AudioSpaces #4
April 2024. Archives, stickers and app improvements.
Morning all. With the end of April we completed our fourth month here at AudioSpaces. As always, a big thanks for all the engagement—from faces both old and new. And of the latter, there are quite a lot of you this month: we’ve now already passed our 350th user on the app!
If you’d like to support us further, make sure to let people know about AudioSpaces, and also consider sharing this newsletter. Both of those help us a lot. And of course, the number one thing we’d love for you to do is continue sharing your wonderful sonic moments on the AudioSpaces map. Speaking of which, let’s begin today with some of our top picks of the month.
AudioSpace(s) of the month
Considering there’s a quite a few of you who are new here, one lovely thing that came out with the uploads this month was a sense of discovery and flirtation with the app. Perhaps for some of you this is even the first time trying out audio recording itself.
Clicking on any of these should take you straight to the AudioSpaces to preview them in-app. If you’re nearby to where it happens to be pinned, why not go over and listen to the whole thing? Let us know if you do! As always, if you don’t have access to the app yet you can find previews of our favourite AudioSpaces on our Instagram.
Morocco garden by night
by madalena
Shiny ✨
by thomaschacharealsmooth
Footsteps and drumming
by sorley
Unloading a Mamiya RB67
by will foley
App updates
Ollie’s been tinkering away with his tiny, tiny spanner to tighten things up and make AudioSpaces as smooth as ever. You may have even noticed some new additions here and there. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, make sure you’re updated.
First, on the Home tab you’ll now find a Popular filter in addition to the regular chronological Feed. This will show some of your friends’ AudioSpaces that are getting a lot of engagement, a good way of gauging who’s listening to what and where. On the top right of the screen you’ll also see a little Notification bell icon which shows all the relevant activity as it happens.
Next, the Explore tab has had a minor redesign. Now in this page of the app you can easily discover new AudioSpaces on the map, find new people to follow, or browse through all the Collections available at the moment.
Finally, on your Profile you can now access a bit more information: both the Collections and AudioSpaces you’ve personally uploaded, all the things you’ve liked, as well as everyone you follow (and of course who follows you).
As I said, these are all just fiddles, trims and nudges, but they help to make the app both easier to use and more powerful at the same time. There’s lots more of this to come; for now, go give the app a spin and let us know what you think.
Things to explore
We haven’t done any shout outs or recommendations for a couple of months. Here are some things that have been occupying my mind’s ear in April. I’ll split it into a story of two halves.
Sound observations
Probably due to the nature of spending a lot of time focused on this project, I’ve got into a real habit of thinking about other people’s sensory experiences. What are other people are hearing, smelling, touching, seeing, as they go about their lives? How does all of this makes them feel? Is it the same for them as it is for me?
This habit of thinking phenomenologically has been made much richer by blogs like Sound Observer, which posts very colourfully written reflections on sounds, nature, the seasons and the very personal human emotions that inflect into all three. There’s a lot of nice thoughts on grounding your senses, paying attention to the material world and your body, and just generally being mindful.
Their Substack is adjacent to Sound Observer’s main endeavour: holding group meditation sessions which utilise acoustics, listening and resonant instruments—sound bowls and the like. I’ve never been to these, partly because I don’t live in Brooklyn, but they sound interesting. Regardless of whether you’re into the more “spiritual” aspects of what they cover, Sound Observer’s open, curious posture towards the acoustic world is a treasure trove of observations. From a post earlier this month:
I have lost nothing in winter, yet early spring conjures a sense of mourning. Endless brittle branches are letting go of their bareness. I have been attuning to subtler sounds of spring, awaiting the quiet symphony of petals bursting open and returning back to earth, simultaneously, fragmenting time – between an equinox and an eclipse.
Well isn’t that nice.
The medium is (still) the message
In his Radiotopia podcast Ways of Hearing, Damon Krukowski interrogates how everyday experiences of sound in contemporary societies have been radically transformed in our digital era. Some great insights into, for example, the role of things like earbuds in the privatisation and shrinking of public spaces.
This is a hugely interesting series not only for those of us intrigued by the social questions surrounding audio, but also more generally for anyone who recognises how both culture and everyday life are so deeply shaped by the media technologies we use.
This is, as any keen-eyed readers will have probably gauged, precisely my starting point with this newsletter. That is, if we want to get at the why’s and how’s of any given kind of media (like audio recording in our case), it’s less important what the content is than uncovering the character of the media form itself. The medium is, as is often said, the message.
The podcast is a highly effective application of Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage, so go listen. It’s worth also mentioning that Krukowski gets at least part of his inspiration from John Berger’s 1972 series Ways of Seeing, which does something similar but focusing on vision and with more funky shirts.
Many of you will have come across Berger, possibly through one of his books—especially if you studied a humanities degree, and even more so if you’re one of those postmodern Marxists they keep warning me about. He actually adapted Ways of Seeing into a book, but I seriously cannot recommend enough watching the actual TV series first. It’s beautifully paced, deliciously didactic, and still extremely relevant. One of those pieces of media that can, quite literally, change the way you understand and feel about the world.
April’s posts
Before you go and absorb all of this goodness, though, don’t miss out on this very newsletter’s two fantastic articles from April.
AudioSpaces: just a lil' archive?
Sam Newmarch draws from experience to give us the lowdown on archives. He argues that some of the key questions every archivist has to ask might be useful to ask about AudioSpaces too. Namely, what's its purpose? And what's in it?
Against Audiogram, pt 1
The internet is currently teeming with discussions about how and why so much of what we do online make us miserable. Since we're on the theme of wellbeing and feeling good here at AudioSpaces, it seemed necessary to address what felt like an elephant in the room: how do we ensure that that AudioSpaces doesn't fall into the dark logic of the social media industry?
What else?
Keep your eyes peeled for AudioSpaces stickers placed around town. Their scannable QR codes provide a digital bridge between AudioSpaces and the physical places they’re pinned to. A lot of these will continue to go up around London, especially in the spots where we hold our in-person events, yet they’re already dotted in different places around Britain and beyond—even Lisbon!
More customised versions are on their way, which we’d love to throw at you during one of our next events. Stay tuned for information on the upcoming second instalment of Panes, a collaborative arts and music night in London.
Other than that, without revealing too much, also coming up are more guest writers for the newsletter and a few more Collections launching over the next few weeks—all on topics far and wide. Don’t want to miss any of this? You know what to do.