“Audio” or “Sound”

Thinking in audio implies thinking through the recording and transmission of sound signals. Sound, a more broad term, remains open to any source of sound. Think soundwalk for something that might be accomplished without technology. 

Audio requires a source, whether received through transmission (i.e. radio) or recording and playback (i.e. speakers). 

Transmission possibilities include a signal tuned in from a low power radio fm station on site.

Or a signal received through a 2-way radio—shortwave, walky talkies, or perhaps a live phone call. 

In recording & playback, what kind of object is the speaker? Headphones? Boombox? Over-ear or earbuds? Handheld speaker? Walkman? Speakers installed in the route? The phone? 

Also in recording & playback, the question of storage: is the audio received through download? Is it in an app (whether bespoke or hosted). Does the listener call in to a voicemailbox or a phone tree? Is a tape and walkman received in the mail, to be sent on by post to the next member of the audience after the walker has done their walk? 

Attention

How much, or in what ways, do you direct the attention of the walker? 

Is the walk a container explicitly for heightening attention? To what?

Attention to the sensory experience of walking: to the body of the walker.

Hard attention: directing the walker to points in the landscape with the intent to reveal something about it.

Soft attention: an all-over awareness, walker as moving point within a field with a multiplicity of meanings and beacons.

Control

(1) What are the elements of the environment that you can control as the maker? Maybe think on a continuum from, say, a theater (where light, sound, what appears and what happen (at least in the stage portion of the room) are tightly controlled) to a totally unspecified walking-listening site. 

(2) What are the non-environmental elements that are open to control or direction? (Instructions to the listener, the audio track itself…)

(3) Who is more in control of the experience? The maker of the walk or the listening walker who activates it? In what ways might you make space for the listener to assume creative control?

Embodiment

Whether highlighted or not, the fact of the audience receiving the piece while actively moving means that their embodiment is part of the experience. 

Possibility to focus on this, taking it as far as making the walker’s body the site of the walk. Compositional avenues of foregrounding embodied history through a relationship to an environment. 

Alternately/additionally a compositional avenue in the invitation to physically experience the environment in certain ways. How to be a body in this place? A moving body in this place?

Event Limitations

Possibility that the event can only be triggered by certain conditions that can be met. For example, if the audio is embedded in a geolocating playback format, the walk cannot be passively listened to at home. 

This variable is the possibility of insisting that the walk is an event. Like a theater show that can only be experienced in a particular place at a particular time. Audio Walks might dispense with the exact time, although a walk that could be tuned in from a low-power fm pop-up radio station in a particular area could be a way to re-impose start times on the walk. 

Using limitations this way makes it harder to experience the thing, but perhaps more special when it is experienced. 

History

To play with or resist the layers of history and land use, whether personal or social, that exist in any site. 

To use the audio walk as living history/documentary. 

To use history as a compositional layer or underground aquifer feeding the language of the piece. 

Intention

To what degree is your (the maker’s) intention a compositional element of the walk? Could we think of a spectrum from light facilitation (invitation to a practice otherwise uncontrolled by the maker) to strict fabrication (listening as being in a world of the maker’s creation that cohabits the real world of the site where the walker is walking)?

Intimacy

To play with or to resist the intimacy of sound, which touches the ear with sound waves, especially sound on headphones, close enough to whisper into ear. 

To play with or resist the nearness of a recorded vocal presence, which allows a soft, intimate vocal performance to feel loud and close. 

Knowledge Assembly

This assembly describes the interaction of material elements that combine to give the walker knowledge about where to go and where she is. How does information pervade each compositional layer? 

Thinking “assembly” perhaps allows the non-audio elements more weight than thinking “supporting materials.” For example, if I want a printed map to be part of the knowledge assembly, perhaps that gives me a prod to give the map a role that goes beyond just dots on a path where I should stop or arrows where I should turn. Perhaps it also holds an epigraph, or a letter, or a set of annotations, or spaces for the walker to write.

“Assembly” as a way to organize a work — a materials question. “Knowledge Assembly” as the way each material holds the needed information for the thing to happen.

Landscape Readymades

Site possibility: a generic kind of landscape that repeats itself whether through the architecture of commerce, transportation, domesticity, or public spaces. 

Language

To use speech or no speech. 

To write and record or to collect through interviews or trawled audio archives. 

To ask the walker to speak or to allow them to stay silent. 

To give the walker written information.

Linearity

(see also Seriality)

To what degree do you engage a linear sequence across the duration of the walk, whether that’s fixing an order and pathway through a site, or using the timeline of a single audio track instead of many tracks that can be selected in different orders? 

Linearity here not as a dramatic idea of the “linear” story, which tracks a chain reaction of cause and effect, but as a line drawn in space, starting somewhere and ending somewhere else. 

To what degree can lines even be drawn on the site? 

Name of —

Is the person doing your audio walk

—the walker?

—the pedestrian?

—the listener?

—the collaborator?

—the participant?

How do each of these designations foreground different elements of their role, different possibilities for your composition? 

Narrator

Is there a primary voice in you audio walk that helps to direct the walker? How reliable is this narrator? Does the narrator speak with authority, with invitation, with apology? Does the narrator lead the walker astray? How does the narrator function as an element of the knowledge assembly? Does the narrator say YOU to the walker?  

Overlay

What is overlaid on the present environment of the walker, through sound, text, or composition? 

• The site’s history? 
• A fiction? 
• A different time of year? 
• A mood? 

Pedestrianism

“Pedestrian” designates someone moving on foot, but in aesthetics “pedestrian” implies the ordinary, the daily. Sometimes this is an elevation of the daily, the incursion of the ordinary world into high art as both protest and beautification (see Judson Dance Theater and its inheritors). Sometimes it is the criticism of the high or rare, an accusation that nothing has been done to separate one experience from the mush of ordinariness. 

If walking and the invitation to a walk implies an easy pace, a question hovers: will pedestrianism be honored in this walk? Will it be pressured? abandoned? Will pedestrianism verge on trespass? Will it accelerate into a run? Will the pedestrian be asked to walk on the grass or to pee on the flowers? Is there a shadow variable always hanging around the comfort and unobjectionable, public-art-friendly form of the audio walk? Ahe counter-pedestrian? Antipedestrianism? Anarchopedestrianism? 

Playable Landscape

(1) An attitude from skateboarding or parcours: the landscape as surface that can be playfully navigated. 

(2) Through geolocated triggering, the landscape itself becomes an instrument that can be played by moving through it. 

Rules

What are the rules, implied or explicit, of the walk? Rules here as a compound set, the rules of the site (don’t cut across traffic, stay to the right, don’t walk on the flower beds, don’t climb the fences) plus the rules of the walk (I’m going to speak to you gently, direct your attention, make an offering).

Are you interested in pulling the rug from under the walker by abandoning or contradicting a rule? Is there an element of I-dare-you to your (the maker’s) relationship to the walker? How much can you ask of the walker? How much does their non-passive participation complete the walk, beyond the basic agreement to walk and to listen? 

Scale

In a theater or on the page, the literal scale of the event is fixed, but in a walk the variable of scale is more open. To what distances or what proximities does the walker tune their attention. Could playing scale as a variable create a kind of dialogic energy (the near speaking to the far, the far to the near; the small speaking to the large, the large to the small) that activates the piece?

Seriality

Possibility of writing in series, whether as a kind of episodic partitioning of a single site (i.e. writing discrete pieces for each of the mall’s store windows that form a group but don’t necessarily need to be consumed in a particular order, or even might stand alone, as microstories). 

What implications does this have on the technology/materials side? 

For example a geolocated audio walk that uses a GPS tracking app will store all those discrete audio objects but only play them when activated by the GPS alignment. 

An episodic piece without the requirements of a particular sequence could be listened to as a playlist on shuffle. 

A soundwalk that uses instructions for an acoustic environment could be delivered to the walker as a card deck which can be shuffled. 

Site Specified/Unspecified

Writing for a particular site.

Writing for a type of site. 

Writing for walking through any site at all, but tuned toward the environment of the walker somehow.

Writing for walking and the walker, not environment.

Supporting Materials

Possibility of printed materials to accompany or frame the walk—the most common is the map.

Possibility of printed or other kinds of materials to be found on the walk. 

Possibility of an app as housing for some part of the walk’s content. 

Timeline

Audio made in an audio editing program is arranged along a timeline. The 0:00 to 10:36 of the track. 

Is the material arranged along a fixed timeline? 

Does the timeline correspond to a spaceline, so that the walker must proceed at a pace roughly analogous to the audio? 

Is the timeline amenable to pause or playpack (through tracks, through sliders)?

Or is the audio organized in a different way? Geolocated triggers might alter or randomize the order in which audio bits play, depending on the available pathways through the site. Playlists might be shuffled in order to randomize them, keeping the correlation of audio to location unfixed. 

Underscore

Underscoring as a cinematic ground layer for the scene. What happens when something turns cinematic? What does that turn describe? 

Underscore verges on soundtrack. Maybe a designation of their difference is that underscoring moves a little lower, not calling itself to the listener-watcher’s attention so much as sculpting the mood, whereas soundtrack (think the intrusion of popular music) makes a grab for straight for the feelings, nominates itself as the emotional frame through which to mark the moment. 

Both of these things as frame. The frame needed to mark off a moment so that it can be read for its meaning instead of merely pass us by or carry us along. 

You

This variable covers all the YOUs, primarily You, the walker. To what degree do you, the maker, address the walker as “you.” The implied you in “Start walking.” 

Do you want to compose an I-You relationship? 

What would it be like to exclude the possibility of address from the text of the audio walk? What kind of invitation does it create? How does the walker understand her relationship to the voice or voices she hears?  

Then there is a second person address that isn’t imperative (“you, do this!”) but descriptive (“You reach the corner by putting one foot in front of the other. You look around.” In this descriptive you, the walker is invited to inhabit the description, either imaginatively or by complying with the the descriptions. It could even be a way of calling a dance (the way square dances are “called”), with the walker complying in lag-time (“You step around something. You close your eyes. You turn your head and move toward the first new thing that enters your field of vision…”).

Then there is the question for You the maker: who am I to you? Imagine the walker asks this of the maker, who am I to you? Who are you and why have you made this thing? Why are you asking me to move in this way through space?