Interested in literature, sound recordings, place, technology and walking? Then you may wish to attend our upcoming Exploring with Sound Walks event at the British Library on the afternoon of Friday 7th June. Places are free, but please book here; https://soundwalks.eventbrite.co.uk.

Following on from our recent ‘Season of Place’, which was about all things digital mapping; at this Sound Walks event Mahendra Mahey from BL Labs will talk about the Library’s current Imaginary Cities exhibition, which showcases fantastical cityscapes created by the Library’s artist in residence Michael Takeo Magruder. Michael used cutting–edge digital technologies to remix images and live data from the Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps to create fictional and beautiful cityscapes, including an explorable algorithmically generated virtual reality work.

Imaginary Cities exhibition trailer

Bringing us back to exploring real world physical cities; Andrew Stuck, Founder of the Museum of Walking and podcaster at Talking Walking will talk about sound walks, explaining what they are and giving an overview of Sound Walk Sunday, which is scheduled for Sunday 1st September 2019 and the week following.

A sound walk is any walk that focuses on listening to the environment, or adds to the experience for example through the use of sound recordings; a scripted narrator, or choreographed score etc.

Sound Walk Sunday has a map and directory of sound walks on their website, and they facilitate a worldwide network of creatives, institutions and museums to share practices and knowledge around sound walks and walking pieces. Furthermore, this initiative curates a collaborative resource of educative materials, which is available to the public, empowering people to create their own sound walks.

To give examples of the types of works and digital technologies that can be used to create sound walks, there will be a series of short talks and videos by:

• Fred Adam from the GPS Museum and Geert Vermiere of the Milena principle & Made of Walking about their CGeomap platform
• Marcin Barski, curator, music publisher, sound and installation artist
• NG Bristow, writer, director, filmmaker and installation artist
• Babak Fakhamzadeh, Dérive app, Kompl and Sauntering verse
• George Fort, Placecloud.io
• Alastair Horne, a British Library and Bath Spa University PhD student who is making a creative audio work set in Brompton Cemetery
• Josh Kopeček, Echoes

Trailer for Alastair Horne's creative audio project set in Brompton Cemetery

We are hoping the Exploring with Sound Walks event will encourage people to make entries for the current Sound Walk Sunday open call, which is inviting people to create outdoor audio, geo-located, immersive performances, listening walks and sound walks.

Furthermore, we would be delighted if any new sound walk works use our Wildlife Sounds. To explain more about these recordings, Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds at the British Library will talk about this fabulous collection, giving examples of how they have been used creatively by sound artists and game designers, to sow some seeds of inspiration.

Hope to see you there! - Friday 7th June, British Library, book here; https://soundwalks.eventbrite.co.uk.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)