Our City,Our Music Launch Sat 20th June

Our City,Our Music Launch Sat 20th June

Originally uploaded by fin5bjh

Flyer – Our City, Our Music

Megan Smith at Handheld Learning 08

Megan Smith at Handheld Learning 08

Originally uploaded by meganleigh

Handheld Learning Conference 2008 – Paper

Our paper presented at Handheld Learning 2008 is available here.

Our City, Our Music: Using mscapes to map new narratives.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7712455/Megan-L-Smith-Handheld-Learning-2008

BBC Raw Talent with Alan Raw

BBC Raw Talent is one of Yorkshire’s assets for discovering the brave new waves on the circuit.  Alan Raw and team present every Thursday, 1900-2200 on BBC Radio Leeds (92.4FM).  I always wonder what the presenters look like. Here he is. 

Our City, Our Music web-site launched

We’ve just launched the new Our City, Our Music web-site at http://www.ourcityourmusic.com. If you’re a musician or filmmaker from Leeds who’d like to be involved in the project then visit the site to find out more.

This coincides with a visit to the Handheld Learning Conference where we’ll be delivering a paper titled “Our City, Our Music: using mScapes to map new narratives” that explores the educational potential, creative and social possibilities of this locative media technology.

Louis Vuitton Sound Walk

This site hosts MP3 guided tours curated by Louis Vuitton.  The site is smooth, glossy, posh and targets women, people who like sexy voices… and those who would like to go on a relaxing walking tour of Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong.  The narration contains ‘signature’ sounds of the cities mixed with fiction and real fact.  It aspires to leave you dreamily connected to the actress telling the story and forever emotionally bonded with the places you visited.  Geraldine Dormoy enjoyed the experience: “Each step smoothly follows the previous one. Each street is a treasury of stories, my narrator expertly mixing anecdotes and history. I particularly enjoy the walk in the noisy Central market: as the government is not renewing the stallholders’ licences, this side of Hong Kong is doomed to disappear. This is the sort of detail that fascinates me the most about the Soundwalk: thanks to all these little indications whispered in my ear, I really have the impression the actress is by my side, just for me.” click here for full blog entry

The project is realised by Soundwalk.  Their slogan is “Audio tours for people who don’t normally take audio tours’ :)  Which I think means business people who jet into a city for meetings, don’t know anyone, want to see a bit off the city but are not keen on the tour bus model or the massive walking tour with the woman with the big umbrella pointing at the statue yelling details about its role as a city landmark.  These are designed as intimate journeys that layer the sound of the bustling market on the audio loop with the located sounds and visuals of the place combined with the voice of the personal guide, whom you are not obliged through guilt to tip at the end.  There is a hint of binaural sound recording on the demos but I think these tracks are actually intricate compositions of multiple samples.  I would love to try it!  Louis Vuitton will you send me to Beijing to try it too?  My only question really is: My goodness why no GPS?! tut,tut.

http://www.louisvuittonsoundwalk.com/go/en/home/

Through My Ears

 Through My Ears is an binaural audio map constructed on an imbedded Google map.  The present sound 

clips on the site are based in California and represent an assortment of recordings from skate parks to a walk through a canyon.  Like Our City, Our Music the goal is to create an immersive audio experience.  Where we differ is that we will encourage participants to actually stand in the same geo-located space and double up their experience by adding past and present sound and visuals.  The layered audio experience is still possible with Through My Ears if you can access the tracks on your mobile devices.

http://throughmyears.blogspot.com/

Our City, Our Music pitch at Manchester Art Gallery

The winning pitch from b.TWEEN 08. Thanks to all of you who voted for us by phone and on the web-site. Last night we had the privilege of talking about the project in front of Jimmy Choo at Leeds College of Art & Design.

the bands-and-fans dynamic!

“While MySpace was not launched with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie-rock bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular clubs. Intrigued, MySpace contacted local musicians to see how they could support them (T. Anderson, personal communication, September 28, 2006). Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation.”

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html