AudioSpaces #9
November (and a bit of December) 2024.
Morning everyone. It's been just under a year since we properly unleashed AudioSpaces onto you all. As always, thanks so much for your company this year—new faces and old. It’s been a pleasure exploring your sonic antics all over the world. We’ve also loved sharing our ideas here on this website, and starting dialogues with so many of you about which directions we might want to take with the project.
This will be the last newsletter before the new year, so just before we take a breather let's catch up on some of our favourite picks from the last month or so.
AudioSpace(s) of the month
There’s a lot to feast your ears on this month. It’s been a seasonal transition period, and you can hear that in the cool air of so many different acoustic spaces around the world—from sparrows in Brooklyn, to wide natural soundscapes in outer Tokyo and squelchy winter waves on Atlantic beaches.
There’s also quite a lot going on inside, behind closed doors this month: dodgy guitar strings, church bells through the window, Irish choirs, assignment deadlines…
god bless the sparrows
by angelina
creek swapping stories with the rocks
by liketheletters
Comunity center swim time
by the windphone
Playing with snapped guitar
by rory baynham
Just another morning in Kathmandu
by simon ferrier-may
Nikko National Park during Autumn🍁
by prin
Walking past the Magdelenakirche as it sings noon
by olili
Thanks everyone. If you’ve stumbled across any of your own favourites, let us know and we’ll share it here.
Picks from the year
How about a round-up of what we’ve done this year on Substack? Apart from these monthly posts, our long-form pieces have taken a bit of a backseat recently but there’s a lot more to come in the new year. For a taste of what kinds of things we like to cover on the newsletter, here are some highlights.
The sound map
We got the ball rolling with an introduction to sound maps, a key idea for AudioSpaces. Also included are a bunch of related projects that we draw inspiration from.
The Rio Cavalos trio: ‘arts of noticing’ through sound in new landscapes
To be read alongside her three sound pieces released exclusively as AudioSpaces, Jo Scott takes us on a journey along the shores of the Rio Cavalos, her snaking liquid neighbour in her new home near Tábua, Portugal.
AudioSpaces: just a lil' archive?
All year we've been asking what AudioSpaces actually is as much as you have. In his first article for us, Sam opens up a new channel of thought by suggesting: maybe we're a kind of archive?
Athens or Maybe Elsewhere
Through reflecting on her own experiences of moving between homes, cities and other sites, Carla brings to the foreground issues of how we relate to spaces, another really important aspect of the project.
Against Audiogram, pt 1
AudioSpaces is an app, and that means we're implicated in one of the big issues facing us in the twenty-first century: our relationship to our phones. I began to consider this here in April, but then I moved continents and got eternally distracted. You'll have to wait until 2025 for a response.
What else?
Of course, the centrepiece of AudioSpaces will always be your contributions to the map. Next year, though, you can expect a whole lot more from our side, too: more collaborations, more collections, more essays, events and art pieces. Lots for you to get involved in, if you’re ever feeling it. And, yes, that other thing is also coming… But in the meantime, until we speak next, here’s some other stuff to explore if you need a fix of sound-y space-y things over the holidays.
Cities and Memory’s “Sonic Heritage”
This one’s actually for you to get involved in yourself. Stuart Fowkes’ Cities and Memory project (which we’ve mentioned here before) is looking for recordings of world heritage sites or examples of “intangible heritage” as listed by UNESCO. These will go into their new project about heritage, tourism and preservation. You have until the 31st December to send your sounds.
Phantom Power podcast
Now featuring hours and hours of fascinating deep-dives into sound and technology, Mack Hagood’s podcast has actually just finished for good. Luckily, that’s because he’s starting a new, less academic, more public-facing podcast in 2025, and apparently he’s also going to start his own newsletter soon as well. While all that is very exciting, I’d still definitely give Phantom Power’s back catalogue a go when you have time.
Sisters With Transistors
This 2020 film by Lisa Rovner was recommended to me the other day, and I’m passing on the wisdom. It tells the story of some of the most important women pioneers in electronic music, from early oddities in the 1920s to some more recent familiar faces. Crazy archive footage of techy legends with matching synths and Laurie Anderson’s voice narrating it all.
What’s so interesting about this documentary is that the women it covers didn’t just make music. Rather, by manipulating different technologies in their own ways, they all changed the terms in which music, sound and listening are even thought about. Give it a watch with your mum.
framework
To wrap things up, this one is a recommendation but it’s also just an appreciation post on my part. My slow descent into obsession with sound stuff comes from many places, but one of the big turning points for me was coming across framework radio. Hosted since 2002 by Patrick McGinley aka murmur, framework shows are usually about an hour-long mix of field recordings, ambient composition and recording-based sound art.
The curation and mixing is insane, and often quite surprising; there’s usually as much jarring and scary stuff in there as there is serenity. If you’re already interested in field recording you almost certainly know the show by now. But since AudioSpaces is also about roping in the non-experts, a lot of you might not. If there’s one habit I’d recommend getting into for next year, it would be listening to framework.
Anyway, have a very nice rest of December peeps. Thanks again, and see you in 2025 xx