Audio Portrait of a City

SOUNDMAP SOUTHAMPTON 2012

Currently developing...

An Audio Portrait of Southampton:
in partnership with noTours

A vast soundscape across the city, using the voices and sounds of the people and the place. . .
Geo-located musical labyrinth constructed from spoken, sung, played words and music of residents of the city.

Listen with an Android phone with GPS connection, using special software that allows you to connect sounds with physical places.
It is a location-specific composition that you can enter like a physical structure, where listeners move around as though inside an enormous live performance, between the very sources of sound themselves, investigating as they choose.
What the listener hears depends on where they are at a certain time and how they move within the whole invisible structure.

It is two things at once:
A collection of oral histories, songs, interviews, spoken word accounts of life in the city in 2012 by the people that live here.
It is also a musical composition, an intricately interwoven sonic tapestry of human life and our environment: an interpretation in sound of the city at this time.

It is being built in two forms:
  (1)  Music You Can Walk Inside: accessible via Android phone with headset, listeners navigate with the aid of a printed map, they walk inside the soundscape for any duration, on any route.
  (2)  Web sound archive with interactive city map, an online archive of contributors’ stories and songs with additional related texts and images: the sounds and images of lives in Southampton, 2012.

We need:
Contributors - stories, memories, reflections, song, music, whatever you want to tell!
Collaborators – bringing individuals and organisations together to make this happen in a big, exciting way, creating a strong media profile to promote an innovative initiative in a vibrant, evolving city.
Funding - events for listeners to walk inside the Audio Portrait, each person experiencing the whole in a unique way: and building the online archive of sounds and images.

We need your help to make this a spectacular celebration and reflection of our city, a massive portrait of real lives and a snapshot of the sounds, experiences, memories and hopes of Southampton in 2012.

Please get in touch.