How does a locative sound producer create a cohesive experience? An experience that builds off mobile software and hardware, comes via an app and marries in the voices, sounds, people and place?
Producer, Hamish Sewell, takes us inside the up-and-coming Miles Soundtrail at the scoping stage when making a map: from the main street to the railways station, around the backstreets and down to the cemetery on the Dogwood Creek. Although the trail has been extended with additional stories since this map was made, it gives you a good idea about the process.
Notice the different type of audio files and their shapes that follow the intended route. In making a place come alive, sound artists and producers must consider what is heard at any one site and how it is heard: whether a GPS activated sound field comes with images or not; is ‘standard’ visible or ‘background’ invisible; whether it plays right through, plays just once or continually loops.
And then, of course, there’s the sound mix.
This Miles Soundtrail will blend local voices in around local landmarks: from Leichhardt’s 1840 diary entries, to the inimitable voice of Merlene Coates Freeman whose love of this scruffy outback town was paradoxically born in the aftermath of a tragic drowning incident on the Dogwood creek in 1940 that killed her mother.
The Miles Soundtrail will be out shortly. Stay tuned.
Interested in learning how to build a Soundtrail? Please send us a message through our contact form.