Audio Walk Working Group ARCHIVE
archive overview
The materials collected here were generated during a month-long audio walk working group, which included a chat forum and several video meetups to freely discuss the formal possibilities of the audio walk and share our particular interests in the form. You’ll find a set of prompts (for site research, scripting walks, and audio editing), a series of audio considerations, some playlists and resource links, and a document called “Open Variables,” which aims to capture a glossary of compositional variables that can be put in play while making an audio walk. Open Variables also acts as a partial, sideways archives of our conversations, as several of the variables were articulated in the course of our discussions.
In those discussions we often found ourselves debating where the line could be drawn between what could and could not be considered an audio walk: how far does the form stretch? What’s the difference between an audio walk and a sound walk? Between a listening practice and a framed compositional experience? What if you listen to the audio walk when you’re not walking — is it still a walk? We discussed the merits and disadvantages of technology, particularly the basic choice now available as geolocating apps become widely accessible both as platforms for creators and venues for sound art. We discussed the walking tour as yet another way to organize material, an alternative to putting on a show while the constraints of the pandemic keep theaters closed.
One of the proposals that is, I think, implicit in the form of the audio walk is the idea that space and not time is the grounding dimension of the narrative in the basic sense of what follows what. If packets of audio or text are linked to locations, then it is progress from one location to the next that moves the story forward. Maybe forward is a conceptual direction to dispense with, actually. Maybe what an audio walk really does is move the story around.
jump to...
Technical elements of audio making considered from a compositional perspective.
prompts
Background/Foreground
Import a voice recording (of yourself or something found, say on Internet Archive) into an audio editor, and using only the scissors/splice tool, drag and
Psychogeographic Walk
prompt for a walking experience with optional mapping and freewriting components
Deep Listening (after Pauline Oliveros)
A practice of listening. Use as a daily tuning exercise.
Site Mapping: Paths & Points
A practical site research exercise. For a research into a particular site or as a research practice for a way of moving through a site.
what is walking (2)
An exercise for tuning into the differences between listening while walking and listening while doing other things.
Mapping: Speech & Language
A site research exercise focusing on how language layers into an environment.
Audio Walk: Slipstream Script Study
A prompt for a location, although you can adapt it to an unlocated site too.
Audio Walk: Attention Study
This is a prompt for a script study, focusing on the walker’s attention as the medium of the walk.
Audio Walk: Antigravity Walk
A prompt for a walking script that directs the walker on how to move through a site.
Audio Walk: Populate the Silences
A script prompt for a walk adapted from a Deep Listening exercise.
Site as Contemplative Occasion
Write or collect a series of fragments that contemplate an abstraction. (For example the idea of the soul, the self, the nature of time, the
readings
Psychogeography
A practice of walking that tunes to the drift of psychological response to an environment.
How to Listen (or What is Walking)
I’m listening to all these sound walks as research, but I’m not out walking, I’m at my desk. How can I be a good listener
Forced Entertainment: Nights in this City
A script by Forced Entertainment evoking the urban landscape as a site of unending possibility.
audio considerations
Fields and Field Recording
Key parameters of the field Field recording is recording the world as spacetime field, microphone as proxy for a roving, roaming ear. Field recordings might
Beyond the Vocal Track
(Field, Underscore, Foley, Sound Bed, Overlay) Taking a speaking voice as the most common guiding element of an audio walk, a question opens: what sounds
Track Thinking
The track is an organizational unit in edited audio. In the most basic sense, it’s a pathway for a voice or instrument inside your audio
open variables
Open Variables is a glossary of variables in play in the composition of audio walks. The glossary has its own page, here.
playlists
Audio Walks
CAIRNS was presented by HERE in 2020. It’s specific to the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, although it’s a beautiful listening experience even without being able to be on site. Layers a musical-compositional vocal approach to a guided tour that mines the site for history and present contemplation. A map is downloadable from the HERE site but not the Bandcamp. The audio is hosted on Bandcamp, making it simple for anyone to download to their phone and ramble along. This link is to the Bandcamp page. You can pay for the full album or listen to a few freely available tracks to get the mood.
MEANDER is a walk for the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, produced more recently and much shorter, a single track you can pause as needed, a guided way of being in the landscape.
https://www.bbg.org/visit/event/gelsey_bell_and_joseph_white_meander
18:44 // This dreamy piece for a snowy field is a great example of how the meaning of a place can radiate into a huge array of histories. The field in question is on the cover of a Joy Division album, so it makes a direct line into pop history and much more. It’s suggested you take yourself to a snowy field, but this could be a listening experience with or without walking, with or without a field. That is, walking (or imagined walking) doesn’t ultimately need to activate the piece.
https://owdscratrecords.bandcamp.com/album/l-e-t-m-e-t-a-k-e-y-o-u-t-h-e-r-e-single
The whole piece is archived on this page but you have to access it piecemeal. The piece was produced by the public art fund, there is a program and a series of photographs that you would have been given, I believe along with a walkman or another specific audio device loaned out for the experience in the way you get a headset/player at a museum, say. You can click on all the photographs (they’re woven into the narrative and important to the piece), and the tracks 1-6.
The piece is really texturally smooth and layered. There is the sound of walking, an overlaid curiosity/half-narrative (via the photographs), a voice speaking to the listener giving directions and occasionally being interrupted as if by phone call, and other subtle layers. Janet Cardiff makes lots of audio walks; her web archive is below, though this is the only complete audio score I was able to find.
This is a walking piece about walking and foraging. You’re directed to walk while listening to it, but that walk can be anywhere (it is site unspecified). Occasionally throughout the piece, there are directions for how to move or stop or sense in an environment. This piece was made as a collaboration between a documentary filmmaker and an radio producer, and while more spacious than radio, it definitely comes from the audio intelligence of radio producing, to my ears. Interesting to contrast with equally sound-heavy and dreamy Cairns (Gelsey Bell), which to my ears, clearly comes from the intelligence of theater and music composition. Compositionally this is notable also for its weave of layers of , which is a very walking-prose affordance.
This is in French, but even if you don’t understand French, the texture/composition is worth listening to. Walking/footsteps/field recording is an active element of its sound.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15wi7GT0EJfb3cPk4oU9CNrfxG2QK64My/view
As noted above, this is an audio essay/talk on her series, Shadow Walk, with a lot of samples from the walks. Note: Cunningham studied and worked with Pauline Oliveros and her talk is a nice introduction to Oliveros’ highly influential Deep Listening.
The talk:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OQpvTZXEvrg5pkdrYETLGCKThEcZdjWS/view
And more on Cunningham’s Sound Walks, with links at bottom to different projects.
Overlay is described as a collective memory walk, set on Mt Tabor in Portland, OR. Scroll down to the soundcloud file on the page to hear the audio and see a map of the route.
These soundwalks feature home care workers recorded in particular environments, with the suggestion that you listen in those environments. They take what could be a journalistic kind of content — the lives of home health aides and especially migrant workers who work in homes — and reposition the way that you the listener are asked to listen. Links below to the main page, and to a few pieces on the site.
https://homemakersounds.org/portfolio/
My Garden, which asks you to “listen in a place you can take care of”
https://homemakersounds.org/my-garden/
The Market
GEOLOCATED SOUND WALKS
The Echoes app, free to download, is ahost of geolocated soundwalks activated by GPS or pegged to certain sites. If you allow it to use your location, it will suggest nearby sound walks that you can try on site. The app is also free to use (with upgrade options as usual) if you want a place to host your sound walk. Take it for a spin.
This is a public art sonic composition activated by GPS signals mapped onto several different public spaces, including Central Park. It has to be experienced through its own free app.
Link to the site and also a NY Time review of the work, which helps give it some context if you’re unable to get to any of the active sites.
BUS TOURS
This is one of those events I kick myself for missing, but I’ve gleaned as much as I can about it since then. As far as I know, the text is not published (tho, go out and get everything else Claudia Rankine has written now, please). Here are a few tantalizing clips to grab a fraction of a sense of what it was. It was produced by the Foundry Theater as a bus tour through the South Bronx. This link is to the Foundry’s project page. Scroll down to the bottom for two videos. The first one is 10 minutes long, so you can really get a decent sense of the piece, the mood, its materials. As you can see in the videos, the audio was experienced in the actual performance on headphones. Later in the video you can see that the actors are speaking live.
http://thefoundrytheatre.org/2009/09/18/the-provenance-of-beauty/
Nights in this City is a bus tour by the British group Forced Entertainment, from 1995. The link is to the project page on Forced Entertainment’s site. You can stream a 2-minute snippet on that page. There will also be a post on this script, with excerpts, on the readings page soon.
https://www.forcedentertainment.com/projects/nights-in-this-city/
PLACE-HEAVY OR WALKING-BASED PIECES (That aren't tours)
14:48 // This is one of my favorite pieces of audio art, more evocation of place than documentary, but rooted in non-fiction and field recording, becoming a sideways portrait of the gardener. Sherry DeLys is an Australian audio artist whose work is definitely worth checking out at length. The audio is hosted on the Third Coast Audio Festival’s site, which is also an excellent place to dig around, though more radio-oriented than audio walk-facing.
Billed as a sonic tour through religion in Western Syndey and commissioned by the very sadly cancelled show Soundproof on the Australian Broadcast Network. Why is this not in bus tours? Because it was created for radio, but uses the bus tour as its narrative structure. The audio’s a bit submerged on the page, so linking first to the overview page and then to the audio below. Note: the video link at the top of the page doesn’t work. The audio is in a little download arrow halfway through the page.
https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podcast/2014/06/sof_20140601_2015.mp3
This trippy delightful layered audio piece is built on a walk, though it’s not designed to accompany a walker but more to bring the walk into the audio form.
https://www.category-other.com/episodes/on-the-trail-with-dwayne-amp-courtney
A 30-minute radio piece about women artists who make walking-based work. The pieces sampled here are live guided walking events. Plus musing on walking, what it gives, what it allows. With space made to think about why a lot of well-known walking artists are male.
This audio piece combines field recording from a walk, which you could say makes the walk its narrative structure, with a layer of vocal recordings added as an overlayer.
This is not an audio piece, but a series of walking prompts distributed via a Google Group, by interdisciplinary artist Heather Kapplow.
http://www.heatherkapplow.com/recent-and-upcoming-events/2020/3/15/walking-in-the-time-of-covid-19
Winderen collects audio from places humans mostly can’t reach. Surge is playable from her page in an exhibit called Art’s New Natures on the Streaming Museum. The audio is edited and composed from source recordings, a nice balance between field and feedback.
ARCHIVES AND RESOURCES
Huge, growing archive of radio art. The archive is relatively new, and is augmented annually by Wave Farm artists in residence, a nice curatorial model to make sure that the thing doesn’t get stuck in a single focus, and Karen Werner, who was the first fellow to begin building the archive, took care not to let it be a strictly euro-centric compass.
Note that when you click on a “work” you will get an informational overview of the work. Only after you click on the audio button, will you see a player to listen to individual works.
Amazing archive of 20th century sound art (among other materials), mostly in the European/American avant garde. Old school html site oh yeah. It’s pretty overwhelming. Some of my favorites artists I’ve found through this site are: People Like Us (Vicki Bennett) and Caroline Bergvall. There is so much here.
https://ubuweb.com/sound/index.html
Sadly, this great show for sound art on the Australian Broadcast Corp was cancelled. The archive page isn’t great. The first link will bring you to a subset of feature episodes. The second will bring you to a list of subjects which is the only way, besides direct links to the pieces, into the full catalog of the show. The archive by dates link is broken unfortunately. When you get to a page, there is a little “Download Audio” option at the top, as well as download full episode (usually the episodes would contain a few different artists).
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/soundproof/
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/soundproof/past-programs/subjects/
Worldwide society for audio walks! This site has a lot to explore and has a hub function — folks can post events and add listings of their works to the archive though audio isn’t hosted on the site. I recommend starting with the Soundwalk September prize winners, or go to the randomly select walks based on site, from the Works tab.
Dream audio website for those who like things out of the generic categories, started up by the sound designer, director, actor Ben Williams.
Archive page of their many audio walks. Most contain a description, some images, and video access. You have to click on the video tab to get the video option. Many make use of smartphones in an elementary AR (augmented reality) mode, where prerecorded video aligns with the landscape and acts as the spatial guide for the walker-listener as well as venue for a fictional or poetic overlay.
Where the radio cool kids are. Or were. Dormant since 2017.