AudioSpaces at Audible Futures
The extended abstract of our paper presented at the 2025 Audible Futures Conference at Hanyang University's Music Research Centre in Seoul.
Digital Archiving, Authenticity and Public/Private Listening: Emerging Sonic Cultures in the Cartophonic Project AudioSpaces
Dylan Diego Bradbury, Oliver Jonas
Background
In recent years, the increasing ubiquity of digital and online audio technologies has seen a proliferation of so-called cartophonic tools that incorporate sound into some given cartographic medium, which involve a combination of building and organising sonic archives as well as (re)signifying acoustic space. The most common form of cartophony is that of “sound maps”—using a “mimetic approach” to representing space, in which recorded sounds directly represent each acoustic space on what is usually a conventional, flat map (Thulin 2018). This quality draws especially on the priorities of acoustic ecology, which also often carries a concern for audio quality and fidelity, found for example in the brilliant Aporee, Cities & Memory or the Montreal Sound Map (and other local variations).
Recent scholarship on cartophony has challenged these latter features as part of a tendency towards the aesthetic moralism historically present in acoustic and soundscape ecology (Fargier 2020). Others highlight the gendered and class-based cultural hierarchies that seem to both underpin and be reproduced by many sound maps (Waldock 2018; Droumeva 2017). It seems reasonable to extend this consideration to other social relations such as those of race, geography and age. Cartophony beyond conventional sound maps, however, is a broader notion that simply points to the ways sonic and cartographic practices can feed into each other in a variety of interesting ways. Sound maps can be seen as one kind of cartophonic practice, but not the only one.
AudioSpaces is a project centred on listening, recording and memory, launched in 2023 using our own mobile application, which we suggest leans towards a more open cartophonic approach that challenges the potential limitations of the conventional sound map. While the latter may principally be the territory of artists, field recordists and other professionals or hobbyists in sound, our explicit goal has been to prioritise a non-specialist and diverse community of contributors. This is done with a simple user interface and almost no curatorial restrictions on equipment, sound quality, audio length or what kinds of sounds or audio someone might want to contribute, nor any concrete guidelines to represent spaces in any specific way beyond a few keywords such as “memory.” It therefore seems sensible to use the wider framing of “cartophony” over the more loaded term “sound map.”
On the other hand, at the level of playback we reconfigure the relationship between the virtuality of an online sound archive and the physical materiality of sound “out there”: users must physically find themselves in a given sound's pinned location to listen to the full recording, thereby involving a mobile, interactive engagement with material space from the outset. As a result of this design, the manner in which the sonic archives that constitute AudioSpaces are linked to a given set of places or themes features prominently in every engagement with the tool, but crucially it is as open as possible for each individual contributor’s own auditory techniques (Sterne 2003).
Aims
Conventional sound maps have been used for some time as a source to examine not just the acoustic profile of places, but also what we might call the “sonic cultures” of different fields or milieus. By this latter term, broadening Brian Kane’s notion of “auditory cultures” (2015), we mean simply practices and conceptualisations of listening, recording, archiving and otherwise dealing with sound, which emerge and transform historically. But interesting for us is the potential to explore what sonic cultures emerge in contemporary vernacular contexts—that is, everyday, non-specialist and from a more varied set of sociocultural backgrounds than the dedicated sound mapping community.
Given the priorities and designs mentioned above, our project has in this respect led to an interesting range of contributions and trends in how people engage with cartophony. With this paper we set out to explore the nuances of the sonic cultures emerging within the specific parameters of AudioSpaces. To put it simply, we aimed to analyse the AudioSpaces “map” (or “maps”) in order to speak to the following questions: how do people engage with the acoustic world in vernacular contexts today? And relatedly, in a highly technologically mediated sonic environment, how might people conceptualise themselves as listeners and/or recordists?
Methods
Our analysis is based on the following methodology. First, a close interpretive reading (or listening) of four individual contributors, who we deemed paradigmatic examples of wider engagement with the project so far. Attention was paid to metadata, the “maps” in their overall structures of meaning as well as the more granular characteristics of individual recordings. We then conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with each contributor, in person and online, in which we reflected collaboratively on their recordings and the auditory dispositions they might reveal. It will help to briefly introduce them. We use their chosen usernames on the app with their permission.
jody lives in Lisbon, having moved there from his hometown Luanda several years prior. His motivations during the period we examined were generally twofold: to provide an honest soundscape of the places he navigates (between daily movements in Portugal and to a lesser extent Angola) and as a means of personal and creative sonic journaling.
siobhan is a mother of three adult children living in North London. She has a professional background as an audio journalist, so is not a novice in terms of sonic practices but neither is she part of the field recording community as such. The most notable orientation she has with her recording is to tell a story.
hello, who also lives in London, had been moving between homes in what were at times precarious circumstances during the period we analysed for this paper. In a time of significant personal upheaval, hello’s interest had been often to capture his own feelings and his relations to the spaces around him at an emotional level.
concon lives in Leeds, and drawing from his electronic music practices takes a deeply artistic and experimental approach to sound. Along with various contemporaries and friends in Leeds who also contribute to AudioSpaces, his practices have often involved exploring the sonic world in its acoustic and vibrational textures.
Implications
Drawing from these four case studies, we focus on two overlapping themes which speak to contemporary sonic culture as it has emerged in the AudioSpaces project: concerns around authenticity as well as various dynamics between the public and the private. Firstly, all of the four contributors express some concern with authenticity with regards to their engagements with AudioSpaces, and in fact tend to draw some association to sound as somehow felt to be more authentic than other media. Nevertheless, unsurprisingly given the slipperiness of the concept itself, being authentic seems to mean different things between each contributor, and how they might achieve authenticity through sound varies too.
For jody, sonic authenticity seems to translate to what he calls a kind of “transparency”. He demonstrates a kind of emotional closeness that comes with capturing sound—a transparency of emotion that may allow honesty and reflection—which in our discussion he contrasts to the superficiality, and perhaps opacity, of visual and written media. The most important source of this for jody is the voice, describing both a recording of one’s own voice in its initial vocalisation and its listening back as a kind of window to one’s own inner self. From singing to passing reflections and recited poetry, the voice attends to the sentiment that “I was here, and this mattered to me.”
For siobhan the theme of voice also arises, but more with recording other people. She notes a tension: “I’d quite like to try recording voices [but] it’s hard because you've got to be there in the moment. You don't want two minutes of people just waffling on. You want them to say something, the thing that captures the moment.” This idea of “capturing the moment” seems to indicate a truth value—a kind of authenticity, in other words—placed upon a noteworthy sonic event that happens (contrary to jody) outside the listener. siobhan’s professional background comes through in her resistance to interfere with the object of her recording, as well as her aim for maximum clarity and fidelity of a sonic event for some imagined public listener. Yet her practices seem to transform over time, with authenticity as story or true moment becoming more personal, more tied to the qualities of her own acoustic spaces: the affectivity of the family car, or the drone of cicadas making audible the sluggishness of a Spanish summer.
In addition to authenticity, we found the theme of the public and the private arise both in terms of how contributors imagine their listening publics, and to what extent the objects of recordings were considered public or private sounds. There seems at first glance a split between our four selected participants. siobhan and concon conceptualise the sum of their recordings as publicly available archives, and their practices follow this in the invisibility of the recordist, the attention to fidelity and the object being external sonic events deemed notable or telling of a particular location. In contrast, hello and jody almost take an opposite approach, though always aware that their recordings are publicly available, nonetheless so often consciously placing them in spaces of intimacy, microphoning closely and addressing themselves.
hello uses his own vocality very effectively to construct a meaningful sonic event. One of the key contextual elements here is the value of privacy in uncertain conditions—the quiet moment of being alone in one’s own private acoustic space, which at times he struggles to find. The voice, in his most reflective monological contributions, features in his personal “map” in relation to other sonic signals, ambiences and objects significant to hello—a scattered assemblage of sounds that taken together attend to a notion or feeling of “home.” As such, when the stable boundaries of home are hard to come by the voice in this case becomes a means with which to navigate the ambiguity between public and private, between exteriority and interiority.
A sense of home also seems to seep through much of concon’s contributions, even if at the first instance they appear more texturally exploratory and abstract. The sounds he contributes with ties to the home are not just domestic ones, but include a range of noises, ambiences and voices scattered across Leeds and other English cities. The blurriness between the private and public is shown in one recording of concon flicking through his own local radio stations. It brings with it, by our ears, connotations somewhere between public record, local heritage and an ultimately nostalgic memory of sitting at home, bored, not finding anything interesting to listen to. Overall, we suggest such preliminary findings indicate the great potential that cartophonic projects such as AudioSpaces have for in-depth interpretive analysis of vernacular sonic cultures. This is perhaps the best possible moment for such an examination, given the increasing accessibility of sound technologies amongst a wider diversity of non-specialist listeners.
Keywords
cartophony, vernacular sonic cultures, authenticity, public and private, AudioSpaces.
References
Droumeva, Milena. 2017. “Soundmapping as Critical Cartography: Engaging Publics in Listening to the Environment.” Communication and the Public 2 (4): 335–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317719469.
Fargier, Noémie. 2020. "Global Sound Archive: Soundmap Projects and the Perspective of Future.” IASH: Humanities of the Future: Perspectives from the Past and Present 21: 83–97. https://hal.science/hal-03194051v1.
Kane, Brian. 2015. “Sound Studies without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn.” Sound Studies 1 (1): 2–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Waldock, Jacqueline. 2018. “Soundmapping: Critiques and Reflections on This New Publicly Engaging Medium.” Journal of Sonic Studies 1: online. https://doi.org/10.22501/JSS.214583.