically expanding listening in human geography. Expanded listening refers to the varied ways in which bodies of all kinds - human and more-than-human - respond to sound. Drawing on insights from sound studies and sonic geographies, our aim is to encourage broader applications of listening in geographical research, on a range of topics. We discuss three areas where sonic sensibilities are already evident, or emergent, but where we hear particularly productive possibilities for extending them: in research on landscape, affect and geotechnologies. These are sequenced to work outwards from the dominant anthropocentric understanding of listening, beginning by deepening and expanding human listening (in relation to landscape), then considering how sound moves bodies beyond cochlear listening and human consciousness (as affects and atmospheres), and finally exploring forms of listening in which human bodies are marginal (vibrations in earth materials and machines). As the visual medium of text is not ideal for encouraging listening, we have provided audio clips of some of our examples.

In recent years there has been 'a veritable avalanche of scholarship devoted to the interconnections between sound and space' ( Born, 2013: 4), including major works in the transdiscipline of sound studies (e.g. Augoyard and Torgue, 2008; Blesser and Salter, 2007; LaBelle, 2006, 2010). Across this literature, three overlapping themes can be identified. First, there is work that treats sound as a medium of knowledge, understanding listening as a 'hermeneutic disposition' ( Revill, 2013: 58). Feld's concept of acoustemology ( 1996) frames sound as a distinctive medium for knowing the world, a notion that underpins research on such varied themes as the semiotics of music ( Faudree, 2012; Henriques, 2011), the representational qualities of soundscape composition ( Drever, 1999, 2002; Montgomery, 2009; Rennie, 2014), and the use of listening in producing medical knowledge ( Rice, 2013), folklore ( MacDonald, 2011), ornithology ( Matless, 2000; Lorimer, 2007), and knowledge about particular places ( Butler, 2006, 2007; Adams, 2009; Gallagher and Prior, 2014).

Second, there is scholarship addressing sound as a productive and performative force that creates spaces. Research has explored, for example, how sound organizes and reconfigures urban territories ( Atkinson, 2007; Augoyard and Torgue, 2008; LaBelle, 2010), the use of sonic power in institutional spaces ( Jones, 2005; Gallagher, 2010, 2011), and the role of sound art in the production of space ( Pinder, 2001; Butler and Miller, 2005; DeSilvey, 2010; Gallagher, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Revill, 2014; Montgomery, 2011).

Third, attention has been paid to the geographies of sonic affects, bodily sensations and emotions, within the wider turn towards post-phenomenological theories, in which listening is untethered from cochlear reception ( Scrimshaw, 2013). Research has examined how sound moves bodies ( Gallagher, 2016), including through various kinds of noise nuisance ( Atkinson, 2007; Lorimer, 2013), sonic warfare ( Goodman, 2009), and sonic affects in domestic and other everyday spaces ( Anderson, 2004; Boyd and Duffy, 2012; Duffy and Waitt, 2013; Waitt et al., 2015). The emotional dimensions of listening in research encounters have been discussed ( Bennett et al., 2015), as has the role of sonic affect in forming the self ( Simpson, 2009). Other forms of sonic affect addressed by geographers include voices ( Kanngieser, 2012), micro-radio ( Kanngieser and Kogawa, 2013), and tinnitus ( Atkinson, 2011; Ash, 2015).

Nevertheless, sound remains a neglected concern within human geography as a whole. Geographers routinely listen to and make sounds - during oral presentations, field trips, interviews and so on - but in most cases these practices are not adequately theorized or subjected to critical reflection. Despite all of the work reviewed above, it is still all too common for simplistic assumptions about sound and listening to be uncritically reproduced in geography. Listening tends to be understood in implicitly anthropocentric terms, linked to human consciousness and aurality (hearing through the ear). Other kinds of sonic encounters are frequently left out. For example, while a recent article on methods for animal geographies ( Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015) briefly refers to aural inter-species communication, no mention is made of the wealth of relevant work in wildlife sound recording and bioacoustics. Similarly, Oosterlynck and Swygedouw's (2010) research on struggles over aircraft noise in Brussels focuses almost exclusively on the underlying politics. Noise - a complex, contentious concept within the sound studies literature - is treated as a straightforward environmental pollutant, without any discussion or theorization. These articles are by no means unusual; they merely exemplify the marginal status of sound and listening within mainstream human geography.

As a discipline addressing the earth in all its diversity, geography needs to develop broader sonic sensibilities. Every space and place sounds and resounds, every living body and being vibrates, and every kind of material, object and surface has acoustic properties. Conceiving of listening in a narrowly anthropocentric way is wholly inadequate for understanding this profoundly polyphonic world. An expanded conception of listening concerns the responsiveness of bodies encountering sound - bodies of any and every kind, in different ways and contexts. The sound studies and sonic geographies literatures cited above have helped to enlarge the horizons of listening. Our aim in this paper is to bring these ideas and practices into other areas of geographical enquiry. The rationale for doing so is threefold.

First, expanded listening enables us to recognize that sound affects bodies, human and more-than-human, in ways that extend beyond human perception, cognition and knowledge. Perception and thought clearly play an important part in human listening, but using a universalized human consciousness as a guide for listening in its entirety - as though listening were only that and nothing else - creates an overly narrow field of enquiry. Expanded listening attends to any and every kind of kinetic oscillation, generating insights into the interrelations and flows between humans, animals, objects, technologies, materials, infrastructures, and environments. It has been suggested that such relations can be better understood using the metaphor of fluids rather than the networks of Actor Network Theory (e.g. Sheller, 2004); listening to sound, as waves moving through fluids such as air and water, is helpful for making this conceptual shift.

In particular empirical contexts, however, it may make sense to listen more closely to some of these elements than others. Rather than favouring any one theorization of sound and space, we want to recognize the different analytical functions they perform. If the object of analysis is, say, the affects generated by noise in buildings, then sound might be heard as a spatially disruptive force that transgresses boundaries and territories. Alternatively, if the aim is to explore how such noise is managed through architecture and design, it may be more useful to conceive of sound as waves moving within spaces, and examine how the material qualities of those spaces shape sound. Sounds both produce spaces and are produced by them, in all kinds of ways. Different conceptualizations of this relationship need not be mutually exclusive. They can be used selectively or in combination, as filters that attune analysis to different aspects of the matter at hand.

All of these themes stress the inherent complexity of sound. Sound simultaneously creates, reinstates and breaks apart boundaries, impressions, and associations. It does more than one thing; indeed it often does many contradictory things, at the same time, to many different bodies. This complexity cannot be shied away from; sound cannot be reduced to make it easier to understand, or tied down to a set of consistent functions across different domains. The ephemeral, fluid, mobile and relational qualities of sound, while difficult to pin down, need this difficulty in order to function productively. Rather than reducing sound to fit a narrow set of listening practices, those practices must be expanded to encompass the diversity and multiplicity of sound.

II An expanded concept of listening

In the social sciences, listening is predominantly orientated towards the human. This focus is evident in research practices which explore what people have to say about their lives ( Back, 2007; Gallagher, 2013), phenomenological accounts of how sound is experienced ( Ingold, 2007), and notions of listening as a conduit for understanding the self ( Nancy, 2007) or as intersubjective exchange ( Bennett et al., 2015). Such perspectives generate important insights, but they struggle to address the full potential of listening to extend beyond the human to engage with other forms of life. Geography's concern with the earth as a whole points towards the need for an expanded conception of listening, as the responsiveness of bodies and materials encountering sound. Bodies, in this formulation, include human and more-than-human entities, while materials could include everything from microscopic particles to large-scale landforms. Our interest is not simply in how sound moves through these bodies and materials. Rather we are concerned with those situations where bodies and materials become particularly responsive to sound, resonating, amplifying or relaying vibration - situations where sound makes a difference in some way. Expanded listening starts with the ear, but goes beyond it to include the whole body. It also acknowledges forms of responsiveness to sounds that cannot be 'heard' by humans, whether due to frequency range (sounds below 20 Hz or above 20 kHz), amplitude (very quiet or deafeningly loud), temporality (sounds which take place within microseconds or over long spans of time), or spatiality (such as sounds beneath the earth's surface or in the atmosphere).

Revill (2015) cautions that listening risks downplaying other important aspects of sound, such as its relations with materials. We propose that it is possible, however, to attune to the multiplicity of sound not by moving away from listening, but by radically expanding it. Expanded listening addresses many different registers of sound: aesthetic, compositional and timbral qualities; affective, material and embodied characteristics; the ways in which sound is both spatial and temporal, evoking a sense of time, distance, direction or movement; sound's capacity to produce knowledge of events and processes; and the semiotic associations produced by listening, including the tendency of sound to trigger memories.

Listening is often distinguished from hearing, with the former positioned as conscious attention and the latter as a more passive form of reception; as Handel writes, 'the physical pressure wave enables perception but does not force it. Listening is active; it allows age, experience, expectation, and expertise to influence perception' (1989: 3). Perception is here understood to be 'the necessary second stage [after sensing].... During perception, the conception of an external event is constructed' (p. 3). A variety of different listening modes can be identified that pertain to such human perception. For example, Chion differentiates between causal listening, 'to gather information about [a sound's] cause (or source)' ( 1994: 25), semantic listening, aimed at the interpretation of the meaning of sounds, as with spoken language for example, and reduced listening, which 'focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning' (p. 29). Meanwhile, Truax discriminates between 'listening-in-readiness', wherein a listener is in a state receptive to receiving certain sounds, but whose attention lies elsewhere (Truax provides the example of a mother woken by a baby's cry but not by road traffic), and 'listening-in-search', which involves consciously listening to sounds for 'cues' ( 1984: 19).

We think there is something worth holding onto about listening, as a range of dispositions and activities that are more clearly responsive than what is usually referred to as hearing, but we take issue with how listening tends to be restrictively tied to human consciousness and intentionality. This is not to deny that human consciousness plays an important role, including in many of the examples we discuss below; the problem is rather the tendency to think that listening is nothing but an activity of human consciousness. In qualitative social research, for instance, this conception has led to listening becoming merely a metaphor for interpretation, emptied of any sensibility for sound as such (e.g. Clark and Moss, 2011: 9).

In expanded listening, bodies reveal themselves as malleable and porous, and in some cases, highly susceptible to sound. As Catherine Christer Hennix (2015: unpaginated) suggests, we would do well to 'consider the listener as a dynamical soft condensed matter system far from equilibrium and whose internal signal path and transmission systems can be tuned by exposure to external sound sources'. Developing listening practices may therefore be less about becoming newly responsive to sound, and more about attending more closely to responses that are already happening but which normally pass unnoticed; put another way, listening to bodies listening.

A notable risk of expanded listening is that in embracing polyphony the possibilities for analysis become overwhelmingly diffuse. Our response, in the remainder of the paper, is to focus enquiry on particular instances of listening, to particular sounds, in particular locations. The aim is not to further advance general theories about sound's spatiality, but rather to map out what closer listening can bring to particular areas of geographical enquiry. We have identified three areas in which a sonic sensibility is already established or emerging, but in which we hear productive possibilities for expanded listening: in work on landscape, affect, and geotechnologies. Working through these themes enables us to expand outwards from the dominant anthropocentric position. We begin by exploring how human listening could be deepened and extended as a way to rethink landscape. A focus on sonic affect and atmospheres then expands listening beyond human perception, cochlear listening, and consciousness, to how sound impinges on bodies, including (but not limited to) human bodies. Finally, we examine forms of listening in which humans are more marginal, including vibrations amongst other animal species, in earth materials and vibration-sensing technologies.

III The sounds of landscape

As a fundamental organizing principle within geography, 'landscape' has been most thoroughly conceived of and attended to along visual lines of inquiry, to the point where geographers have been forced to ask: are the visual surface qualities of landscape, as perceived by a physically distant observer, all landscape is (see Wylie, 2007)? This enduring question has been met with a variety of responses from scholars both inside and outside of geography. Some have tried to disentangle the (contested) etymological roots of landscape to help understand its essential nature ( Bourassa, 1991; Evernden, 1981; Olwig, 1996; Scazzosi, 2004); some have emphasized the embodied qualities of being and dwelling in landscape as a corrective to the assumed distancing effect of viewing landscapes from afar ( Berleant, 1992; Ingold, 2000); while others have defended looking at landscapes, particularly from a scenic perspective ( Benediktsson, 2007; Lowenthal, 2007; Parsons and Daniel, 2002).

A few geographers have addressed the sonic qualities of landscapes. For example, Matless (2005) has examined how the regulation of 'noisy' human sounds is central to the construction of 'natural' regions. Here, sound offers a way of investigating landscape-related values and epistemologies, while revealing the widely-held attitude in soundscape management that quietude is universally desirable. This attitude underpins attempts at the top-down regulation of human and mechanical sounds in natural landscapes - a common focus in landscape research outwith geography (see for example Lynch et al., 2011; Miller, 2008) - and also in urbanized landscapes through noise control policies and noise abatement campaigns. There have also been more nuanced approaches to 'noise' that point to how aesthetic appreciation or depreciation is highly variable and context specific, while at the same time taking the human and more-than-human health implications of excessive noise seriously. Adams et al. (2006) demonstrate that supposedly objectionable sounds in urban landscapes, such as all-night parties and the 'hum' of traffic, are tolerated or even aesthetically appreciated in certain contexts (see also Raimbault and Dubois, 2005). LaBelle (2010: xxiii) neatly sums up the resulting tension: 'on one hand there is no denial as to the intensities with which noise interferes with personal health and well being, while on the other hand noise may be heard as registering a particular vitality within the cultural and social sphere'. Addressing this tension, the Positive Soundscapes project has explored how urban landscapes might be designed to sound better, rather than simply sound less ( Davies et al., 2013).

The work outlined here broadens the scope of what constitutes 'landscape' in geographical research, and demonstrates that sound is a vital attribute of landscape and landscape experience. In what follows, we go further by thinking through some of the distinctive qualities of listening within landscapes, and their implications for geographical scholarship.

Secondly, while listening in a given landscape, we may also become aware of how there is often a spatial mismatch between the size of an object or subject from which a sound emanates and the spatial scale of the auditory space that the sound resonates within and fills (e.g. insects and birds in a meadow [audio: birds-in-meadow.mp3]). Such resonance within a landscape depends not only on the amplitude of a sound relative to other sounds, but also its pitch, directionality, rhythms, and duration, and the material and spatial qualities of the landscape. As sounds resonate, they can promulgate the spatial dynamics of landscape, revealing spatial contours as well as various material qualities of landscape surfaces - particularly how surfaces may influence the reception of sounds through reflection and absorption (e.g. oystercatcher vocalizations reverberating across the hard surfaces of a rocky beach and cliffs [audio: oystercatchers.mp3]). Listening provides an additional channel of knowledge, producing insights into scale, materiality and landscape morphology that are not available through other ways of knowing.

Thirdly, as well as sensing reflections from surfaces, it is possible to listen to sounds that originate from beneath visible surfaces of a landscape. This listening may augment human auditory physiology with various technological intermediaries, such as geophones to listen to subsurface ground movements, or contact microphones to listen to the internal vibrations of a bridge spanning a landscape [audio: bridge-contact-microphone.mp3]. At other times, sounds produced below a surface may cross this visible threshold, as when listening to a bird call that originates at the syrinx within the bird's body. Listening can also detect sonic landscape components not detectable by the eye (e.g. the sound of electricity running through an overhead power line [audio: overhead-power.mp3]). This ability to simultaneously listen to the inside and outside of sounding objects and subjects within landscapes complicates any simple bifurcation of landscape between surface and depth. Thus, a thoroughly conceived sonic geography of landscape that attends to listening cannot privilege one over the other, challenging critical scholars who valorize depth over surface (see Forsyth et al., 2013) as a supposed corrective to the tendency within the geographical literature of focusing only on landscape exteriorities.

IV Sound, atmospheres and affect

The capacity of sound to move bodies is of central importance to us in expanding listening beyond human perception and cognition; of interest is how feedback loops between sound, space, infrastructures, matter and bodies generate listening responses. Sound produces affective atmospheres, which interface with bodies on auditory and other listening registers ( Adey et al., 2013; Anderson and Ash, 2014; Duff, 2010; McCormack, 2008). Affect, write Gregg and Seigworth (2010: 1), can be thought of as

an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces - visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion - that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world's apparent intractability

atmosphere traverses distinctions between peoples, things, and spaces. It is possible to talk of: a morning atmosphere, the atmosphere of a room before a meeting, the atmosphere of a city, an atmosphere between two or more people, the atmosphere of a street, the atmosphere of an epoch, an atmosphere in a place of worship, and the atmosphere that surrounds a person, amongst much else. Perhaps there is nothing that doesn't have an atmosphere or could be described as atmospheric. On the one hand, atmospheres are real phenomena. They 'envelop' and thus press on a society 'from all sides' with a certain force. On the other, they are not necessarily sensible phenomena.

For Anderson, given this difficulty of definition, we might consider atmospheres as 'spatially discharged affective qualities that are autonomous from the bodies that they emerge from, enable and perish with' ( 2009: 80). To think of affective atmospheres is to think affect into spatial and material realms.

Sound is critical to affective atmospheres for two reasons. First, it moves through space in distinctive ways. Sound is highly promiscuous ( LaBelle, 2010: xvii); while it travels through materials differentially, in air it has a tendency to envelop other bodies. Because of this fluid, diffusive and immersive tendency, sound is integral to the formation of atmospheres in spaces. Second, everything participates in the sounding of worlds, including both biotic and abiotic bodies - an exhale, the teeming of insects, the movement of fabric, a chemical reaction, the oscillation of leaves and branches [audio: leaves-branches.mp3], an echo off concrete, a riot, a boat idling [audio: boat-harbour.mp3], ice thawing and so forth. Because everything engages sound, sound acts to link and collectivize bodies and environments, creating different kinds of atmospheres. These sounds may be audible or inaudible to the human ear, or on the threshold of audibility. The vibrational force of sound means that it acts upon entities regardless of whether those entities are consciously listening to it or not.

The vibratory and affective nature of sound challenges the common assumption that listening is contingent on aural receptivity. In geography, this insight has the potential to extend thinking on governance and spatial control by drawing attention to those heard-felt registers in which sound can affect bodies, sometimes profoundly, but which fall outside the ranges of human perception and consciousness. In debates about 'noise' pollution, much has been made of the human inability to not hear, or to 'shut our earlids' ( Schafer, 1977). Sound, however, is also sensed and listened to through the skin and within bodily cavities, organs, and cells. Listening is thus an embodied practice, forcing us to consider 'non-cochlear' ( Kim-Cohen, 2009) sonic geographies, in which sounds are spatialized across bodies. This is especially the case with sub- or in-audible sounds that cause disturbances, even though affected individuals are often unable to pinpoint precisely why, or how, bodies are affected. Vibro-acoustic effects do not necessarily announce themselves on the level of conscious listening.

One example is low frequency noise (LFN), sometimes referred to as 'the hum' (examples may be heard here: http://bit.ly/1otPx8o). This 'hum' is sensed by a minority of people, clustered in specific locations, who complain of being disturbed by a low frequency droning sound that is often inaudible or barely audible to others, and difficult to register in audio recordings and noise measurements.

While only a relatively small number of people are affected, those who are tend to suffer severe distress ... and they may suffer various symptoms such as depression or even feel suicidal. In some cases a source of LFN is found and can be dealt with. However, in many cases ... no environmental sound that could account for the sufferer's reaction can be found, and the cause of the disturbance remains a mystery. ( Moorhouse et al., 2011: 2)

Such phenomena demonstrate the complex entanglements of sound being heard, felt, and listened to, affective atmospheres, and emotional states. The atmospheres created by sonic environments, and the corresponding neural, emotional and physical reactions - particularly those derived from anticipatory response - agitate bodies, which at the same time recompose atmospheric affects. That is to say, bodies, in varying degrees of intensity, charge and change how atmospheres 'feel', and what they do. Consider how a space might 'vibrate' after a loud retort has echoed, or a street might still hold the sonic memory of a recently passed demonstration.

Technologies of acoustic warfare also deserve consideration here because of the harm they cause via expanded forms of listening. The manifestation of sound as weaponry through symbiotic military and commercial application is customarily shrouded in speculation, in part to do with the amorphous and acousmatic character of sound. The use of sound and music in psychological warfare as a means of interrogation and torture, whereby volume and repetition are used to overwhelm listeners, has been critically documented ( Hill, 2012; Cusick, 2006, 2008; Pieslak, 2009), along with developments in acoustic technologies designed to stun, disperse, intimidate and control civilian populations. These include flash bang grenades which produce sound pressure levels of around 170dB(A) (a level at which immediate physical damage can occur); sonic booms from military jet planes used as a show of force, such as around US air bases in Japan ( Cox, 2010) and in the Occupied Territories of Palestine; gas cannons designed to scare birds away from agricultural crops, aerodromes, and aquaculture facilities ( Lorimer, 2013); ultrasonic devices for dispersing young people from public spaces ( Gallagher, 2016), or repelling animals such as rodents and pigeons; and Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs), which have been adopted for civilian policing. In 2009, at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, an LRAD, or sound cannon, mounted on a police tank was notoriously used to dispel protesters, who were unable to block out the loud and extremely high pitched alarms [audio: lrad.mp3] ( Feigenbaum and Kanngieser, 2015). LRADs, sonic booms, and flash bang grenades have all been documented to cause severe effects ranging from sweating, dizziness, disorientation and deafness, to miscarriages, and long-term anxiety and psychosomatic disorders ( Feigenbaum and Kanngieser, 2015).

Alongside sonic technologies that operate through volume are persistent rumours of infrasonic and ultrasonic devices, using frequencies at or beyond the extremes of human hearing, but well within the hearing range of other animal species ( Vaisman, 2002). While we will discuss the physicality of infrasound in more detail in the following section, here we want to stress the affective capacity of such devices to engender anxiety and fear ( Goodman, 2009), due to the potential of sound to be inaudibly instituted as a technique of nation-state governance and violence. Ongoing concerns around the developments of 'silent' but fatal technologies such as VLF modulators, 'sound bullets' and directional sound beams such as the 'voice of god' weapon, haunt military literature and online forums.

It is precisely this play with perceptibility that contributes greatly to the affective atmospheres that sound invokes, and which requires a concept of listening that goes beyond human consciousness. While affective atmospheres are tied to bodies, they are clearly not only tied to human bodies; all matter is affected by sound in some way. In his text on non-cochlear sound, Scrimshaw proposes a scission of affect from 'the necessity of subjective affirmation' (2013: 28), to emphasize the nature of sonic affects and signals in excess of their human audibility or perceptibility. This echoes Cox's (2011) call for a sonic materialism, in which sound is considered beyond its attributed phenomenological immediacy, individuality and symbolism. Hearing sound, and listening, from this expanded perspective, brings to debates on geographies of affect a clear avenue for understanding how bodies, materials and environments can interact and interrelate, without anthropocentrism and the reduction to a universally 'human' experience ( Gallagher, 2016).

V Geotechnologies

As we have already noted, the science of acoustics conceives of sound as mechanical waves propagating through materials:

When the molecules of a fluid or solid are displaced from their normal configurations, an internal elastic restoring force arises. It is this elastic restoring force, coupled with the inertia of the system, that enables matter to participate in oscillatory vibrations and thereby generate and transit acoustic waves. ( Kinsler et al., 2000: 1)

Thus, whilst sound may not be material per se ( Ingold, 2007), it is closely bound up with materials. Sound requires matter to vibrate in and through, and materials shape sound through their physical properties. Sound waves may be amplified by the resonances of materials, attenuated through absorption, or reflected as reverberation, with marked effects on the atmosphere of a space (e.g. voices echoing in a stone stairwell, compared with voices being absorbed in a cork-lined space [audio file: reverberant-absorbent.mp3]). These relations between sound, space and materiality are significantly different to those of light, as we have discussed in relation to landscape. Light is capable of passing through a vacuum and tends to be impeded by materials, whereas sound propagates more efficiently through denser materials. Attending to sound can therefore generate distinctive knowledge about the earth's materials and physical processes, particularly where these are hidden from view. Conversely, and perhaps more importantly, tuning in to such vibrations brings an awareness of how thin the bandwidth of human audition is, and of how much action completely bypasses the human senses.

The emergence of sonic enquiry into earth systems is closely allied to developments in audio technologies and geopolitics. The field of marine acoustics, for example, grew out of the intersection between oceanography and military engineering. During the Cold War the US Navy created the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), an array of hydrophones around the Atlantic for the long-range detection of Soviet submarines, based on the physics of deep ocean channels propagating low frequencies across long distances. It was later repurposed for civilian scientific listening, including monitoring submarine volcanic activity and blue whale movements ( Wolman, 2002; listen to examples: http://youtu.be/bgWwx_5WsIo). Sonar and other audio technologies are now routinely used for bathymetry ( Chakraborty and Fernandes, 2012), oil exploration, the surveying of fish populations, the measurement of ocean currents using acoustic Doppler shift, the assessment of underwater noise from shipping ( Merchant et al., 2012) and for research on glacial processes ( Tegowski et al., 2011). Seismic monitoring can similarly be understood as an expanded form of listening to sound beyond or at the limits of human perception. Like sound waves, seismic primary waves (P-waves) are compressional vibrations, with frequencies ranging from 0.01 Hz up to around 100 Hz.

Many infrasound phenomena are only detectable on human registers with specialized listening technologies. Again, Cold War geopolitics helped to drive the expansion of these systems, because atmospheric nuclear detonations produce infrasound that spreads across large areas, so low frequency detection arrays were developed for monitoring testing activities. A worldwide network of 60 infrasound stations, known as the International Monitoring System (IMS), is now used to enforce the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, together with seismic, hydroacoustic and radionuclide monitoring networks. As well as this global surveillance function, the infrasound arrays pick up signals from a host of earth processes: stratospheric variations in wind and temperature, ocean storms, lightning, tornados, auroras, avalanches, icebergs calving, volcanic eruptions, meteors and other large explosions, even the earth's rotation ( Evers and Haak, 2001; Assink et al., 2008; Ottemoller and Evers, 2008; Evers and Siegmund, 2009; Matoza et al., 2011; Hedlin et al., 2012). Ganchrow (2015: 182-4) points out that:

the frequency band the human organism is orientated towards is roughly at a scale that interacts with small- to medium-sized objects in our environment. In contrast, the scale of infrasound interacts with the scale of topography or even of the atmosphere itself ... it literally connects the solid earth to oceans and weather, as well as to modern industrial practices.

Infrasound monitoring is thus a form of expanded listening, centred not on human perception but on how materials are perturbed by certain frequencies. Unlike with the forms of listening we have discussed in relation to landscape, and the forms of bodily response produced by sound as affect, in many cases the human body plays no part at all in responding to infrasound. Algorithmic calculations and graphic representations are used to translate the vibrations into comprehensible information. Likewise with seismic monitoring, human auditory perception is either absent or at most is grafted on afterwards through technical means. Time compression has been used to shift the frequency of seismic recordings up into the range of human hearing, reducing their long durations to a more comprehensible timescale, as with the sonification of the Tohoku earthquake (Sendai Coast, Japan, http://youtu.be/3PJxUPvz9Oo; see Peng et al., 2012). This technological accommodation of earthquake vibrations to human perception points to the plasticity of both senses and data ( Sterne and Akiyama, 2012). Sound spills across into other sensory registers, through visual representations such as spectrograms and noise maps. Equally, sonic renditions can be produced from any and every kind of geographic information; this is something that deserves much fuller exploration as a geographic method (see Evans and Jones, 2008).

All of these examples underline our argument that listening is not restricted to the human perception of sounds, but includes the responsiveness of many different bodies and materials to vibrations. Earth sounds, and the technologies that transduce them, situate the human subject as a relatively marginal element amongst many resounding bodies, contributing to a more disparate, relational understanding of the world. Geotechnological listening offers novel ways to investigate the relations between animals, environments, materials, and machines. At the same time, it has the potential to work in exactly the opposite direction, forcing an awareness of how narrowly we humans perceive sound, how much of it passes us by, and how indifferent it can be to our concerns. That awareness brings a humility about our ability to know the world, and about our place within it - a humility that is particularly valuable in an age of ecological crisis ( Kanngieser, 2015).

VI Conclusion

In this paper we have argued for the importance of expanding listening in geography. While numerous studies on specific forms of sound have been undertaken within the discipline, little has been done to clearly engage the broader question of what geography as a whole might gain from a deeper engagement with listening. Our aim has been to articulate how listening can contribute to nuanced and less essentialized understandings of the world, recognizing its polyphonic complexity and simultaneity. In doing so, we have shown that a wider conception of geographic listening can both enlarge what we understand by human subjectivity and also make space for other kinds of audio receptivity. Bringing together the use of sound in diverse geo-spatial practices - mapping landscapes, charting animal populations, understanding social configurations, investigating technologies of warfare and governance, monitoring earthquakes - this paper has outlined how expanded listening can be used to research spaces, places, and environments.

In inviting a different kind of listening, the paper has undertaken three tasks. The first has been to survey current debates on sound, listening, and space, both from within and outside the geographical literature. The second task has been to propose an expanded concept of listening, to deepen, and extend beyond, humanistic perspectives. Given the urgency of global environmental change, the move to foreground the planetary subject has never been more pressing. To demonstrate how listening might be deployed in geography, across human and more-than-human realms, our third task has been to outline some of the specific contributions that expanded listening can make to three thematic trajectories within contemporary geography in which an interest in sound is already evident: landscape, affect, and geotechnologies. These three themes have enabled us to narrate the expansion of listening we have in mind: from that which is tethered to human cochlear listening, moving outward through sound as affects and atmospheres, to the responsiveness of more-than-human technologies, materials and species to sound.

These discussions have created space to think about how sonic geographies may sit - or not - alongside the various conceptual devices geographers use in the study of terrains, atmospheres, and environments. Put another way, we wanted to ask (and to continue asking): how does listening shape our experience and knowledge of landscapes? How can the generation, movement and impact of affective atmospheres be understood through the vibrations of human and more-than-human bodies and environments? And how does sound and listening help us to develop less human-centric perspectives more generally? Through posing such questions, listening and sonic experience present challenging points of departure, requiring the reconfiguration of conventions in formulating, undertaking, and communicating the results of geographical research.

Audio Files Appendix

audio file: birds-in-meadow.mp3

An ambient stereo recording consisting predominantly of the sounds of birds and insects sounding across a grassland meadow located adjacent to a wheat field, Spišská Belá, Slovakia. Recorded 26 July 2013.

audio file: oystercatchers.mp3

An ambient stereo recording of oystercatcher vocalizations reverberating off of a rocky beach and hard cliff sides located on the south of the Isle of Mull, Scotland. Recorded 10 June 2013.

audio file: bridge-contact-microphone.mp3

A mono contact microphone recording of sounds vibrating internally within a concrete and metal road/pedestrian bridge spanning the Danube River, Bratislava, Slovakia. The contact microphone was attached directly between two sheets of metal on the pedestrian path of the bridge. Predominant sounds include the rumble of vehicular traffic, pedestrians talking, and the bridge itself shaking. Recorded 5 September 2011.

audio file: overhead-power.mp3

An ambient stereo recording of electricity running through an overhead power line, recorded in an agricultural field in Balerno, Scotland. Recorded 29 September 2013.

audio file: leaves-branches.mp3

The sounds of leaves and branches make for distinctive atmospheres, evident in this stereo recording of strong wind moving deciduous trees in leaf next to an urban cycle path in Edinburgh. Recorded 1 June 2011.

audio file: boat-harbour.mp3

An ambient stereo recording of the atmosphere of Dunbar Harbour in summertime, including the sound of a boat engine idling and the cries of kittiwakes and other seabirds. Recorded 13 July 2012.

audio file: lrad.mp3

The sound of a Long Range Acoustic Device replicated through a tone generator and digital audio processing.

audio file: reverberant-absorbent.mp3

Contrasting ambient stereo recordings of (i) voices reverberating in a stone stairwell in the Pałac Kultury i Nauki, Warsaw (recorded 19 June 2009), and (ii) voices absorbed by the cork-lined Serpentine Pavilion, London, by Herzog and De Meuron and Ai Weiwei (recorded 21 June 2012).

audio file: automated-announcements.mp3

A stereo recording of automated announcements in Edinburgh Waverley railway station. Recorded 5 August 2014.

References

Assink, JD, Evers, LG, Holleman, I, Paulssen, H (2008) Characterization of infrasound from lightning. Geophysical Research Letters 35.
Google Scholar

Chion, M (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Gorbman, C . New York: Columbia University Press.
Google Scholar

Cusick, SG (2006) Music as torture/music as weapon. TRANS-Transcultural Music Review 10.
Google Scholar

Evers, LG, Siegmund, P (2009) Infrasonic signature of the 2009 major sudden stratospheric warming. Geophysical Research Letters 36.
Google Scholar

Foley, JA (2014) U.S. Navy sued for violating Marine Mammal Protection Act in connection with sonar training exercises. Nature World News. Available at: http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5803/20140128/navy-sued-violatingmarine-mammal-protection-act-connection-onar-training.htm (accessed 23 May 2016).
Google Scholar

Gallagher, M (2016) Sound as affect: Difference, power and spatiality. Emotion, Space and Society. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.02.004 (accessed 23 May 2016).
Google Scholar

Hennix, CC (2015) On ritual and omsahatranamam. Sound American 11. Available at: http://soundamerican.org/catherine-christer-hennix-on-ritual-and- (accessed 6 June 2015).
Google Scholar

Lynch, E, Joyce, D, Fristrup, K (2011) An assessment of noise audibility and sound levels in U.S. National Parks. Landscape Ecology 26(9): 1297-1309.
Google Scholar

Matoza, RS, Vergoz, J, Le Pichon, A, Ceranna, L, Green, DN, Evers, LG, Ripepe, M, Campus, P, Liszka, L, Kvaerna, T, Kjartansson, E, Hoskuldsson, A (2011) Long-range acoustic observations of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, Iceland, April-May 2010. Geophysical Research Letters 38.
Google Scholar

Merchant, ND, Blondel, P, Dakin, DT, Dorocicz, J (2012) Averaging underwater noise levels for environmental assessment of shipping. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 132(4): EL343-EL349.
Google Scholar

Prior, JD (2012) The roles of aesthetic value in ecological restoration: Cases from the United Kingdom. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh.
Google Scholar

Revill, G (2015) How is space made in sound? Spatial mediation, critical phenomenology and the political agency of sound. Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132515572271.
Google Scholar

Vaisman, D (2002) The acoustics of war. Cabinet 5. Available at: http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/acousticsofwar.php (accessed 10 July 2014).
Google Scholar

Von Muggenthaler, E, Reinhart, P, Lympany, B, Craft, RB (2003) Songlike vocalizations from the Sumatran Rhinoceros ( Dicerorhinus sumatrensis). Acoustics Research Letters Online 4: 83-88.
Google Scholar

Waitt, G, Harada, T, Duffy, M (2015) 'Let's have some music': Sound, gender and car mobility. Mobilities. DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2015.1076628.
Google Scholar

Author biographies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies - Michael Gallagher, Anja Kanngieser, Jonathan Prior, 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This paper argues for expanded listening in geography. Expanded listening addresses how bodies of all kinds, human and more-than-human, respond to sound. We show how listening can contribute to research on a wide range of topics, beyond enquiry where sound itself is the primary substantive interest.

# data[].attributes.body
Undersökning

# data[].attributes.headline
Spatial knowledge acquisition and mobile maps: The role of environmental legibility

# data[].attributes.subject
Spatial knowledge acquisition and mobile maps: The role of environmental legibility

# data[].attributes.headline
Navigating through haptics and sound (EXJOB)

# data[].attributes.subject
Navigating through haptics and sound (EXJOB)

# data[].attributes.body
Exploring non-visual navigation for urban cyclists toenhance the cycling experience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Navigating through haptics and sound: Exploring non-visual navigation for urban cyclists to enhance the cycling experience 2019 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis

Abstract [en]

Bicyclist are increasingly shaping the picture of urban traffic. With regard to guided navigation through urban areas, navigation systems that are designed for this type of traffic participants do not offer a satisfying solution. Voice instructions are often perceived as annoying and far too detailed. In addition, the usage of headphones to hear these instructions reduces the hearing and localization of environmental sounds significantly. Visual information on the other hand, draws the attention too much away from the main traffic situation. This effects the ability to react to and interact with other traffic participants and the surrounding and results in a feeling of insecurity. This thesis investigates how acoustic and vibro-tactile signals can be used to provide cyclists with necessary navigation instructions while maintaining the ability to perceive ambient sounds and keep attention to the environment. In addition, the focus is placed on the experience of guided navigation with a non-visual, multi-sensory system.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages

Malmö universitet/Kultur och samhälle , 2019. , p. 82

Keywords [en]

Interaction Design, non-visual interfaces, audio-tactile interaction, multi-sensory, bicycling experience, navigation system, embodied interfaces, urban mobility, cycling, vibro-tactile, open-ear headphones, wearables National Category Engineering and Technology

Identifiers

URN: DiVA, id: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-21693 Local ID: 30197 OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-21693 diva2:1481601

Educational program

KS K3 Interaction Design (master)

Supervisors

Examiners

2020-10-272020-10-27 Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext (3502 kB) 9 downloads

File information

fulltext application/pdf

By organisation

Faculty of Culture and Society (KS)

On the subject

Engineering and Technology

Search outside of DiVA

Total: 9 downloads

The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

Total: 6 hits

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Navigating through haptics and sound: Exploring non-visual navigation for urban cyclists to enhance the cycling experience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Navigating through haptics and sound: Exploring non-visual navigation for urban cyclists to enhance the cycling experience 2019 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis Abstract [en] Bicyclist are increasingly shaping the picture of urban traffic.

# data[].attributes.headline
Designing the user experience of musical sonification in public and semi-public spaces

# data[].attributes.subject
Designing the user experience of musical sonification in public and semi-public spaces

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You seem to have javascript disabled. Please note that many of the page functionalities won't work as expected without javascript enabled.

Visilab (Vision and Artificial Intelligence Group), University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), E.T.S.I. Industrial, Avda Camilo Jose Cela s/n, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain

DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz), Augmented Vision Research Group, Tripstaddterstr. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

Fluxguide, Burggasse 7-9/9, 1070 Vienna, Austria

Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 22 November 2019 / Revised: 24 January 2020 / Accepted: 29 January 2020 / Published: 31 January 2020

An automatic "museum audio guide" is presented as a new type of audio guide for museums. The device consists of a headset equipped with a camera that captures exhibit pictures and the eyes of things computer vision device (EoT). The EoT board is capable of recognizing artworks using features from accelerated segment test (FAST) keypoints and a random forest classifier, and is able to be used for an entire day without the need to recharge the batteries. In addition, an application logic has been implemented, which allows for a special highly-efficient behavior upon recognition of the painting. Two different use case scenarios have been implemented. The main testing was performed with a piloting phase in a real world museum. Results show that the system keeps its promises regarding its main benefit, which is simplicity of use and the user's preference of the proposed system over traditional audioguides. View Full-Text

▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Vallez, N.; Krauss, S.; Espinosa-Aranda, J.L.; Pagani, A.; Seirafi, K.; Deniz, O. Automatic Museum Audio Guide. Sensors 2020, 20, 779. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20030779

AMA Style

Vallez N, Krauss S, Espinosa-Aranda JL, Pagani A, Seirafi K, Deniz O. Automatic Museum Audio Guide. Sensors. 2020; 20(3):779. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20030779

Chicago/Turabian Style

Vallez, Noelia; Krauss, Stephan; Espinosa-Aranda, Jose L.; Pagani, Alain; Seirafi, Kasra; Deniz, Oscar. 2020. "Automatic Museum Audio Guide" Sensors 20, no. 3: 779. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20030779

Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.

Article Access Map by Country/Region

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An automatic “museum audio guide” is presented as a new type of audio guide for museums. The device consists of a headset equipped with a camera that captures exhibit pictures and the eyes of things computer vision device (EoT).

# data[].attributes.headline
What Can We Expect from Navigating?: Exploring Navigation, Wearables and Data Through Critical Design Concepts

# data[].attributes.subject
What Can We Expect from Navigating?: Exploring Navigation, Wearables and Data Through Critical Design Concepts

# data[].attributes.headline
Being and Mixing – Designing Interactive Soundscapes 

# data[].attributes.subject
Being and Mixing – Designing Interactive Soundscapes 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The auditory sense is an intuitive and immersive channel to experience our surroundings, which motivates us to augment our perception of the real world with digital auditory content. We present a wearable audio augmented reality prototype that tracks the user with six degrees of freedom in a known environment, synthesizes 3D sounds, and plays spatialized audio from arbitrary objects to the user. Our prototype is built using head-mounted visual-inertial odometry, a sound simulation engine on a laptop, and off-the-shelf headphones. We demonstrate an application in a gallery scenario in which visitors can hear objects and scenes drawn in the paintings, feeling audio-visually engaged in the depicted surroundings. In a user study involving 26 participants, we observed that the audio-enhanced exhibition improved people's experience, as well as helped them remember more lively details of the artworks.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The auditory sense is an intuitive and immersive channel to experience our surroundings, which motivates us to augment our perception of the real world with digital auditory content. We present a wearable audio augmented reality prototype that tracks the user with six degrees of freedom in a known environment, synthesizes 3D sounds, and plays spatialized audio from arbitrary objects to the user.

# data[].attributes.headline
Uncover: supporting city exploration with egocentric visualizations of location-based content

# data[].attributes.subject
Uncover: supporting city exploration with egocentric visualizations of location-based content

# data[].attributes.headline
DetourNavigator – Using GoogleLocation History to GenerateUnfamiliar Personal Routes

# data[].attributes.subject
DetourNavigator – Using GoogleLocation History to GenerateUnfamiliar Personal Routes

# data[].attributes.headline
Forskning på critical och speculative design

# data[].attributes.subject
Forskning på critical och speculative design

# data[].attributes.body
Can Diverse Futuring Strategies Inform an Ecology-Centred Speculative Design Practice?

Critical Design as a Resource. Adopting the Critical
Mind-Set

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Critical Design as a Resource Adopting the Critical Mind Set

# data[].attributes.body
Examensarbete

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.headline
Peripheral Awareness and Smooth Notification: the Use ofNatural Sounds in Process Control Work 

# data[].attributes.subject
Peripheral Awareness and Smooth Notification: the Use ofNatural Sounds in Process Control Work 

# data[].attributes.body
Progression där jag identifierar vart jag behöver skissa på gränssnitt och vart jag behöver göra undersökningar i from av simulerade användartester och hitta tekniker och redan etablerade lösningar att utgå ifrån.

# data[].attributes.body
Ljud stängs av mär man går fel och slår på när man går rätt

GUIDE startar när man närmar sig

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is geolocated sound?

A sound (or multiple sounds) contained within shapes on the map, which create geofenced areas. These will trigger content when listeners physically walk inside, by using GPS to determine their location or their proximity using iBeacon technology.

Layer sounds in subtle or rich ways, guide your audience, surprise and entertain - a completely different way to experience our physical environment, a threshold where magic happens ✨.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ECHOES - sound walks, audio tours, spatial audio experts & custom projects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ECHOES - sound walks, audio tours, spatial audio experts & custom projects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Easily drag & drop
engaging content

With the Layar Creator, you can enhance flyers, postcards, packaging or any other item with interactive content, including video messages, Web and social links, photo slideshows, music clips and much more!

Page Views

Interactions

Unique Users

Users Per Country

Page & Button Stats

Blippbuilder to create AR experiences.

Want to know more?

Have a question?

Stay in touch

Receive our latest updates.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Crafted in

Amsterdam

We use cookies to improve our services. Don't worry, they don't store personal or sensitive information and you can disable them at any time in your browser settings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With the Layar Creator, you can enhance flyers, postcards, packaging or any other item with interactive content, including video messages, Web and social links, photo slideshows, music clips and much more! Blippbuilder to create AR experiences. Receive our latest updates. Subscribe to Our Newsletter Crafted in Amsterdam We use cookies to improve our services.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pathshare · Realtime Location Sharing with GPS on iPhone and Android

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As soon as your geofences are set up, every device that enters or leaves a geofence will trigger an event to Pathshare. You can now define if-this-than-that rules how to use geotrigger events, e.g. in order to send a welcome message to your user if he enters the perimeter of an area of interest.

# data[].attributes.headline
Audio-augmented museum experiences with gaze tracking

# data[].attributes.subject
Audio-augmented museum experiences with gaze tracking

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this work, we enrich landscape and genre paintings by spatializing sounds for the drawn objects and scenes, which expands visitors' perception of the paintings and immerses them in the depicted scenarios. Plus, we personalize such spatial audio perception based on visitors' viewing behavior by applying gaze tracking. Through a preliminary user study with 14 participants, we observed that the gaze tracking-based audio augmentation helped people better focus on the areas of interest in the paintings, and enhanced their overall viewing experience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Audio-augmented museum experiences with gaze tracking

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this work, we enrich landscape and genre paintings by spatializing sounds for the drawn objects and scenes, which expands visitors' perception of the paintings and immerses them in the depicted scenarios. Plus, we personalize such spatial audio perception based on visitors' viewing behavior by applying gaze tracking.

# data[].attributes.body
Teknik: Ex: google maps och ev annan?

Testa med text och 2D- gränssnitt.

Intuitivt 3D-objekt som styr dig mot mål.

# data[].attributes.body
Utifrån traditionell guidad turs händelseförlopp och interaktioner så har jag skapat ett linjärt flödesschema på hur min idé skulle kunna arta sig. Den innehåller en del varningar på hur jag ska behålla användaren, vart jag behöver göra gränssnittsprototyper, vart jag behöver göra användartester och vart det dyker upp frågor gällande teknisk möjlighet och om det går att genomföra rent praktiskt.

# data[].attributes.body
Behöver utforska hur man kan använda och vilka tekniker som fungerar att jobba med samt hur andra har gjort tidigare

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A few months ago, here at the British Library we held an interesting Exploring with Sound Walks event, that discussed digital projects that connect literature, sound recordings, place, technology and walking. Several digital tools were mentioned by the presenters at this event, so this post, by Marcin Barski, is a practical guide for creating geo-located sound walks. We hope you are inspired to create your own walks, listen to sound walks, vote for your favourite (you need to be logged in to vote), and maybe attend one of the Sound Walk Sunday events taking place on the 1st and throughout the month of September 2019. If you can easily travel to London, you may also be interested in attending a Sound Walk Sunday walkshop in and around the British Library, taking place 10:00-13:00 on Saturday 31st August.

Over to Marcin for his advice on creating sound walks:
Let's start with some basic definitions. A sound walk is any activity that involves both walking and some form of listening. Listening is a much broader term than most of us would ever suspect. It can basically relate to the very act of giving attention to sound, but if we focus on details we soon realise that, as much as it happens mostly involuntarily, in certain circumstances and contexts we can direct it at the topics or phenomena that otherwise would have been lost in the very rich audiosphere that incessantly surrounds us.

It's rather important to understand that those topics and phenomena do not necessarily need to be of audial nature. Using pre-recorded sets of narratives, spoken word or studio-engineered music, we can make our audience aware of stories normally hidden from sight.

In recent years several tools have been developed that help sound walk artists, educators and creators place sounds in exact locations. Once placed, we need to tell our audience how to find and experience them. This can be achieved by voice instructions, QR codes or most commonly (and conveniently) by using mobile apps that determine the user's position via GPS and trigger sounds in the exact locations where we would like them to be heard.

Below you will find a quick guide on how to start creating your own geo-located sound walk, along with descriptions of some of the tools that can make the process smooth and stress free.

The very first thing you will need to do is to decide what story you want to tell. Do you know it well enough already, or is there a need to do some research? Is the story self-explanatory, or will you need to explain some or all details to your audience? And - actually, maybe the first question to ask - is it a story at all? Some sound walks can be based on natural recordings and music only, meaning the whole covered area changes its character without a single word.

Once your story is ready, decide how it should be conveyed to your audience. Do you prefer to tell the story yourself, or maybe it will be better to find and interview other people with significant knowledge of the topic? Creating a sound walk can sometimes be similar to working on a radio piece, in which important elements are delivered by experts or insiders. Will you need to record everything yourself or is it possible to find archival sounds that would add something valuable to your content?

In the next step you will need to decide what area should be covered with your sounds and narratives. Would you like the sounds to be located only in the described and meaningful locations, or would you prefer to have the whole area covered with some more or less abstract background recordings? In the latter case, you need to take into consideration that the larger the area, the more sounds will be needed to fill all the silent spaces.

Bear in mind that your audience will most likely experience your piece by foot, hence the distances between the particular spots should not be too large. The best results are achieved when distances between the sounds allow for smooth and undistracted strolling.

Remember to consider safety! Don't force your audience to walk in hazardous or restricted areas. They will be using headphones, so choose a route away from busy roads.

Each app you are going to use will come with specific requirements for the format or duration of your recordings. In most cases these requirements will be easy to meet, but make sure you are doing it correctly right from the beginning to avoid the hassle of file conversion or additional editing in later stages. You will find helpful descriptions of some of the available apps below.

Creating a geo-located sound walk can be fun not only for you, but also for others. Consider working in a group in which all of you have assigned tasks or subjects to cover. You will be surprised how much a socially creative activity it can become. Some people create sound walks with children, or with their local community groups.

We don't all carry high quality microphones in our pockets. Of course, if you want to create an audiophile experience, you will need to secure professional audio recorders and microphones, however technology is not a barrier anymore. You can even use your smartphone to make your recordings - their quality will definitely be good enough to record speech.

If you'd like to use background sounds, and you have no means of making the recordings yourself, there are repositories of sounds available on the Internet. Impressive collection of sounds can be found, for example, on the British Library's SoundCloud channel. You can also search at http://archive.org and http://freesound.org - which are available for you to use free of charge.

There's quite a number of open-source and free sound editing software on the Internet. If you're not a professional sound designer, most likely Audacity will be enough for you. It's easy to use and has all the features you may need. It's also quite popular so you will find many helpful tutorials online.

This is probably the most pleasant and at the same time the most challenging part of the work. Be prepared to spend hours in your chosen area and to have your patience tested. Although most of the apps allow for fairly accurate placing of sounds, you will need to test each single location yourself. Sometimes you will need to move a sound by a few metres, other times you will want to change the way in which two sounds interact with each other. Wear comfortable shoes and submit to the trial and error process. Despite the challenges, trust us, it's fun!

Once you are sure that all of your recordings are out there and in the exact places you want them to be, you can make your walk public. In most of the available apps you can publish with just one click. And when it's public, don't forget to tell everyone to try it. It's very rewarding to hear back from your audience - you will realise how much your work has re-shaped their perception of the chosen space.

Here is a list of digital tools and platforms available for making sound walks:
Echoes
Echoes gives you the freedom to explore breath-taking GPS-triggered audio tours wherever you are. With the Echoes Creator, you can quickly and easily upload audio, images, and text, geolocate them on the map, and publish them for the world to see. Just add shapes to the map, which create geofenced areas. These will trigger content when your listeners physically walk inside them.

Echoes is free to use and available at http://echoes.xyz
PlaceCloud
Placecloud's mission is to reveal the cultural significance of everyday places. To achieve this, they have invented something called 'placecasts', or place-specific podcasts: short audio recordings with GPS coordinates attached to them. Users can listen to them while being physically present in the places they refer to.

Placecloud keeps the process simple: many of the steps described above won't be necessary when working with this tool. By adding your recordings you become part of a wider community of 'placecasters'.
http://www.placecloud.io VoiceMap
VoiceMap is a tool for digital storytelling in public spaces. It's designed for storytellers and passionate locals all over the world who can - in an easy way - share their thoughts and narratives about the places they live in. As a creator you can guide your audience around your city - and get paid for this.
http://voicemap.me Locosonic
Similar to Echoes, Locosonic is designed for creating "movies for your ears" - as they call it. Locosonic Soundscapes link sounds, music and stories to a location. While exploring an area, you will hear the Soundscape that matches your location. Like an additional sense, Locosonic allows you to experience places through their stories and music.
http://www.locosonic.com CGeomap
CGeomap is a collaborative tool which allows people to work together on the same project. Very easy to use, it creates simultaneously an online map and a browser-based web app, geolocating audio, text and visual content, without the need to install on your device.

It is more limited in terms of sound than Echoes or Locosonic, but adds media to your walk, and generates simultaneously an online media map, accessible for all on desktop. An extra feature allows the user to shift, while walking, from one map to the other, activating up to three layers of content in one place.

Info: http://bit.ly/300hpMS
Aporee
radio aporee ::: miniatures for mobiles is a platform for (creating) sound walks. These are created and organised by a web-based editing tool and listened to with a mobile phone app, while walking outside, at the site where the piece is created for. In addition to the phone apps, a (prototype) browser-based web app is also available, without the need to install the app on your device.
https://aporee.org/mfm/ We hope you have fun making and listening to sound walks! Sound Walk Sunday events are taking place on the 1st and throughout the month of September 2019. One of them " Ecumenopolis - the whole world is one city", by Geert Vermeire, is being made for walkers around the British Library London, the State Library of Moscow, the National Library of Greece and the City Library of Sao Paulo, so we can't wait to listen to this work. This post is introduced by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) and Andrew Stuck from the Museum of Walking. Many thanks to Marcin Barski, curator, music publisher, sound and installation artist, co-founder of the Instytut Pejzażu Dźwiękowego (Polish Soundscape Institute) for writing this practical guide to creating sound walks.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creating Geo-located Digital Sound Walks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A few months ago, here at the British Library we held an interesting Exploring with Sound Walks event, that discussed digital projects that connect literature, sound recordings, place, technology and walking. Several digital tools were mentioned by the presenters at this event, so this post, by Marcin Barski, is a...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
LISTEN HERE OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS

In this episode you will learn what geolocated audio is, how it relates to 3D audio experiences and how geolocating audio can be used to augment reality. Enjoy!

PUSH THE PLAY BUTTON TO LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW OR SUBSCRIBE TO "THE MAPSCAPING PODCAST" WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS.

Josh:
Yes exactly. The areas which you use to trigger the sound files, geo fences. We allow you to attach information to those geo fences as well so you can add a picture and a bit of text to those areas, to those zones, but really the main focus is the audio. It's tagging a location with audio.

Daniel:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the MapScaping podcast. My name is Daniel and this is the podcast for the geospatial community. Today I'm talking to Josh from the company called Echoes and he's going to be telling us all about the geolocation of audio files. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Daniel:
Welcome, Josh. I'm so pleased that you could take the time to talk to me today. I think from the little tiny piece that I know about your work. It sounds really interesting, but before we jump into it, maybe you could just give us a quick introduction about who you are.

Josh:
Sure, my name's Josh Kopecek. I'm the director of Echos, which is a platform for creating locative audio experiences.

Daniel:
Right. That begs the question, what is locative audio?

Josh:
It's a large topic really. Perhaps it would be good for me to give a little bit of background about where my history in locative audio came from. Personally, my background is as a musician and I studied electroacoustic music and classical music and it wasn't until I finished my studies that I was introduced to locative audio.

Josh:
A few friends and I were asked to create a walking audio experience. At the time I had no idea what it was. We were thinking about the experiences to create. At the time I was living in Vietnam and we had collected sounds from around the city and we were thinking about placing them in various situations. We used an APP which was available at the time to create a map of the sounds around the city.

Josh:
As you walked around the sounds were then triggered by your location. The APP we used at the time was great, but we came up with a load of problems which we wanted to solve. We ended up eventually creating our own platform for making these walking audio experiences. Through the process of creating that platform, we discovered that there was a really great interest in creating these experiences.

Josh:
A lot of people who were involved in that original walking audio tour were then interested in creating their own experiences. We opened up our platform for people to be able to publish their own experiences. That's really where Echoes has come from. The whole concept around locative audio is that you have a piece of audio or sound. Could be anything, somebody speaking. A narrative is very popular. It could be a field recording, something that you've taken a recording of outside.

Josh:
It could be something you've recorded in a studio, it could be a piece of music, and then you fix a location to that GPS coordinates. Then when the user gets close to that sound, then it's triggered for them and then it starts playing in their headphones. This, normally requires a smart phone to be able to play it back with GPS. But that's all you need.

Josh:
A lot of people nowadays have a smart phone. I think smart phone penetration in the UK is around about 90% so basically anybody could do it. Then you need a decent pair of headphones as well if you want to really immerse experience but just to get started, you need a standard pair of headphones. That's the basic underlying concept behind locative audio and a little bit about our history.

Daniel:
So, if I had to put this in layman's terms, it sounds like geo tagging sound files. I know that's probably a really rough way of saying it, but is that what we're talking about here?

Josh:
Yes, exactly. The areas which you use to trigger the sound files, are geo fences. We allow you to attach information to those Geo fences as well. You can add a picture and a bit of tax to those areas, to those zones. Really they are... The main focus is the audio. It's tagging a location with audio, yes.

Daniel:
In the pre-interview talk we had, you talked about that you could change the nuances of this audio depending on where you were in the zone. It wasn't just, okay, here's the point. When you get within five meters at this point this things happened. The audio starts playing, but you could fade in and fade out and trigger other sounds, but all in the same area. Is that correct?

Josh:
Yes, that's right. You have control over some basic playback properties. For example, if you want a looping sound, you can set a sound to loop when you're inside a zone which can create a continuous ambient background sound for you, which can then be a backdrop for your narrative or whatever if you're creating a guided tour.

Josh:
You also have the ability to... Especially which is good for guided tours, be able to play a sound file right to the end of it rather than if you leave a zone, then it'll stop. Then your also able to control the volume of the sound based on how close you are to the center of that zone.

Josh:
The further away you get the quieter the sound gets and the closer to the center you get, the louder it gets, which enables you to create these layers, these lattices or collages of sound so you can create a moving texture, moving sound texture as you walk around in that sound map which creates a whole gamma of possibilities for making interactive audio.

Josh:
That's really the part which excites me, which is the creative possibilities behind locative audio. That's just scratching the surface of it really. Because through the Echoes platform, we just offer the most basic parameters for changing the sound. Of course there are other ways of doing it.

Josh:
You could potentially use all sorts of other different factors apart from location. You could use the time of day or the temperature. There's all sorts of sensors on smart phones, which you could use to change the sound as well. But the core of what we do is working with location. Using the spacial coordinates to trigger sound and then control as playback.

Daniel:
In the GIS and mapping world, we're quite used to attaching information to geometries, to things in space to certain areas. For example in GIS, geographic information system, for example, you might have polygons representing buildings and each polygon might have an attribute which would be... It could be a number, it could be the amount of people living in that building. It could be the amount of parking spaces attached to that building. It could be something like that.

Daniel:
This is the first time that I've ever heard of people attaching a sound file to a geometry. I think it's a really interesting concept because it's another way of augmenting that data and it sounds like what we're talking about in reality is augmented reality, but maybe just not with the glasses this time. Maybe not in visual way, but in an audio way. Would that be a correct way of looking at this?

Josh:
Yes, exactly. I describe it as locative audio, which of course is you could say quite antiquated term now. Locative audio as a concept has been around for a long time, maybe 10, nearly 20 years I think. The new concept is to use augmented reality. We tend to call it audio augmented reality these days, which is like you say, attaching sounds to locations and really we allow you, through the Echo's platform to be able to add circles and polygons.

Josh:
Like you were describing. You could add a polygon to a building and then when you get within the vicinity of that building than the sound will be would be triggered. This really raises the possibility of creating augmented reality experiences by just using audio. This is probably the most exciting part for me, which is how you can create an immersive experience using audio. Because when you remove the visual component, you are in a sense reintroducing the real world and the only sense you're taking away his sound.

Josh:
It becomes like a soundtrack to your life as you walk around. That sound then merges with the real environment and probably, what I'll get into in a minute, is 3D audio, but that 3D audio then offers this next generation of immersive capability.

Daniel:
I think it's really interesting. Your approach to this clearly as an artist, someone who's wanting to create experiences. I come from a GIS, geospatial mapping background, and I can see this as a way of delivering information. Like I said before, another way of augmenting reality and another interface. Maybe just a less intrusive interface where you could walk around with your smart phone, your headphones on and receive information passively from these different sources depending on where you were in relation to them.

Daniel:
You mentioned this before 3D audio. What is that?

Josh:
Right. Well, It's interesting you say... I just want to go back a second because you mentioned passive. It's important to remember. I think that this isn't just a passive experience, the listener is really controlling the experience as well. As a medium locative audio is giving the listener the control back over the kind of experience they're creating.

Josh:
Of course the base components, the sounds which are attached to each location are created by the composer or the person who's made the audio tour themselves. But the listener has control over which sounds they play back, where they go, how long they remain in a particular location. Which offers a very interesting [inaudible 00:11:55] de-constructivists approach to audio experiences and which is not something which is really possible with traditional audio or listening experiences.

Josh:
Okay, now I'll get onto the 3D sound aspect. 3D sound is a another layer on top of locative audio. 3D sound allows you to create what is in essence a surround sound experience over headphones. If you imagine when you go to the cinema, you're watching a screen in front of you, but you might be hearing a helicopter, classic Dolby experience, you hear a helicopter flying overhead.

Josh:
It sounds as if it's over... It sounds as if it's traveling over your head and it's quite realistic. You can achieve the same thing with headphones. This technology has been around for again more than 20 years. I think it was in fact possibly developed in the late eighties. The possibility to specialize a sound. It appears as if it's coming from a particular direction around you just using a pair of headphones.

Josh:
This has traditionally been used in games so you can hear a character who's in front of you or an enemy coming from behind you, something like this. What we want to do is use that spacial audio to create more immersive experiences. As you walk around, you would hear sounds coming from a particular building or you would hear a narrator who is directly in front of you and you could approach them and walk around them.

Josh:
You could hear clues coming from particular locations, you could change the audio environment of a particular space. For example, you walk into a factory building and it sounds like a jungle. That's a really basic way of explaining it but the possibilities are really endless.

Josh:
With the new technologies and hardware which are coming out, we're now able to offer head tracking, which enables you to basically create an experience where as you move around and as you move your head, the audio appears to stay in the same place. You can have a static piece of audio. You imagine listening to a bouncing ball in front of you, you can approach that bouncing ball. You can move away from it. As you turn your head away from it, it stays in the same place and that's all possible with head tracking and 3D audio. It's a very exciting sphere.

Daniel:
It sounds like it's really going to personalize things. It sounds like that you're going to have even more control over your experience.

Josh:
Exactly, yes. You are creating a personal listening experience. Like you say, there's a lot of possibility for creating personalized experiences as you walk around and also interactive experiences. If you imagine the kind of massive multiplayer online games which are available at the moment, such as fortnight, you can imagine playing those in a real world environment where the other people are creating sounds around you in the virtual world and then you are able to hear those sounds as well. So yes, it's really exciting.

Daniel:
You gave some examples before of use cases and one of them was that the classic walking tour, and I'm assuming this would be through a city for example. If you had this 3D sound, this immersive environment that would... I guess that would require quite a detailed map of that city environment, wouldn't it? I mean you'd have to know where the buildings were and how they responded to the different sound if you were going to recreate that environment in a realistic way.

Josh:
Exactly, yes. This is one of the questions and we talked a little bit before about the need to map environments in terms of having 3D modeling for environments. This is very important in audio because for example, a cello playing in a concert hall, sounds very different to a cello playing outside. If we were to record a cello playing in the concert hall and then play it back over the headphones while you're outside, it creates a sense of oral discontinuously.

Josh:
By using 3D modeling, we can actually try to recreate the audio scene using that modeling data and then replace that audio in the environment. For example, if you hear somebody speaking and you pass by a building, the actual occlusion of that sound would then be masked by the 3D model itself. The voice of the person actually appears to be coming in the real space. There are all sorts of interesting questions, very difficult questions, I think, which are, for example, how does sounds behave differently in different contexts.

Josh:
For example, in a park, the behavior of sound is very different to that in a concrete playground or a concrete car park. We have a lot of research to do and a lot of interesting questions to answer with regards to that.

Daniel:
Absolutely. Could you give me some use cases for this? I think you've done a really good job of painting the picture of what locative audio is and the future of it, this 3D audio. We've talked a little bit about that sort of walking tour idea. Have you got any other use cases, may be business use case where you think, "Wow, this is going to be a big deal?"

Josh:
Well, yes, I think one of the most exciting things for me, which I thought of in the past was... Which I'd start with a real passion for doing is creating, I guess historic soundscapes. You imagine going into a museum and being able to experience or traveling back in time using sound. Imagine going into the Neolithic period and being able to experience the sounds of the Neolithic period. Hearing the animals running past, hearing people working with basic tools or calling in their own language, things like this and then placing that in the museum context.

Josh:
Then taking that audio and being able to walk through it in a museum and then switch between different contexts based on where you are in the museum or even changing the soundscape yourself in the APP as you walk through the space. I think there are a huge number of different possibilities for this. Imagine if you could go back to feudal Japan just with a pair of headphones and walking around in the museum space. I think it'd be an incredible experience and I think that's where the real potential lies for spacial audio and 3D sound or audio augmented reality.

Daniel:
Absolutely. That sound like really interesting examples. Like I said before, sounds like... If they're going to be a reality, then it's going to require some pretty hefty 3D models. Updated 3D models of these environments. We want to experience and move around and listen to. I think that the mapping industry has got a lot of work to do there.

Josh:
Yes, exactly. There are some shortcuts we can take like pre rendering sounds in particular environments. We work with something called Amazonic audio, which is a prerecorded audio, like 360 audio. It's very similar to 360 video it is the sound format that they use for 360 video, which enables you to create a pre-rendered audio experience within a particular space. You could then pre-render the space for that particular piece of audio.

Josh:
There are lots of different shortcuts you can do, but there's also a huge amount of research if we were to create those kinds of Pokemon go style experiences.

Daniel:
In the pre interview, you gave this great example of recording a 3D experience of a Gospel Choir and you had a lot of challenges there, especially with the indoor positioning. Could you say a little bit about that?

Josh:
Yes, sure. A project we did a couple of years ago worked with indoor location and spacial audio. We created in a warehouse space a walking audio experience, and I should say this, the content was created by an artist that we collaborated with in the US, he wanted to recreate the sound of a gospel choir.

Josh:
What he did was he multi tracked the audio, so he had the individual sound of each singer, but as a whole it created the gospel choir. Then we specialized the voice of each gospel singer within that space and place them where they would have been standing. What actually happened was that you could walk through the space and walk between the gospel singers and hear each individual singer as you approach them. It would be like standing within a real gospel choir, but it being a virtual gospel choir.

Josh:
This was a very challenging experience because we had to work with high accuracy indoor location, although it was a warehouse and the space was quite large, we still had to have pretty good positioning. We worked with an indoor location provider. This was before some of the newer indoor location solutions came out. We were able to get it down to I think below a meter accuracy. I can't remember what the exact accuracy was, but we needed that level of accuracy in order to give this immersive experience, the playback.

Josh:
Then the other half of the experience was that people were able to contribute their own sounds to the experience. They were able to go to a specific point in the space and record their reactions to the concept of the installation, which was climate change in a particular location in the US and leave that as a sound bite in that space. When other listeners walked into those spots, they could hear that particular feedback. This was really, pushing the possibilities of locative audio to the Max. That was a really cool project.

Daniel:
That sounds really interesting. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a company recently and what they were doing is they were were dragging a whole bunch of data out of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, anything that was text based and Geo located. Then they were putting it in... Grouping it into this broad categories of political or stay at home moms or whatever it was.

Daniel:
Their idea was that if they could do that enough, collect enough of this data, then they could get a feel for what the pulse of the community was like at any one time and then watch that change. Watch the feelings, the emotions of the community change. Then they could use it for things like we should... A company might say, "Hey, we need to position a shop where we should it be, what community would this suit best?"

Daniel:
They would use this data as another layer to that analysis. What you're talking about before just reminded me of that idea of locating information and in that context they were locating texts. There was text messages but it had a location. What you're talking about is locating sound and people could contribute their own sound. I wonder if this is going to be the next thing, geo tagging sound in the same way we do with photos, texts and videos on social media for example.

Josh:
I certainly hope so, yes. Sound has always been something which has been somewhat left by the wayside but we talked before about the fact that podcasts are also extremely popular these days. I really think that sound has now reached that level of maturity in terms of technology that everyone has a pair of headphones and everyone has a smart phone in the same way that a few years ago it was... the ubiquity of cameras in smartphones suddenly enabled everybody to be able to take a picture of whatever was happening around them.

Josh:
Then that laid the ground for Instagram and other startups to take advantage of that. I think now with the rise of podcasts and the interest in audio generally, people have got a pair of headphones with them most of the time. So, the possibilities for that are huge now and I think platforms hopefully like echoes are going to take advantage of that and the fact that our platform is free and open and free to use, free to publish content on, anybody can start taking advantage of it now. This could lay the ground for things like locative podcasts or locative news, all sorts of new ideas, new mediums through linking location with sound.

Daniel:
Sounds like we're going towards a very exciting future in terms of locative audio. Hey, I've just got a couple of questions left for you before we say goodbye and one of them is, why is location and audio, why are they so good together?

Josh:
Well, what excited me about location and audio in the past and what still excites me in fact is the fact that it's a different medium. I touched on this a little bit before, but the possibility of linking location with audio changes how the content is presented. Instead of creating a linear experience which you would be doing when composing a piece of music or creating a podcast, which starts at the beginning and finishes at the end, and you listen to all the parts in between in a specified order.

Josh:
What you're doing with locative audio is actually deconstructing that audio, taking it apart. Even the background sound and the foreground sound, if you're creating a narrative with [inaudible 00:27:03] sound, you can separate those layers and then trigger them in different ways. For example, the ambient sound could loop for five minutes before your narrative comes in, but that's dependent on how quickly the the listener moves.

Josh:
By creating these layers of sound and placing them in different places, you're creating this level of serendipity in the creation of the audio experience. Also, the listener is free to construct the listening experience as they choose. If you're creating something in a park or in a public space, the listener may not be able to get to all of the parts of it, parts of your experience, so you don't have control over how much they listen to.

Josh:
It's not like they can just press pause and resume it later. They have to be in that space and experiencing it right there and right then in order to be able to get the full experience. That's really the crux of what really still interests me about locative audio is this... the kind of magical serendipity of it.

Daniel:
Josh, I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me today and introduce me to this idea of locative audio. I've definitely learned a lot and I'm sure the audience have appreciated your story and hearing about this as well. But just before we say goodbye to each other, where can we go to learn more about what you do in your work?

Josh:
If you head to echos.xyz there's lots of information about what we do. You can sign up for Echoes and create your own content online right now. It's free to upload for you to publish content. We have IOS and android apps ready to download, so get creating now.

Daniel:
Excellent. Thank you so much.

Josh:
Thanks a lot Daniel.

Daniel:
That's it for another episode of the MapScaping podcast. My name is Daniel. I'm the host of the show and I want to thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. I really appreciate it. If you want to reach out to me for whatever reason, you can contact me on social media. We are MapScaping on Facebook and Twitter and [inaudible 00:29:13] on Instagram. Hope to hear from you soon and see next week. Bye.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Geo-tagged audio - another way of augmenting reality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A podcast about the possibles of geo-locating audio and how this might be used to provide the listener with an augmented reality experience. A discussion about 3D audio and what located audio might look like in the future and what this will mean for the mapping industry.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The next time you walk the dog, ride public transit or stroll through an open-plan office, have a look around you at how many people are wearing headphones.

Whether it's over-ear, in-ear, wireless, Bluetooth, noise-cancelling or even headphones built into sunglasses, there are more and more styles to choose from. And they're getting smarter.

Tech companies are building new, artificial intelligence-enhanced abilities into the buds to feed us directions, notifications and even advertisements in a whole new way.

Audio augmented reality is poised to become the new selling feature of headphones. Instead of having to look at a phone, headphones can overlay an extra layer of information on your environment through sounds. An AI voice can quietly tell you a restaurant only has three stars when you look in its direction at lunchtime or tell you exactly what's wrong with your golf swing without the people around you knowing.

"Augmented reality, the ability to provide additional information through visual, auditory, even touch, all those technologies are evolving rapidly," said Michael Knappe, who leads technology and lifestyle audio at Harman International.

"We certainly see ways that information can be provided to users while listening to music."

Traditionally, to sell headphones at a premium price, audio quality was key. In 2014, Apple bought Beats Electronics for $3 billion and started selling headphones with high-end audio and heavy bass.

Then in 2016, Apple released a Bluetooth version of its famous white earbuds. They were widely ridiculed at first, with users on social media saying they looked like electric toothbrush heads sticking out of users' ears. But their integration with the voice assistant Siri and ability to take calls hands-free proved popular. Google's Pixel Buds Bluetooth headphones, unveiled in 2017, took things a step further and offered real-time language translation.

Suddenly it seemed like smarts were more important than high fidelity. Headphone's abilities are only set to grow. Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research is working on ways to use sound to provide directions, without barking "turn left" into users' ears. Using technology in headphones, like tiny gyroscopes to detect head position, he can place sounds anywhere in a user's environment.

You can hear some examples of the audio cues that Buxton is working on here:

Here a repeating sound moves from left to right to gently suggest a direction without a voice command.

This more traditional voice command moves through the audio environment to indicate a direction, which can naturally complement the instruction.

Buxton envisions a future where directions can be more subtle.

"If I do it correctly, in terms of choosing the right sound and the right processing, I could place the sound of a church bell into an environment, and you'd swear there was a church there in that direction," he said. "You're fully immersed in the real world, and at the same time you're immersed in a virtual world that is superimposed upon it."

The church bell can be used to give directions on a walking tour of a new city. A tourist could hear a general direction to wander in - toward the bell - but could choose their own route through picturesque back streets to get there.

Personal technology experts warn that any new platform for communicating with us is likely to prove attractive to advertisers, too. Your ears may be the next frontier for targeted ads, whispering to you to go ahead and buy that merchandise you're gazing at.

Wearing headphones all day, every day, raises other concerns, like societal isolation. But those same concerns were raised in a New York Times article about the rise of the portable cassette player. In 1981, the paper published a story with the headline "Private Music and Public Silence," which remarked on the trend of "waves of people ... walking about with little foam-rubber circles on their ears and expressions of transport on their faces in a scene that was almost Orwellian."

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Sony Walkman going on sale in the United States. It seems the preference for headphones isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

If you're a member of your local public radio station, we thank you - because your support helps those stations keep programs like Marketplace on the air. But for Marketplace to continue to grow, we need additional investment from those who care most about what we do: superfans like you. Your donation - as little as $5 - helps us create more content that matters to you and your community, and to reach more people where they are - whether that's radio, podcasts or online. When you contribute directly to Marketplace, you become a partner in that mission: someone who understands that when we all get smarter, everybody wins.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Audio augmented reality: a new platform for information - Marketplace

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The next time you walk the dog, ride public transit or stroll through an open-plan office, have a look around you at how many people are wearing headphones. Whether it's over-ear, in-ear, wireless, Bluetooth, noise-cancelling or even headphones built into sunglasses, there are more and more styles to choose from.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Microsoft Soundscape was a project from Microsoft Research that explored the use of innovative audio-based technology to enable people to build a richer awareness of their surroundings, thus becoming more confident and empowered to get around.

Unlike step-by-step navigation apps, Soundscape used 3D audio cues to enrich ambient awareness and provided a new way to relate to the environment. It provided comfort in unfamiliar spaces, supporting individuals in making mental maps and personal route choices.

The Soundscape research project has reached its conclusion, and the project code is now released as open-source software. For more information visit https://aka.ms/ossblog (opens in new tab) .

Getting started with Soundscape

After you install Soundscape, connect a stereo headset or earbuds. Follow the introduction and when prompted, allow the app to access your location. Then, explore a familiar route to get used to how Soundscape delivers spatial information.

Explore, discover, and have fun!

You can use Soundscape in a number of different ways, whether on a well-known route, out about with a friend or using it to discover new places.

Come on the journey with us...

Soundscape reflects a new concept, so it will take a little time to get used to. Please give it a go-and persist with it-to begin to experience the benefits.

Opens in a new tab

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Microsoft Soundscape - Microsoft Research

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Microsoft Soundscape explored the use 3D audio-based technology to enable people to build a richer awareness of their surroundings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The term smart city has been around for quite a while already, and with the 4th industrial revolution around the corner, it keeps gaining more popularity. Although there is no universally recognized definition of a smart city, its ultimate purpose is to ensure improved citizen services and a decent quality...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Uses of Augmented Reality for Smart City Solutions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The term smart city has been around for quite a while already, and with the 4th industrial revolution around the corner, it keeps gaining more popularity. Although there is no universally recognized definition of a smart city, its ultimate purpose is to ensure improved citizen services and a decent quality...

# data[].attributes.headline
AUGMENTED REALITY IN TOURISM– RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS OVERVIEW

# data[].attributes.subject
AUGMENTED REALITY IN TOURISM– RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS OVERVIEW

# data[].attributes.body
tourism AND AR AND "mixed Reality" AND audio AND haptic

# data[].attributes.body
Ska designa visuell process utefter denna reflektion

# data[].attributes.body
Händelseförlopp & Interaktion: original

# data[].attributes.headline
NAVIGATION: Ljud som blir högre ju närmare man kommer

# data[].attributes.subject
NAVIGATION: Ljud som blir högre ju närmare man kommer

# data[].attributes.body
Teknik för geotaggning för ljud. I cirkeln så aktiveras ett ljud och ju närmare centrum man kommer desto högre blir ljudet

# data[].attributes.body
Tidig skiss på storyboard: övergripande.

# data[].attributes.headline
A real-world study of an audio-tactile tourist guide

# data[].attributes.subject
A real-world study of an audio-tactile tourist guide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This paper reports on the in-context evaluation of an audio-tactile interactive tourist guide - one test was done in a medieval city center, and the other was done at an archaeological site. The activity theory framework was used as a perspective to guide design, field-study and analysis. The evaluation shows that the guide allows users to experience an augmented reality, while keeping the environment in focus (in contrast with the common key-hole like experience that on-screen augmented reality generates). The evaluation also confirms the usefulness of extending the vibrational feedback to convey also distance information as well as directional information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A real-world study of an audio-tactile tourist guide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This paper reports on the in-context evaluation of an audio-tactile interactive tourist guide - one test was done in a medieval city center, and the other was done at an archaeological site. The activity theory framework was used as a perspective to guide design, field-study and analysis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Digital humans might soon be guiding you around the world.

Picture this. You walk in, wide eyed, into the Vatican Museum. A tour guide dressed like Michelangelo greets you at the entrance and after a quick introduction, begins walking you through the galleries, explaining, in detail, the history of Vatican city and the great renaissance artists housed inside. He's funny, charming and knows the answer to pretty much any question you have. He's also not real...He's a hologram.

Let's teleport to another scene. You're in the market for a new home and decided to stop by at a nearby open house. Upon reaching the house, you're greeted by a realtor who asks you what you're looking for in an ideal home and then walks you through the house giving you a complete overview of the features and history of the house. She's helpful, knowledgeable and as you might have guessed, also a hologram.

This is the dream that got us most excited about augmented reality (AR) when we began our journey, at Placenote, with a guided tour of an office we built in early 2017. The idea was simple - AR lets us re-imagine how people interact with not just the digital but also the physical world and this fusion of digital and physical is what would guide the next big paradigm shift in computing.

Over the last year we've seen the AR community begin to connect the dots to this idea in a remarkable way. With this post, I wanted to shed some light on this trend, highlight interesting products built around it, and list the tools available to you, as a developer, if you're interested in building something like this today.

First, to define the concept.

In the future, hologram tour guides in augmented reality might be the user interface through which we explore the world around us.

The keywords here are "user-interface" and . Let me explain why I think this is a big deal in the next 3 sections.

1. Augmented reality as a UI for navigation

As developers, we tend to think of our apps and websites as independent entities from the real world. You've probably heard the saying, "the UI is the product", because it has almost always been true. So far, users have primarily interacted with our software through rectangular screens on their desks and in their pockets.

In the AR world, this completely changes. No longer is your app limited to a window. You can now create digital content all around your users and essentially "immerse" them in your app. It's an understatement to say this requires a complete rethinking of our design conventions from the 2D world.

The second thing that changes in AR is that the world can now be integrated into your product. Ever since GPS showed up on mobile phones, we've had location-based apps that use maps as a canvas to display information, trigger actions and help us navigate. Great examples are Google maps, Foursquare, Uber and Yelp. In AR, however, the physical world itself can be used as a canvas for your UI. So what does this mean for location-based apps?

The GOOD - AR lets us leverage visual cues in 3D

When searching for directions on Google Maps, you've probably had to look up and down at your phone a few times to try to match the points of interest on your map with their real world locations. In AR you can highlight a point of interest directly in the real world to give users a much quicker way to understand contextual information. Here's an example of how 3D visual cues make navigation a more intuitive.

The BAD - AR interfaces run the risk of overwhelming users.

The downside of AR for location-based apps is that you run the risk of overwhelming your users with "too many" visual cues. That means users have to work 10 times harder to search your maps for information that could pop up all around them. You definitely don't want to end up like this:

That makes one think...how can augmented reality UI's be designed to effectively get out of the way of people accomplishing a task - which in the case of location-based apps, is either searching, navigating or exploring the real world. AR forces you to constrain your UI to simple, limited interactions closely based on the user's immediate context.

2. The BIG difference between navigation and exploration

The standard model of navigation apps has always been a very utilitarian experience with one goal - getting people from point A to point B. But think about the last time you used Google Maps as a sight-seeing tool. You first make a list of things to do, learn about each of them, string them together in an itinerary and then use Google Maps purely for the mechanical task of finding directions.
The new Google Trip Planner tries to solve this problem by providing better information and curated itineraries but the utilitarian experience persists here as well.
In my opinion, thekiller feature of AR is enhancing a traditionally utilitarian experience with richer storytelling. If you've ever been on a walking tour of a city or a museum with an enthusiastic and insanely knowledgeable tour guide, you will understand why walking tours are a 16 billion dollar industry worldwide.

Walking tours are a 16 billion dollar industry worldwide.

With AR, finding your way doesn't need to be a mechanical task anymore - It can be fun, educational and exploratory. Your digital tour guide could craft an itinerary for you, based on what it knows about you and then create a rich guided experience that lets you enjoy the best things a place has to offer in a simple, meaningful way.

3. Augmented reality as a digital assistant.

The concept of digital assistants is not new. There was a time when using a computer for the first time was an exploratory task for most people. If you used a computer in the 90s, you probably remember this little guy.

More recently, we've seen the rise of chatbots like Facebook messenger bots as well as voice assistants like Siri, Google Home and Amazon Alexa fighting to answer our questions with sassy AI bots.

These bots are incredibly useful but so far, we've only communicated with them through text. Even voice-enabled bots like Alexa don't really hear us. Rather they read a transcription of our words to understand us. This is an important point because AR could lets us build bots that can communicate across a much larger range of channels - voice, body language, facial expressions and physical movement. I'm talking about importing the best parts of human face-to-face conversations into digital interactions with computers.

AR can let users have a face-to-face conversation with a bot.
In the next sections, I'll show you how to build an AR digital assistant and what the current progress in this space has been so far.
The point I'm making here is that there is a strong need for guided location-based experiences that isn't being met by navigation apps available today. Experiences that rely on exploration need a layer of storytelling with context and personality that can only be solved by (1) an intelligent guide and (2) deep knowledge of a users location and context.

AR can bridge the gap between the utility of navigation and the fun of exploration.

How to build an AR tour guide

Building an AR tour guide app essentially boils down to three main components:

Let's discuss each of these components and explore the latest tools you can leverage to build something like this today.

Character Design (Animation and AI)

One of the most important pieces of an augmented reality guided tour is the guide itself. This is a 3D animated character that will be the face of your digital assistant. Building animated characters is a well established field in the film and gaming industries. Characters are designed by artists, rigged to define facial features, joints and movements and then animated to match the script with careful timing. Watch the making of any Pixar movie and you'll see what a tedious process this is.

Fortunately for developers, tools like Unity have pre-built animations that can be attached to any rigged character model for basic movements like walking, dancing, waving, frowning etc. But building more nuanced and custom animations has been quite inaccessible to the average mobile developer so far. This is changing now with startups building new and easier ways to create animated characters for VR and AR. Here are some examples:

Companies like 8i and Quantum Capture create volumetric scans of real humans with custom camera setups to record and replay animations in VR and AR apps.

Other companies like Mind Show and Limitless are making it easy to animate 3D cartoon characters, rather than real humans, using clever ways to create interesting characters for immersive environments.

Character AI is the second most important piece of character design. Digital assistants should be able to interact with users and respond to questions. In fact Amazon has built a product called Amazon Sumerian that uses the same AI engine that powers Alexa to create animated digital assistants for VR and AR apps.

Perhaps, alternatively, we might even be able to use something like Facebook's Social VR to create live telepresence sessions with animated characters embodying real tour guides remotely guiding people in AR.

Story Design

Story design encompasses everything that defines the "story" or the sequence of actions in an AR experience. In guided tours that basically means the sequence of tour stops, the story path alternatives and scripted content that will be played along the tour.

This part of the stack is independent of the AR interface itself and, as such, has existed in many forms like audio tours in museums for several years. There are a few startups building products that make it easy to design simple guided tour experiences on mobile and they each have built their own unique story design tools. Some neat examples are Guidigo, Detour, Guide By Cell and MetaVerse.

Location awareness

The final piece of the guided tour puzzle is "location-awareness". This has traditionally been done in the 2D world with GPS. GPS works well enough for 2D location-based apps because the accuracy needed for 2D maps is pretty low (3m-5m).

However, in AR, GPS doesn't really cut it because rendering visual cues over the physical world in 3D requires a very accurate and responsive location-awareness system. Further, GPS doesn't work indoors.

Our team at Placenote is building an SDK to bring "visual location awareness" to AR apps. It works by letting you create visual 3D maps of outdoor and indoor locations and use them to create highly accurate location aware apps like guided tours.

The image below shows how you can use Placenote SDK to visually map and define points of interest in your guided tour, effectively replacing GPS as a location-awareness solution.

Conclusion

A combination of these three components (Character design, Story design and Location awareness) could be put together in creative ways to build incredibly compelling guided tour experiences that give users a fun, educational and engaging way to explore the world.
Join our Slack Community
I think this is absolutely a killer app for AR and I would love to see more developers start experimenting with character led tours.
Install Placenote SDK + Get a free API key
If you've still reading until this point, Thank You! If you're interested in learning more about what we're building at Placenote,

or

Also, if you've seen any interesting examples of virtual tour guides, please do share them with me! Thanks!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Killer App for AR - Hologram Tour Guides - Virtual Reality Pop

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Digital humans might soon be guiding you around the world. Picture this. You walk in, wide eyed, into the Vatican Museum. A tour guide dressed like Michelangelo greets you at the entrance and after a quick introduction, begins walking you through the galleries, explaining, in detail, the history of Vatican city and the great renaissance artists housed inside.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The dérive ( French: , "drift") is a revolutionary strategy originally put forward in the "Theory of the Dérive" (1956) by Guy Debord, a member at the time of the Letterist International. Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances."

# data[].attributes.body
Titta på målgrupp och mer specifikt om dem.
Hur ska kombinationen vara givande och användarvänlig.
titta på vilka kombinationer och vad som har gjort som liknar
franska appar om hur man navigerar sig runt utan att navigera sig.

# data[].attributes.body
finns portfolios att titta på.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This page is part of an ongoing project that aims to support Disabled walking artists. It also aims to help everyone make their creative walking more accessible to everybody who may wish to take part. It is not perfect, or complete, and I would welcome any comments and contributions. I am always learning how to make things better myself. In particular I realise there is a problem with this website not being fully accessible. I am trying to fix this and find a better home for this work. In the meantime if you need this information in alternative formats I will do my best, please contact me via email mlrose@thelrm.org

I realised this work was needed through my own experiences. As a Disabled person I have often been "left behind" when engaging with walking art. Sometimes the lead was simply going too fast and didn't notice anyone was struggling to keep up. Sometimes information I was given about venues was incomplete or inaccurate and the terrain was not physically accessible. I want to help make creative walking / psychogeography accessible for all. I always want to share the work of other Disabled walking artists. My version of walking has always included sticks, wheelchairs, orthotics and other assistive technologies. When I talk about Disabled people I am inclusive of anyone who defines as such, including people who are neurodivergent, have a chronic illness, mental health condition or learning differences as well as physical and sensory impairments.

You can read more about my approach, and the motivations behind this work in my chapter Access Denied: Disabled People and Walking Art in Walking Bodies Papers, Provocations, Actions edited by Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind and Phil Smith (Triarchy Press, 2020). I can send you a pdf of my chapter if you can not access the book.

This list includes resources made by, or with, Disabled people. It does not include work made for us without inclusion of Disabled People.

General Principles

I would urge everybody to think creatively and holistically about access and equal rights. My focus here is on disability but there are other aspects of exclusion too of course. As artists increasing and diversifying our audiences can only be a good thing. If possible design in access and inclusion from the beginning of a project, don't try and add it on later. Accessible design benefits EVERYONE, for example avoiding upstairs spaces which can only be reached by stairs is useful not just to people who use wheelchairs or have physical impairments. Its good for people with prams or buggies or large bags or temporary injuries or who feel tired.

Be honest and be explicit about the accessibility of your work. Give as much information as you can so people can make an informed decision. Good quality information is so important and can make a huge positive impact I suggest adding something like "This performance takes place on pavements and in public spaces through out the town. There are no steps and we will cross roads only where there are dropped kerbs. The route is 1.5 miles and will take approximately 2 hours without a break. There are toilets and refreshment facilities at the beginning and end of the performance. If you have any particular access needs please contact us at XXXXX and we will do our best to help" or "the gallery is on the second floor and is accessible by lift. There is limited seating available, please let us know if you would like us to reserve you a seat or if you have any questions about access"

Ask people what they need to be able to participate or attend and be prepared to accommodate them as far as possible. Disabled People know what makes them feel welcome - examples could be a quiet space, a free ticket for a PA, information in a specific format or a particular kind of seat.

Support venues that are fully accessible wherever possible. This one goes without saying but again be honest; I'm not the only disabled performer who has been invited onto a stage that I can't get onto!

If you are facilitating a walk be alert and reflexive to your participants and always move at the pace of the slowest. I've been left behind on occasion and no-one even noticed; this was truly horrible. Always try and plan a route with toilets at the beginning and end point and again, be honest about how and where you will be travelling.

If a performance can not be accessible for disabled people think about how you can share it in alternative formats. For example, some work may be on difficult terrain or move at a fast pace; thinking accessibly does not mean you can't do this but maybe consider how it is recorded.

Remember access is an issue for online events too. For example turn off the chat function during presentations so text readers do not get confused and add captions to videos.

If you want information on how to make your art or event more accessible Shape Arts and We are Unlimited have some excellent oneline resources.

https://www.shapearts.org.uk/pages/news/category/resources

http://weareunlimited.org.uk/resources/

Disability Arts Online also provide a lot of information

https://disabilityarts.online/projects/

If you need bespoke advice please try to contact Disabled Peoples Organisations local to your area for details of consultants. Of course their professional and personal expertise will need resources. It is not fair to expect people to work for free unless they have explicitly offered to volunteer.

Creative Walkers

Thank you to everyone who suggested work via social media. Not all of the works explicitly discuss disability, in keeping with a commitment to self definition. I do not believe this must be central to all the work Disabled artists produce. Please let me know who is missing, or if you believe someone is here in error.

Aidan Moesby https://www.aidanmoesby.co.uk/contact-us/
"an artist curator working at the intersection of art, health and technology. His current work investigates the dual crises of Climate Change and Mental Health"

Alec Finlay https://www.alecfinlay.com/
"An internationally-recognised artist and poet whose work crosses over a range of media and forms.... Recently Finlay's work has focussed on place-awareness and ecopoetics. He is lead artist on Day of Access https://www.dayofaccess.co.uk/

Raquel Meseguer / Unchartered Collective - A Crash Course in Cloudspotting (the subversive act of horizontality)
https://weareunlimited.org.uk/commission/raquel-meseguer-unchartered-collective-crash-course-cloudspotting-subversive-act-horizontality/?fbclid=IwAR0HVtXP6queiNNTN3TKbS_dHkVbeFptaDdnYCszDqH_MmXYYD12XZXJc-8
An invitation to pause. To listen. To rest. A journey for the ill, infirm and sick. That is all of us. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. An ode to invisible disability and to acts of bravery we don't see. Part installation, part verbatim theatre, A Crash Course in Cloudspotting (the subversive act of horizontality) tells stories of people who need to rest throughout the day.

Sue Porter and Dee Heddon Walking Interconnections
https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/projects/walking-interconnections-performing-conversations-of-sustainabili Walking Interconnections recognises and responds to the fact that disabled people's voices have been largely absent from the sustainability debate. See also Dee Heddon, and Sue Porter. "Walking Interconnections." CSPA Quarterly, no. 18, 2017, pp. 18-21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/90015872

Tony Collier and Kate Green Mind walks http://www.kate-green.co.uk/installation/4594182921
A two-year collaboration with Tony Collier who lived with Motor Neurone Disease. Projecting the images on to objects created the immersive experience that Tony aspired to in his paintings, and enjoys on his Mindwalks, and bought the audience closer to the space that I feel on a physical walk. I worked in a different colour palette and tone for each walk, so that all four Mindwalks had a distinct aesthetic.
Further Reading
Inclusion London https://www.inclusionlondon.org.uk/disability-in-london/social-model/the-social-model-of-disability-and-the-cultural-model-of-deafness/
Inclusion London have a lot of useful resources about the history of Disabled Peoples rights, this short introductory guide explains why language matters and gives a useful overview

These are some papers and websites which discuss issues around disability, neurodiversity, access, psychogeography and walking art. If you can't access any of these resources please do get in touch.

Beverley Hood , Chris Speed , Ben Butchart , Janet Dickinson & Julia Hibbert Locating the Territory (2014)
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/19596094/HOODSPEEDLocatingtheTerritorySMALL.pdf
A participatory research project creating locative media with people who have learning difficulties

Damien Patrick Williams http://www.afutureworththinkingabout.com/?page_id=4
"writing, talking, thinking, teaching, and learning about philosophy, comparative religion, magic, artificial intelligence, biotechnological intervention into human and nonhuman bodyminds, pop culture, and how all of these things relate to each other"

Steve Graby Wandering Minds: Autism, Psychogeography, Public Space and the ICD (2011)
This paper looks at issues around neurodiversity and walking and is free to download here
https://www.academia.edu/8586966/Wandering_Minds_autism_psychogeography_public_space_and_the_ICD_2011_
Something to add? Please email mlrose@thelrm.org This version was written in February 2021

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This page is part of an ongoing project that aims to support Disabled walking artists. It also aims to help everyone make their creative walking more accessible to everybody who may wish to take part. It is not perfect, or complete, and I would welcome any comments and contributions.

# data[].attributes.body
skapa designkoncept utifrån dérive
Skapa promenader
All utforskning sker genom dérive och följs av olika förutbestämda regler. följ magkänslan, intuitionen, färgen röd, gå alltid till höger,

# data[].attributes.headline
Phases of Urban Tourists’ Exploratory Navigation:A Field Study 

# data[].attributes.subject
Phases of Urban Tourists’ Exploratory Navigation:A Field Study 

# data[].attributes.headline
Uncover: supporting city exploration with egocentric visualizationsof location-based content

# data[].attributes.subject
Uncover: supporting city exploration with egocentric visualizationsof location-based content

# data[].attributes.headline
Interaction in Augmented Reality: Challenges to Enhance User Experience

# data[].attributes.subject
Interaction in Augmented Reality: Challenges to Enhance User Experience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One year ago, Abha Dawesar was living in blacked-out Manhattan post-Sandy, scrounging for power to connect. As a novelist, she was struck by this metaphor: Have our lives now become fixated on the drive to digitally connect, while we miss out on what's real?

# data[].attributes.headline
Non-verbal Audio and Tactile Mobile Navigation

# data[].attributes.subject
Non-verbal Audio and Tactile Mobile Navigation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
[PDF] Non-verbal audio and tactile mobile navigation | Semantic Scholar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As typical turn by turn systems fail in several aspects to provide an engaging experience to pedestrians in urban environments, we investigate the potential of alternative interaction methods for navigation. We present a two-phase experiment, involving both audio and tactile navigation and discuss the collected evaluation data.

# data[].attributes.headline
Interweaving Visual and Audio-Haptic Augmented Realityfor Urban Exploration

# data[].attributes.subject
Interweaving Visual and Audio-Haptic Augmented Realityfor Urban Exploration

# data[].attributes.headline
Towards the Design of Effective Haptic and Audio Displays forAugmented Reality and Mixed Reality Applications

# data[].attributes.subject
Towards the Design of Effective Haptic and Audio Displays forAugmented Reality and Mixed Reality Applications

# data[].attributes.body
Future work will include investigation of other design factors and feld studies in the real tourism scenarios.

# data[].attributes.headline
Data-driven Serendipity Navigation in Urban Places

# data[].attributes.subject
Data-driven Serendipity Navigation in Urban Places

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Musikens påverkan på oss människor har studerats tidigare. Den skapar känslor och associationer. Det går även att se att musik aktiverar hjärnans emotionella del.

I en ny studie från Berkeley University har forskare nu studerat på vilket sätt musik kan upplevas hos lyssnare och om dessa upplevelser är generella. Forskarna ville även se vilken påverkan kulturell tillhörighet kan ha i upplevelsen av vilka känslor som en särskild musik ger.

Både västerländsk och kinesisk musik

- Man har undersökt subjektiva upplevelser av musik på ett väldigt grundligt sätt med stora grupper av försökspersoner från både USA och Kina, berättar Fredrik Ullén, som själv forskar på frågor om musik och hjärnan på Karolinska institutet.

I den nya studien var det 2777 personer från både USA och Kina som fick lyssna på mer än 2000 olika musiklåtar. De valda musiksnuttarna var valda utifrån både modern och klassisk västerländsk, respektive traditionell kinesisk musik. Personerna fick sedan klassificera vilka känslor som de upplevde av musiken. De kunde även säga ifall de upplevde musiken som positiv eller negativ och ifall den hade hög eller låg energinivå.

Ger rika känsloupplevelser

- Resultaten är väldigt rika men ett huvudfynd är att man presenterar bevis för att musikaliska upplevelser är mycket rikare än vad man ofta tagit hänsyn till i tidigare studier. En vanlig approach är att skatta känsloresponser i ett tvådimensionellt diagram där axlarna motsvarar positiv eller negativ känsla, samt "arousal" (energinivå), berättar Fredrik Ullén.

På så vis har mycket av forskningen hittills missat att kartlägga hur viss musik kan skapa mer precisa känsloeffekter, menar Fredrik Ullén.

Den nya forskningen visar att det finns åtminstone 13 oberoende dimensioner av musikaliska känsloupplevelser. Dimensionerna motsvarar ungefär adjektiv som forskarna på engelska namngett "amusing" (roande), "annoying" (irriterande), "calm" (lugn), "dreamy" (drömsk), "erotic/desirous" (erotisk/lysten), "scary/fearful," (läskig) och "triumphant/heroic" (triumferande/hjältemodig).

13 musikkänslor blandas

- Dessutom kan dessa olika grunddimensioner blandas i en viss musikupplevelse. Det handlar alltså inte om distinkta antingen/eller-kategorier. Så den nya forskningen visar att musikupplevelser är emotionellt otroligt mångfacetterade och nyanserade, förklarar Fredrik Ullén.

- På ett sätt kan jag väl tycka att det här är rätt självklart för alla musikälskare. Men det är ju snyggt att det visas vetenskapligt, säger Fredrik Ullén.
Studien är publicerad i journal Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hittat språk- eller faktafel i texten? Skriv och berätta.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Musikens påverkan på oss människor har studerats tidigare. Den skapar känslor och associationer. Det går även att se att musik aktiverar hjärnans emotionella del. I en ny studie från Berkeley University har forskare nu studerat på vilket sätt musik kan upplevas hos lyssnare och om dessa upplevelser är generella.

# data[].attributes.body
13 dimensioner av musik som vi kan känna.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In our first post on audio-led AR, R&D's Henry Cooke discussed why we're interested in the technology. After going on a soundwalk, we decided that a interesting next step would be to port our existing experiment in geolocated audio to our Bose Frames devkit: Alluvial Sharawadji. Here, Jakub Fiala - until recently a Software Engineer at BBC R&D - describes the port and what he learned by making it.

Alluvial Sharawadji is "crowdsourced soundwalk" work made for the Eufónic festival in Catalonia in summer 2018. For the piece, Tim & I built a mobile-friendly web app allowing participants to record sounds, which would be saved along with the current geolocation of the participant. We then used Google Street View and the Web Audio API to present a "virtual soundwalk" around the town.

The Sharawadji soundwalks are represented as remotely stored sound files with associated latitude and longitude coordinates. The coordinate mapping and the sound files are downloaded when the soundwalk starts.

For this rebuild, we use an iPhone's GPS to position sounds around the listener, and calculate the volume level of each sound based on its distance from the listener. We then use the Resonance Audio (Google VR) library to render the sounds spatially in real time, giving us a dynamic soundscape that changes in response to the listener's position in the real world.

The first soundwalk we tested was composed of sounds recorded by various members of our team with their phones around our office in White City, London. Most of these sounds were fairly quiet, ambient recordings with lots of traffic sounds, construction noises and passers-by. At this point, we were using a "rolloff" mechanism from the Resonance Audio library - "rolloff" being the gradual attenuation of sound volume as the listener moves away from it.

We found that ambient sounds, especially those recorded in the environment where they're being played back, tend to be drowned by real-world noises, and so don't provide enough immersion. Furthermore, the built-in rolloff mechanism in Resonance Audio seems unsuitable for our coordinate system, as to walk a longitudinal distance of one degree is to walk about 51 miles in London. Due to the small changes in coordinate values, there was no perceptible rolloff effect at all.

For the second test, we "placed" three pieces of music at approximately 150 metre intervals along Wood Lane. We also ported the Inverse Square Law-based volume attenuation function from the Sharawadji webapp into our demo, and switched off the Resonance Audio rolloff. We found the custom attenuation worked very well, resulting in well-localised sounds - at about 5-10m from the sound location, we could hear a faint hint of the music, and following the direction it seemed to come from, we arrived at the spot where it played the loudest.

We are very excited about the possibilities of audio AR technology, and we're keen to run more experiments with it. From our tests so far it seems that with the right sound material and adjustments to the placement and attenuation of sounds, it could prove an interesting platform for new localised sound experiences.

Tweet This - Share on Facebook BBC R&D - On Our Radar: Audio AR BBC R&D - Audio AR: Sound Walk Research - The Missing Voice BBC R&D - Virtual Reality Sound in The Turning Forest BBC R&D - Binaural Sound BBC R&D - Spatial Audio BBC Academy - Introduction to Spatial Audio BBC Academy - Spatial Audio: Where Do I Start? BBC R&D - What Do Young People Want From a Radio Player? BBC R&D - Prototyping, Hacking and Evaluating New Radio Experiences BBC R&D - Better Radio Experiences: Generating Unexpected Ideas by Bringing User Research to Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In our first post on audio-led AR, R&D's Henry Cooke discussed why we're interested in the technology. After going on a soundwalk, we decided that a interesting next step would be to port our existing experiment in geolocated audio to our Bose Frames devkit: Alluvial Sharawadji.

# data[].attributes.body
Kostar pengar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Use voice, sounds and music to create immersive and engaging experiences for your visitors. SonicMaps uses GPS and location technologies to automatically deliver geolocated audio content to your audience as they walk, just like a real tour guide.

At the core of the SonicMaps platform is our easy to use online Editor, offering a multi-layer approach to storytelling and soundscape composition where you can overlap multiple layers of sound on a map. This is extremely useful, for example, if you need to have some background music covering a large geographical area, along with several voice recordings at specific spot locations within that area, or if you want to crossfade audio files as the user walks from one location to another. This approach ensures a seamless, more natural experience for your visitors who can enjoy your guided tour or soundwalk with their own smartphone and headphones without the hassle of scanning QR codes or manually playing the right audio file from a list. (less)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Use voice, sounds and music to create immersive and engaging experiences for your visitors. SonicMaps uses GPS and location technologies to automatically deliver geolocated audio content to your audience as they walk, just like a real tour guide.

# data[].attributes.body
finns gratis
Tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwXqgSpT50U

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is geolocated sound?

A sound (or multiple sounds) contained within shapes on the map, which create geofenced areas. These will trigger content when listeners physically walk inside, by using GPS to determine their location or their proximity using iBeacon technology.

Layer sounds in subtle or rich ways, guide your audience, surprise and entertain - a completely different way to experience our physical environment, a threshold where magic happens ✨.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ECHOES - sound walks, audio tours, spatial audio experts & custom projects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ECHOES - sound walks, audio tours, spatial audio experts & custom projects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Together with Golfstromen and VPRO Medialab we will start mapping the Gentrification Frontline. Golfstromen is creating a guide to the gentrification frontline of Toronto. Using the storytelling and mapping tools of HearUsHere combined with FigureRunning, we will explore this frontline with Golfstromen, and together reveal the hidden stories in this part of the city.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Klasien van de Zandschulp designs story-based and participatory experiences, blending digital/physical and online/offline interactions. Her work involves mobile and augmented reality experiences as well as interactive installations and explores embodiment, sensory design, rituals, human interaction and radical thoughts around our daily technology practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Soundwalking is a practice that encourages conscious listening and interaction with the sound environment in a non-linear and improvisational manner. There is a theoretical relevancy with "promenadology" and Benjamin/Baudelaire's flânerie, as the user/listener is invited to wander through an "aurally augmented" urban environment. The result establishes rhizomatic maps and lines of sound/audio walks relevant to the city, as perceived and aurally captured by the artist. The practice of soundwalking suggests wandering new routes, thus questioning linear urban planning, and uses field research and sound recording and their juxtaposition to escape from the model of the "panoramic city," which is mostly perceived visually.

Most soundwalks and geo-located sound installations use open-source platforms that combine locative media (GPS) with music/sound/performative compositions by applying them to a region's map. The artist's and the listener's function often coincide, both in cases where the sound is recorded while crossing the area and in those cases where the path chosen by the walker/listener determines the artistic result.

In this paper I will attempt to connect the concept of "nomadism," as introduced and explained by Deleuze and Guattari, with contemporary artistic practices of sound walks, site-specific sound compositions, and geo-located sound interventions in urban public space by juxtaposing the principles of nomad art with those of open-source platforms and fl ânerie.

As Deleuze and Guattari (1980) imply, many social activities, including art, can constitute a war machine drawing "a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth place of displacement" (ibid., 423) by reforming or acting against dominant systems and/or practices (ibid., 500). In the case of soundwalking, nomadism does not apply by suggesting fleeing the city but by proposing wandering as resistance to its confined and bordered space (Deleuze 1985, 149): in these soundscape compositions, narratives prevail, communities acquire space and voice, buildings are not mere subjects for sightseeing tours, the city is not a collection of historical information but a space to aurally, artistically, and socially wander within the micro-frames of which this space rhizomatically consists. Music and narrative as tools, leave behind ethnography, documentary, score, concert halls, museums, and institutions and become pliable materials, fragments of a living organism, of a city-score whose music is made by and is addressed to people. Actually the notions of nomadism and war machine apply here "as a war of becoming over being, of the sedentary over the nomadic" (Deuchars 2011, 3).

Departing from the distinction of audio walks, sound walks and listening walks, I will connect these contemporary artistic practices with the Deleuzian notion of rhizome and nomadism in order to indicate how the sound routes of wandering create experiential, non-dichotomous relations between public space and people that inhabit it or cross it, and how this process is a becoming-art through the inclusion of lines of flight and soft spots that converse with displaced artistic tools and site specific sound representations.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. "Nomad Thought." In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David B. Allison, 142-49. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Deuchars, Robert. 2011. "Creating Lines of Flight and Activating Resistance: Deleuze and Guattari's War Machine." Seminar at the Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Locative Media Sound Walks: Connecting Nomadism with Contemporary Geolocated Flânerie and Open Source Practices

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Soundwalking is a practice that encourages conscious listening and interaction with the sound environment in a non-linear and improvisational manner. There is a theoretical relevancy with "promenadology" and Benjamin/Baudelaire's flânerie, as the user/listener is invited to wander through an "aurally augmented" urban environment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
SWS Awards 2023

The original award discovering the best soundwalks from all over the world.

Up to €1000 for first prize!

Marŝarto Awards 2023

The first and only award recognising walking art from around the globe.

Up to €1000 for first prize!

This event is free for supporting members

Walking as Artistic Practice

Our next event: 2023-10-24 18:00

We are excited to have Ellen Mueller as our guest for this Cafe. For the last few years, she has been compiling a comprehensive resource on walking art and sharing it through her blog and through her own teaching resources. However, she is now the author of recent book from SUNY Publishers that brings together

Walking A/way with the prizes...

At the Sound Walk Stories Sunday showcase event of new writing, at which the shortlisted poems and stories from our 2023 Walking A/way themed writing competition, were read by their inspiring authors, we learnt which of them walked away with the prizes.

walk · listen · create is a community of 1500+ contributing members

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can, and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
Gautama Buddha

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Home of walking artists and artist walkers

# data[].attributes.headline
"I just leaned on it!" Exploring Opportunistic Social Discovery of a Technologically Augmented Cushion

# data[].attributes.subject
"I just leaned on it!" Exploring Opportunistic Social Discovery of a Technologically Augmented Cushion

# data[].attributes.headline
Using Sensory Wearable Devices to Navigate the City:Effectiveness and User Experience inOlder Pedestrians

# data[].attributes.subject
Using Sensory Wearable Devices to Navigate the City:Effectiveness and User Experience inOlder Pedestrians

# data[].attributes.headline
Outdoor Auditory Wearable Interfaces: Bone Conduction Communication

# data[].attributes.subject
Outdoor Auditory Wearable Interfaces: Bone Conduction Communication

# data[].attributes.headline
Interaction in Augmented Reality: Challenges to Enhance User Experience

# data[].attributes.subject
Interaction in Augmented Reality: Challenges to Enhance User Experience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Freesound: collaborative database of creative-commons licensed sound for musicians and sound lovers. Have you freed your sound today?

# data[].attributes.body
Där det pågår en eldshow med medeltidsband