#sound maps

[justabirdy]

Sound Maps

Have you ever tried to map sounds? One of my focii this past week was in teaching students how to use all 5 senses to observe the world around them. Sound is one of those senses we often forget to actively observe and record.

Sound maps are an easy and enjoyable way to observe the sounds around us. In this particular map, I recorded the sound as an onomatopoeia rather than trying to identify what exactly made the noise. The colors represent how loud the noise was to my ears and the locations and movement of the words on the page are where I estimated the noises to be in relation to myself.

If you work with children, or have a spare 10 minutes yourself, I highly recommend trying a sound map, just to recognize the myriads of sounds that surround us all the time.

What do you think you might hear?

[mizelaneus]

The sound maps that predict poachers' movements

Digital monitoring tools are helping rangers protect wildlife in South America's Atlantic Forest. Could sound-based maps pin down the poachi

[richaldis]

Brilliant sound maps from the British Library. Includes examples of different British accents (just for those people who say ‘the British accent’ withour realising how wrong that is)

[sunlit-music]

The top ten sound maps

The world's top ten sound maps listed and reviewed.

Top ten sound maps around the world.

Sound maps record sounds that exist in certain locations, like forests, cities or rural towns.

You can hear people talking about their daily lives, road traffic and coffee shop sounds, wildlife animal sounds, music from around the world, and travel sounds - as if you were there.

Travel sounds can include travel by foot, car, plane, or ship.

You can also hear the wind, ocean waves and cicadas chirping.

You can listen to people singing and musical instruments from around the world.

[immaculatedegenerate-blog]

Sound maps of London: ambient recordings or soundscapes made across London during day and night

Field recordings combined with mapping and archiving. Very cool project.

[jgruda]

Over a 25 year period, I recorded over a 1000 different songs in Bosavi (New Guinea), and those songs are maps -contained between them are 7000 place names. Attention to the poetics of those songs taught me how they mapped social geography, biographies, histories of listening, histories of movement, histories of living and working in the forest, histories of coordinated relationships between people and birds and water and insects and all the things they sing about, with and to. So in time I realized that what I was collecting was not so much field recordings but a real time archive of ecological and aesthetic co-evolution.

Steve Feld in The Art of Field Recording, p. 206.

[comccaff]

Sound maps: List of lists

Above: Screenshot - Écouter Paris sound map

As part of this research project, we are starting to pull together a database to help with comparative analysis and to get a sense of the field of sound mapping - what is out there, who is producing sound maps, what purposes are they being put to, who are the contributors, who are the users?

Listings of sound map projects appear from time to time on message boards and blogs and in journal articles: each of the sources listed below has proven invaluable to this process. (This list compiled last year by Brandon Mechtley is a particularly good starting point, citing authors for each map and filterable by region, year, content types and more.)

Our own list so far, focusing on urban, web-based sound maps, numbers about sixty. In the process of creating our own list I've chanced across some gems I hadn't seen before, including: Indy Sound Map, which maps personal narratives of Indianapolis; the beautifully-realised Écouter Paris; and possibly the best-titled sound map so far, Bolognoise.

More to follow on the blog in due course about our own list & database...

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Sound Maps: List of lists (updated 1 Dec 2014)

ACOUSTIC ECOLOGY INSTITUTE (2010). “A Topology of Sound Maps”. Blog post dated February 1, 2010. Retrieved 20 November 2014 from http://aeinews.org/archives/685

Delicious user Beau Bruit (2009 - present). “Current Filter: #sound #map”. Delicious list dated 2009 - present (last updated August 2014). Retrieved 20 November 2014 from http://delicious.com/radiophonie/sound+map

KALLIMOPOULOU, Eleni, et al. (2013). SonorCities: Learning Culture Through City Soundscapes - A Teacher Handbook. Published online - retrieved 1 December 2014 from http://sonor-cities.edu.gr

Metafilter user Bora Horza Gobuchul (2010). “worldsoundsurround”. Blog post dated September 6, 2010. Retrieved 20 November 2014 from http://www.metafilter.com/95485/worldsoundsurround

Metafilter user agatha_magatha (2010). “Sounds of the City”. Blog post dated February 3 2010. Retrieved 20 November 2014 from http://www.metafilter.com/88882/Sounds-of-the-City 

MECHTLEY, Brandon (2013). “Sound maps on the web”. Retrieved 20 November 2014 from http://bmechtley.me/websoundmaps.html

OUZOUNIAN, Gascia (2014). “Acoustic Mapping: Notes from the Interface” in Gandy and Nilsen (eds.) The Acoustic City. Berlin: Jovis.

PREBBLE, Tim (2010). “Sound Maps”, blog post on Music of Sound. Retrieved 15 November 2014 from http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/blog/sound-maps

RUSSO, Frank, et al. (2012). “Around the World” page on Toronto Sound Map website. Retrieved 15 November 2014 from http://torontosoundmap.com/aroundtheworld.php

TAUSIG, Ben (2010). “Atlas Sound: A Typology of Sound Maps”. Blog post dated January 10, 2010 at Weird Vibrations. Retrieved 20 November 2014 from http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/01/10/atlas-sound-a-typology-of-sound-maps/

TAUSIG, Ben (2010). “Sound Maps: II”. Blog post dated January 13, 2010 at Weird Vibrations. http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2010/01/13/sound-maps-ii/

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PS: If you know of more such listings, they would be more than welcome - you can contact me via Twitter (@comccaff) or email comccaff [at] gmail [dot] com

[comccaff]

Super logo for Sonic World, a long-defunct sound map project from the late 1990s.

Sonic World maps the planet with sound. Listening to the ambient sounds of the world within this site is an invitation to travel, to be entertained and to learn. Sonic World is a theatre experience on one level, an archive of human experience on another.

Via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.