Hello! It’s a bit late, but happy solstice. To all our friends in the North: I hope you’ve been having fun broiling in the sun, as I have. To our friends in the South: keep warm and enjoy the sleepy winter renewal. Since we missed May’s newsletter, it’s a double-whammy today. And we have some rather LARGE updates to bring you. First things first, though, let’s get through some favourite contributions from May and June.
AudioSpace(s) of the month(s)
There are always too many lovely sounds from which to choose for this section. Every month the map gets even fuller with interesting and creative phonographic ideas. From drill symphonies to ASMR-like scissor solos and piano key-cleaning sessions. From stories told in giggles round a fire to chimes at the Venice Biennale, sheep soundtracking a countryside drive and closing down sale vocal melodies. Busy city streets documented, poems recited, birds outside and trees dancing in the late Spring wind. A treat for me ears.
Ellenas poem for me- half of it
by jody
Op het station, 7 mensen
by christiaan
Bangkok on a Monday Morning
by prin
Scissors at the studio
by isabella
British pavilion @ biennale
by alana
You are what you is
by sebastian sw
17.05.2025 Afternoon
by potreba
Happy times with friends and poems and songs
by kač
Windy woods at Cerne Abbas near to the Cerne Giant
by matt shenton
In the car surrounded by sheep
by siobhan
Mid day Capo peloro’ seaside
by skillace
Web and Android are here
Shut up—really?
Yes, yes, yes! We weren’t just teasing you all this time. Props to Oliver for his ability, like a cross between a wizard and an octopus, to do so many great things in such an impressive timeframe.
But, a couple of caveats:
We’re still very much in the testing phase of our cross-platform rollout. Please do give the app a spin by visiting our still rather humble website audio-spaces.com, or sign up for the Android beta. Things are looking and sounding delicious, if you ask me, and you’ll notice we’ve had a stylish new visual makeover. However, we’ve still got a bit of work to do in terms of functionality. So, expect a few bits and bobs to not work as well as they eventually will.
This also comes with a massive favour to ask. Since we’re still testing, the more feedback you're able to provide the better. We’ve added a Feedback Mode that you can activate by going to the Profile Tab —> Options —> Enable Feedback Mode. This will make it easy for you to give us comments as you go. It would be great to hear about your experiences using the app, especially with things like signing in, recording, listening to recordings, creating and adding to collections and following other users.
Big Idea prize
From one exciting update to the next. Sebastian—friend, resident Mexicano and AudioSpaces team member who’s been key to our creative direction from way back when—has brought the project our first competition success. He finished in a tiny pool of 30 winners (out of 223 total candidates) at the University of Westminster Enterprise Network’s 2025 Big Idea awards—with a cash prize 🤑
You can watch his pitch to judges and a public audience on the competition website. His smoothly delivered presentation here sums up what I love about Seb’s involvement in AudioSpaces, always painting what we’re doing in a different light. I admittedly get lost in my own interests quite easily, so it’s very grounding to hear Seb’s user-focused vision for how we can make the platform more intuitive, more open and more inspiring. Vamooo karnalito!
This might be a good moment to repeat that our doors are always open for anyone who wants to get involved. Artists, recordists, writers, programmers, designers, project managers, archivists, community organisers, and anything in between—we’d likely love to team up.
Explore the app and have a flick through our previous activities here on Substack to get a sense of our values and what we’re already doing. Maybe you’ve got a good idea that we haven’t thought of yet; we’d be quite happy for you to run with it using your own approach.
Though we are taking baby steps to secure some grant funding, we’re still working very much voluntarily at the moment so joining the project’s behind-the-scenes will for now be a labour of love. But we’ve got a lot of love to share, so let us know.
Audible Futures proceedings
I told you a couple newsletters ago that Oliver and me went to Seoul to present a paper-in-progress focused on AudioSpaces at Hanyang University Music Research Centre’s Audible Futures conference. The research is still ongoing, so we don’t have a fully fleshed out report to give you just yet. However, the proceedings for the conference are due to be published, which will include an extended summary of exactly what we discussed on the day.
The publication will be coming in the next few days, but I’ve also included our own paper here on Substack for those of you interested. We’re still really grateful to our four AudioSpaces contributors whose generosity made the paper possible: hello, siobhan, concon and jody. In the coming months, when some life things fall into place, we’ll be sharing more of our research on patterns of everyday listening, recording and “vernacular” sonic cultures.
Echoes for Palestine
For our new readers: in these newsletters I usually like to include alongside updates from the project some links to extra things I think you’d all enjoy exploring, learning or libidinously consuming. Sometimes they’re just shout outs to people or things that inspire what we’re doing with AudioSpaces.
Another thing about this newsletter is that, as you can probably tell, I don’t tend to respond so much to wider world events. What we’re looking to showcase here is fairly specific, and I think it’s ok to leave it at that. You very likely didn’t subscribe to this Substack to read my take on the news, and any attempt to go in such a direction would probably be quite unsatisfying in this format anyway. Just go read Adam Tooze’s newsletter and you’ll be fine.
On the other hand, scattered across our posts you will probably get a sense of an underlying politics at work—politics in the simple sense that all things are ultimately underpinned by a set of values, some sort of perspective on how things should be, on justice, on history and so on. The important thing, for me, is to find where these wider values become manifest in those sonic and spatial matters that make this newsletter what it is.
On that note, sound artist Rafael Diogo and Cities and Memory are organising a global collaboration of composed sound pieces in solidarity with Palestine, and they’re open for submissions until 21 August. All the proceeds for the resulting compilation will go to Hope and Play, and more details about what kinds of pieces they’re looking for can be found here.
I don’t know about you, but for the last few days I’ve found myself lost in yet another round of anger and sadness about the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The kinds of activities like Rafael’s provide some means for those of us interested in creating things with sound to channel such feelings into something productive. I hope some of you find some resonance with it.
Of course, alongside sound we’re very much interested here in how spatial technologies (like maps) can be used in new, useful and creative ways. Since we’re on the topic of Gaza, Forensic Architecture has two investigations that I recommend you explore (when you’re in the mood): their granular Cartography of Genocide and their Index of Repression—which focuses on Palestine activists in Germany, but you imagine will (with good reason) be urgently extended to the UK and beyond.
In case any of our readers are unfamiliar with Forensic Architecture, it’s well worth having a look at their work. Covering the globe, their investigations are fascinating, important and also just generally very cool in terms of how they do things.
Lots of things to explore. Thanks for reading, as always, and have a nice July. Love from Dyl and a slightly evolved AudioSpaces xx
To keep on growing!!