Locativeaudio is a sonic-centric walk experience started in the city of Manchester, UK which has progressively incorporated a network of people, institutions and cities around the world. To become a locativeaudio walker, all you need is a smartphone and headphones, (we can provide them too), a pair of sport shoes and the desire to explore the sonic journey (you bring these two!). To design the next generation of experience in the Augmented City, we place the walker at the centre of our thoughts to create unique immersiveness and understanding of a place. Locativeaudio has reconstructed history and architecture, has transformed noisy streets into beautiful soundscapes, has implanted secret thoughts onto solitary statues, and even extended the boundaries of the concert hall experience. Locativeaudio's contribution to the Augmented City may include converting urban spaces into citizen's livingrooms, where people could plant site-specific thoughts in every street, including their fantasies, desires and fears.
More than 60 composers and aggregators have contributed to our projects so far and many others have used the locativeaudio tools for their own.
We started in patnership with geolocative developers from 'NoTours' and 'Escoitar'. Their tools inspired the creation of other such as, 'SonicMaps' in Manchester and 'Echoes' in Vietnam. We are now working on the Augmented Reality and aural encryption in the city and IoT.
Historians, social enterprise leaders, policy makers, archaeologists, urban planners, and heritage architects. Locativeaudio projects have been supported by cities@manchester among many others.
Our walkers are the most important part of every stage in our journey. We do not simply organise soundwalk tours. We revisit our relationship with the city and the way we share our thoughts and organise sound.
Locativeaudio makes sound research playful throughout the concept of Augmentation. We focus on the Aural experience, although with a broad understanding of how humans really experience and interact with the world.
Our cross-disciplinary approaches combine forces with historians, urban anthropologists, social enterprise leaders, local residents, archaeologists, urban planners, to mention a few. Our aim is to formulate what site and comunity-specific symbolic codes can be implanted and why.
We explore cities with geolocative-aware devices as a tool to organise a collage of narratives in the Augmented City. Space and Interactive media have been two of our focuses as composers, ans researchers for decades and the city opens a new dimension to them.
We employed a number of smartphone tools to navigate the urban space and interact with others, We have extended the traditional concept of soundwalk by incorporating game-engine technology, procedural audio and server streaming data which performers could use in live concerts to interact with the buzz of the city.
The boundaries between the physical world and its multiple digital overlays are fading out to reveale a new undersanding of public spaces and the self. In the meantime, self-awareness among citizens to securing the privacy of their communication channels is exponentially increasing. Next generation Sonicmaps, Maia and Echoes geolocative tools aim to address these complex issues.
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Cities are cultural pockets with broad diversity and aural richness. We proposed in this edition to trascend the urban boundaries by simultaneusly walking 9 cities from around the world and provided visitors with the possibility to observe, mix and combine walks as they happen.
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Here we concentrated on the ludic aspects of experimenting the crossover of Spaces. We proposed our walkers to disolve the boundaries between the Concert Hall and the City (walk exprience) by creating a feedback loop of geo-positioned data and dual immersiveness. We have to 'Frankenstein' the technology to allow so!
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LocativeAudio commissioned a ge-located souldwalk city-tour in Manchester's urban area consisting of five concatenated pieces. The sonic journey included a bus trip across Oxford Road, a soundwalk alongside Manchester Canal, a visit to historical Peterloo Square, navigating the secrets of China Town, to finish by meeting street virtual musicians at Picadilly Gardens.
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We started our locativeaudio investigation by looking at the true sound of Manchester (UK). A project on Sonic Metaontology, where the city becomes a museum for us to visit throughout sonic memories. But where to find someone who had been listening to the city for so many years?
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Augmented Reality saturates the already complex visual image of the city. So we want to create awareness about the how important the role of sound could be in the construction of the augmented city. What if we could use sound to unify the real and the augmented to provide an extended experience of a place? Nowadays we carry in our pockets the ultimate expression of social technology built by humans. We carry our friends, our connection to the world and the music that reminds us of a person and a place. Is it not remarkable? This new scholarly discipline is yet to be fully discovered... as we walk! Locativeaudio methods combine location-aware devices with procedural audio, the augmentation of senses, game-engine technology and aural encryption. Smart cities can be smarter when sound is at the core of the game! Imagine a city that you could trust as your secret diary. A great canvas where you could store your thoughts in a particular place and time which could made a difference to others. A platform were you could decide who reads them, when and where. Where cryptology and encryption could strongly inform, protect and route the way we organise sound and media
Challenges for Next Walker's Experience!
Extended Realities
Mobile Music Studies
Smart Audio & IoT
Cryptography.Audio
