Teaching and Learning Guide for: Memoryscape: How Audio Walks Can Deepen Our Sense of Place by Integrating Art, Oral History and Cultural Geography
Authors: Butler Toby 
Published: August 2008

Author's Introduction

This article is concerned with the history and practice of creating sound walks or ‘memoryscapes’: outdoor trails that use recorded sound and spoken memory played on a personal stereo or mobile media to experience places in new ways. It is now possible to cheaply and easily create this and other kinds of located media experience. The development of multi‐sensory‐located media (‘locedia’) presents some exciting opportunities for those concerned with place, local history, cultural geography and oral history. This article uses work from several different disciplines (music, sound art, oral history and cultural geography) as a starting point to exploring some early and recent examples of locedia practice. It also suggests how it might give us a more sophisticated, real, embodied and nuanced experience of places that the written word just can not deliver. Yet, there are considerable challenges in producing and experiencing such work. Academics used to writing must learn to work in sound and view or image; they must navigate difficult issues of privacy, consider the power relations of the outsider's ‘gaze’ and make decisions about the representation of places in work that local people may try and have strong feelings about. Creating such work is an active, multi‐sensory and profoundly challenging experience that can offer students the chance to master multi‐media skills as well as apply theoretical understandings of the histories and geographies of place.

Author Recommends

1. Perks, R., and Thomson, A. (2006). The oral history reader, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

This is a wonderful collection of significant writing concerned with oral history. Part IV, Making Histories features much of interest, including a thought‐provoking paper on the challenges of authoring in sound rather than print by Charles Hardy III, and a moving interview with Graeme Miller, the artist who created the Linked walk mentioned in the memoryscape article. These only feature in the second edition.

2. Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: a short introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

A refreshingly clear and well‐written guide to the different theoretical takes on what makes places – a good starting point for further reading.

3. Carlyle, A. (ed.). (2008). Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. Paris, France: Double Entendre.

This is a collection of short essays and examples of located sonic media art; it includes interviews with practitioners and includes Hildegard Westekamp's Soundwalking, a practical guide to leading students on a mute walk. Lots of thought provoking, applied reading material for students here.

4. Blunt, A., et al. (eds) (2003). Cultural geography in practice. London: Arnold.

A great book for undergraduate and postgraduate students – concepts explained and lots of examples of actually doing cultural geography. The chapter on mapping worlds by David Pinder is particularly useful in this context.

5. Pinder, D. (2001). Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city. Ecumene 8 (1), pp. 1–19.

This article is a thoughtful analysis of a Janet Cardiff sound walk in Whitechapel, East London.

Online Materials

http://www.memoryscape.org.uk

This is my project website, which features two online trails, Dockers which explores Greenwich and the memories of the London Docks that are archived in the Museum of London, and Drifting which is a rather strange experiment‐combining physical geography and oral history along the Thames at Hampton Court, but still makes for an interesting trail. Audio, maps and trails can be downloaded for free, so students with phones or iPods can try the trails if you are within reach of Surrey or London. The site features an online version, with sound‐accompanying photographs of the location.

http://www.portsofcall.org.uk

This website has three more trails here, this time of the communities surrounding the Royal Docks in East London. The scenery here is very dramatic and anyone interested in the regeneration of East London and its impact on local communities will find these trails interesting. Like Dockers, the walks feature a lot of rare archive interviews. This project involved a great deal of community interaction and participation as I experimented with trying to get people involved with the trail‐making process. The site uses Google maps for online delivery.

http://www.soundwalk.com

This New York‐based firm creates exceptionally high‐quality soundwalks, and they are well worth the money. They started by producing trails for different districts of New York (I recommend the Bronx Graffiti trail) and have recently made trails for other cities, like Paris and Varanassi in India.

http://www.mscapers.com

This website is run by Hewlett Packard, which has a long history of research and development in located media applications. They currently give free licence to use their mscape software which is a relatively easy to learn way of creating global positioning system‐triggered content. The big problem is that you have to have a pricey phone or personal digital assistant to run the software, which makes group work prohibitively expensive. But equipment prices are coming down and with the new generations of mobile phones developers believe that the time when the player technology is ubiquitous might be near. And if you ask nicely HP will lend out sets of equipment for teaching or events – fantastic if you are working within reach of Bristol. See also http://www.createascape.org.uk/ which has advice and examples of how mscape software has been used for teaching children.

Sample Syllabus

public geography: making memoryscapes

This course unit could be adapted to different disciplines, or offered as a multidisciplinary unit to students from different disciplines. It gives students a grounding in several multi‐media techniques and may require support/tuition from technical staff.

1. Introduction

What is a located mediascape, now and in the future? Use examples from resources above.

2. Cultural geographies of site‐specific art and sound

Theories of place; experiments in mapping and site‐specific performance.

3. Walk activity: Westergard Hildekamp – sound walk, or one of the trails mentioned above

The best way – and perhaps the only way – to really appreciate located media is to try one in the location they have been designed to be experienced. I would strongly advise any teaching in this field to include outdoor, on‐site experiences. Even if you are out of reach of a mediascape experience, taking students on a sound walk can happen anywhere. See Autumn Leaves reference above.

4. Researching local history

An introduction to discovering historical information about places could be held at a local archive and a talk given by the archivist.

5. Creating located multimedia using Google maps/Google earth

A practical exercise‐based session going through the basics of navigating Google maps, creating points and routes, and how to link pictures and sound files.

6. Recording sound and oral history interviews

A practical introduction to the techniques of qualitative interviewing and sound recording. There are lots of useful online guides to oral history recording, for example, an online oral history primer http://www.nebraskahistory.org/lib‐arch/research/audiovis/oral_history/index.htm; a more in depth guide to various aspects of oral history http://www.baylor.edu/oral%5fhistory/index.php?id=23566 or this simple oral history toolkit, with useful links to project in the North of England http://www.oralhistorynortheast.info/toolkit/chapter1.htm

7. Sound editing skills

Practical editing techniques including working with clips, editing sound and creating multi‐track recordings. The freeware software Audacity is simple to use and there are a lot of online tutorials that cover the basics, for example, http://www.wikieducator.org/user:brentsimpson/collections/audacity_workshop

8. Web page design and Google maps

How to create a basic web page (placing pictures, text, hyperlinks, buttons) using design software (e.g. Dreamweaver). How to embed a Google map and add information points and routes. There is a great deal of online tutorials for web design, specific to the software you wish to use and Google maps can be used and embedded on websites free for non‐profit use. http://maps.google.com/

9 and 10. Individual or group project work (staff available for technical support)

11. Presentations/reflection on practice

Focus Questions

What can sound tell us about the geographies of places?

When you walk through a landscape, what traces of the past can be sensed? Now think about which elements of the past have been obliterated? Whose past has been silenced? Why? How could it be put back?

Think of a personal or family story that is significant to you. In your imagination, locate the memory at a specific place. Tell a fellow student that story, and describe that place. Does it matter where it happened? How has thinking about that place made you feel?

What happens when you present a memory of the past or a located vision of the future in a present landscape? How is this different to, say, writing about it in a book?

Consider the area of this campus, or the streets immediately surrounding this building. Imagine this place in one of the following periods (each group picks one):

What sounds, voices, stories or images could help convey your interpretation of this place at that time? What would the visitor hear or see today at different points on a trail? Sketch out an outline map of a located media trail, and annotate with what you hear/see/sense at different places.

Project Idea

small group project: creating a located mediascape

Each small group must create a located media experience, reflecting an aspect of the history/geography/culture of an area of their choosing, using the knowledge that they have acquired over the course of the semester. The experience may be as creative and imaginative as you wish, and may explore the past, present or future – or elements of each. Each group must:

identify an area of interest

research an aspect of the area of the groups choosing; this may involve visiting local archives, libraries, discussing the idea with local people, physically exploring the area

take photographs, video or decide on imagery (if necessary)

record sound, conduct interviews or script and record narration

design a route or matrix of media points

The final project must be presented on a website, may embed Google maps, and a presentation created to allow the class to experience the mediascape (either in the classroom or on location, if convenient). The website should include a brief theoretical and methodological explanation of the basis of their interpretation.

If the group cannot be supported with tuition and support in basic website design or using Google mapping with sound and imagery, a paper map with locations and a CD containing sound files/images might be submitted instead.

For examples of web projects created by masters degree students of cultural geography at Royal Holloway (not all sound based) see http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/MA/web‐projects.html