Memoryscape: How Audio Walks Can Deepen Our Sense of Place by Integrating Art, Oral History and Cultural Geography

Abstract

This article is concerned with the history and practice of creating sound walks or ‘memoryscapes’: outdoor trails that use recorded sound and spoken memory played on a personal stereo or mobile media to experience places in new ways. In this relatively new and rapidly evolving field, the author brings together works from music, sound art, oral history and cultural geography as a starting point to understanding how such trails can give us a more sophisticated and nuanced experience of places. He suggests that this might offer some exciting opportunities for practice‐based multimedia research and teaching.

Telling Our Stories/Animating Our Past: A Status Report on Oral History and Digital Media

“…Usually confined to museums and archives, our stories have begun to leave these buildings and take to the streets with the emergence of MP3 players, iPods, iPads, and smartphones. the prevalence of mobile technologies is allowing us to explore places, and our connections to them, in new ways (butler, 2007;butler & Miller, 2005).…”

More-than-representational geographies of the past and the affectivity of sound: revisiting the Lynmouth flood event of 1952

“…(Gallagher & Prior, 2014, p. 271) It is perhaps for this very reason that sound has become a medium through which the past is conveyed. For example, several human geographers have experimented with or documented the creation of sound-walks and other sound art installations (see Butler, 2006Butler, , 2007DeSilvey, 2010;Pinder, 2001). Soundwalks can take the form of live listening exercises known as 'listening walks' (Schafer, 1994, p. 212) -during which a person or a group of people walk quietly along a predefined route while listening intently to the Social & Cultural Geography 825 acoustic environment as it is encountered -but the term is also used to mean technologically mediated walks with a phonographic component, recorded sound and voice.…”

‘Scape’-based Forms: A Preliminary Review of Their Use in the Study of Tourism-related Activities

“…Butler's (2007) conceptualization of memoryscape is of an activity in which interactive engagement is gained through guided walking tours. Although activitybased, similar to that of Butler, Carr (2012) has used the memorials and monuments which mark the period of occupation and liberation in the Channel Islands as the hardware for her conceptualized memorialscape; she has then transposed and incorporated that hardware into an investigative framework to facilitate the construction of a narrative of the memories and counter-memories of the Island's historyladen landscape.…”