AudioSpaces #5

May 2024. Summery whirs and nostalgia for home. Also, we were in the Guardian(!)

Morning everyone. I hope life’s treating you well, all things considered. To new heads: welcome to the newsletter. It’s great to have you here. Things have been a tiny bit quieter than usual on the Substack front these last few weeks; I’ve been playing that “how many deadlines can you juggle at once” game, which has been an absolute ball of fun. But there’s still a load of niceness to showcase from May, so let’s launch straight into it.

AudioSpace(s) of the month

In the northern hemisphere summer has officially arrived (sort of, sorry England), and down here in the South comes the dull hum of winter’s grey skies. In May a lot of you filled in the map with pockets of outside ambience from all over the world.

In our favourite uploads of the month you can also hear interjections made by a range of characters, some human but many others more-than-human, some organic but others very much machine—songs, chirps, blurps, whirs and whoos.

Have a flick through these below to preview each one, but don't forget that the full AudioSpace is (almost) always tied to its pinned location. There’s really only one way to listen to the whole thing: go find it.

one of the warring orchestras
by tax

Final tumble 🪨🔜💎
by aghill

19.05.2024 Evening
by ivan

Bath Spartan
by thomaschacharealsmooth

Sea lion colony
by edie

metru de tlheiras
by simao

Prospect Park Morning
by josh lim

Fado 3
by siobhan

For those of you new to AudioSpaces, an important feature to take notice of is Collections. These are, very simply, groupings of several AudioSpaces under a given theme or category. These can be public, which means anyone can access and add to them, or you can make them private if you prefer. The Collection itself can also be pinned to multiple locations, making it possible to listen to several different AudioSpaces in one place, exhibition-style.

This feature has the potential to be very powerful, and we’re working on releasing a variety of curated Featured Collections. One we’ve already seen was Jo Scott’s Rio Cavalos Trio. Collections can, though, be used for anything you could possibly think of, for ideas as big or small as you’d like.

For example, for anyone who finds themselves in New York, don’t miss out on tracing the steps of our very own Ollie in this one he put together while he was in the city. It’s like I was there with him! Other Collections worth checking out—and, who knows, adding to?—are home cooking, bird song (a classic) and Seb’s creation of now global dimensions magic music on the tubes.

Things from May

First things first:

audio.spaces

A post shared by @audio.spaces

We were featured in the Guardian?! Not much to say on this other than a big thanks to Ammar Kalia for putting us in… and obvs to all our amazing contributors who keep AudioSpaces sounding good.

I do want to pick up on two things, just so we’re all on the same page. First, it’s great that the term “social media” is mentioned, because it lets me plug my post from April that covers this very topic: to what extent is AudioSpaces a kind of social media? And then, to what extent is that a problem? If you find it interesting, keep your eyes peeled for part two in June.

Against Audiogram, pt 1

Second, no one likes a pedant, but in the softest way possible maybe we could also caveat the label “staying in”. Of course, AudioSpaces can be used from wherever—and that includes inside. But as you’ll find on the map, only by going out do you find at least half of the world’s sonic beauty, not to mention that outside is where so many of our best memories are formed. And that’s what we’re all about.

Anyway. Speaking of memories, another lovely thing that happened in May was publishing Carla van den Berg’s essay right here on the newsletter. She links together questions of home, nostalgia and senses of place across multiple sites. There’s a lot in this, and I’ve found myself returning to it more than a couple times this month.

Carla’s piece is our third guest contribution so far. Just in case, don’t miss out on our previous two by Sam Newmarch and Jo Scott.

We’re lucky to be able to publish these top quality pieces, all of which are so different from one another—not to mention my own writing. We want them back, so go leave them the likes and nice comments they thoroughly deserve.

Also if you like what you see here and think you’d enjoy being in the newsletter, or collaborating with what we’re doing with the project in some other way, don’t hesitate to get in touch. For AudioSpaces newsletter newbies, in general we try to publish one or two original, standalone articles per month—so there’s always space for guests. You can find more ideas about getting involved here.

Other things to explore

That’s all we’ve got from our side to share with you for now. This round-up has been a bit shorter than usual, so I’ll leave you with a few nerdy things to stick your face into.

Listen to a cicada brood on Locustream

Created by Locus Sonus who are based in Marseille, this is a livestreamed sound map formed from a network of microphones which capture different spaces in real time around the world (well, in the northern hemisphere). You can tap into loads of different mic’d locations at any time of day, and listen to how the unique acoustics of each place changes with time.

Image: Peter Gena.

This initiative has been on my radar for a while, but now is definitely the time to give it a try in the next couple of weeks if you’re going to. Why? Well, apparently it’s the year of the Cicada Brood XIII, and Peter Gena has his mics poised to record this once-every-seventeen-year sea of chirps in Chicago. What the hell am I talking about? I’ll let him explain.

Through Sounds

Substack isn’t perfect, but one of the things that’s been great about using it for this newsletter is all the other stuff you can find on here. If I’m being totally honest I spend too much of my time reading about food, which fills me with shame. But in terms of sound-related publications, a lot of which overlaps with what we’re trying to dig into with AudioSpaces, there’s literally too many to recommend in one go.

My email inbox might be bursting at the seams more than ever, but I learn something new with every post. Plenty of strange aural rabbit hole material. A few months ago I mentioned Matt Eric Hart’s Sonic Tapestries, and then more recently Sound Observer. If you like anything we do with AudioSpaces, both of these definitely deserve your time.

Another one is Through Sounds by Anton Spice. He’s actually a well-established music journalist and editor, but on his personal newsletter he goes deep into the eternally interesting topic of sound as a feature of the “natural” environment. We’re talking bioacoustics, noise pollution, and the various ways that human activity blends and intermingles with soundworlds “out there”. He often explores this by interviewing artists and even scientists. Here’s one with Action Pyramid about ponds.

Uncovering the sonic life of ponds with Action Pyramid

Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music

Finally, if you find yourself in London at some point this summer, it’s worth visiting the British Library for this exhibition covering Black music in Britain, curated by Aleema Gray. Five hundred years goes a bit further back than what you might find in your average account of Black British history, which is an exciting prospect. Though it’s ostensibly about music, it seems it also explores the important links between sound and space in the context of Black identity.

Considering all the entangled geohistorical routes such a history must take into account, of proportions intensely local and global alike, I’m keen to find out how the exhibition unravels it all and then pieces it back together. I should be back in London in time to catch it, so maybe see you there.

In the meantime, we could all do worse than a read through Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic in anticipation.¹ This classic takes on a similar task—only he looks not just at music but at culture as a whole, while also broadening his outlook to the connections between Britain, Africa and the Americas. Worth every minute of your time. Enjoy yourselves, happy June, and thanks again for reading x x

1. Definitely a second name to add to your reading list after last month’s John Berger, for all aspiring dangerous postmodern Marxists out there.