Sound walks aren鈥檛 a particularly new idea - people have already made loads in London alone, and they seemed to have something of a renaissance a few years ago with the rise of the iPhone. A couple of my favourites are and . One that has come up most often in recent conversations, however, is Janet Cardiff鈥檚 , commissioned by in 1999.
Artangel describe the walk like so:
- Part urban guide, part detective story, part film noir, this audio walk transports individual listeners on foot through the streets and alley ways of Spitalfields, a historic part of London next to the City. Intimate, even conspiratorial in tone, it entwines the listener in an elusive narrative that shifts through space and time, confession, conjecture and dream.
This morning, and I met at the (formerly the library), pressed play on our phones, and set off.
The rest of this post will make a lot more sense if you have a to some of the The Missing Voice before reading further, or even better - if you鈥檙e in or near London, do the walk! It鈥檚 great.
Some Thoughts
The thing I most enjoyed about the walk were the moments of synchronicity between the audio and what we were seeing in the world. As we walk along, Janet describes a Kentucky Fried Chicken, someone in a duffel coat, a man with a tight collar, and we find people and shops in our field of view who are close enough to these descriptions and they take on the role. At one point a plane goes over right on cue, and we grin at each other like idiots.
In this way, it reminds me a bit of Greg Wohead鈥檚 , a piece of theatre which has stuck in my mind ever since I saw it in 2014. In Greg鈥檚 production, a show for one person at a time, delivered by headphones and a tape player, these moments of synchronicity were carefully arranged - in The Missing Voice they鈥檙e accidental, emergent, but no less joyful for that. It made me wonder - if you鈥檙e making a piece like this, for a city, maybe if you reference enough generic city-things - shops, people, vehicles - some of them are bound to match up?
We ended up getting lost a few times - Whitechapel and Spitalfields have changed a lot since 1999! This adds another layer to the walk though: it has become a record of the area twenty years ago. Thinking about what鈥檚 changed - and what hasn鈥檛, and why - becomes part of the experience.
And some of the sounds of the environment caught by Janet鈥檚 tape trigger my own memories of the area. At one point, in the maze of alleyways between Spitalfields Market and Liverpool Street station, we hear the sounds of a charismatic church service in full swing and I remember being on this exact street in the middle of a hot summer years ago, standing outside a pub and listening to the same sounds of worship coming from the upstairs windows across the way.
I did wonder how well the navigation would work; how easily we鈥檇 be able to follow the route. This actually worked very well, subtle but effective. As she walks, we can hear Janet鈥檚 footsteps; by keeping our own walking in time and following her directions as she reaches intersections, we followed the route with only minor deviations - which became interesting anyway, as already noted. The engineer part of my brain wanted to do this with maps and waypoints and a clearly mapped route, but keeping step with the audio and following the directions is much more elegant, doesn鈥檛 break immersion and doesn鈥檛 require any fancy tech solutionism at all.
And of course, it鈥檚 always fun to go on a ramble through a part of town with new eyes and ears on, feeling things differently. There鈥檚 one really lovely moment where we鈥檙e taken into a church for a moment of stillness, something I鈥檇 never even think about in my day-to-day routine.
We didn鈥檛 return our Discmen at the end.
Next Up
We鈥檙e only just getting started with our audio AR research; we鈥檙e going to be looking at more things in the coming months and writing up our research. I suspect a run-through of will be happening sooner rather than later.
Maybe we鈥檒l even make some things, who knows? Stranger things have happened.
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- 大象传媒 R&D - On Our Radar: Audio AR
- 大象传媒 R&D - Virtual Reality Sound in The Turning Forest
- 大象传媒 R&D - Binaural Sound
- 大象传媒 R&D - Spatial Audio
- 大象传媒 Academy - Spatial Audio: Where Do I Start?
- 大象传媒 R&D - What Do Young People Want From a Radio Player?
- 大象传媒 R&D - Prototyping, Hacking and Evaluating New Radio Experiences
- 大象传媒 R&D - Better Radio Experiences: Generating Unexpected Ideas by Bringing User Research to Life
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