DR JAMES LAMB
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Maps, music and augmented reality

1/11/2014

 
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I've been wondering what it would be like to wander through a city - London, most likely - listening to a playlist that's linked to the places you encounter. I think it might offer an interesting way of telling stories about the city, in the same way that you might read a book or watch a film or documentary. I suppose the difference here is that you would be closer, geographically at least, to the places where different events took place.

And I wonder whether this might be achieved through a mobile app that provides some form of musically augmented reality? Although augmented reality is normally used to describe the technological manipulation of a visual plane, I'm tuning into the idea that it is concerned with any of the senses and am focusing on sound - or music, more specifically - to enhance and change our perception of what is around us. 

Here's how it might work. 

Within a dedicated urban space, individual songs would be attached to specific places and spaces: a street, a park, a pub, and so on. These songs would then be geofenced on a sound map, which would be accessed by the mobile app. This would be activated when the user enters that (real life) location. There would probably be satellites, code and other things like that involved. Here's what might happen in practice.

You put on your trainers. 
You plug in your earphones, maybe setting the volume so that you can still hear a trace your surroundings.
You activate the Location function within the settings on your mobile.
You open the app.

You take a left into Kelly Street in Kentish Town and the app automatically begins to play a song. 

You look down at your mobile and the app tells you that it's Mario's Cafe by Saint Etienne. A short description explains the song's relationship with the street you're walking. You ignore the details for the moment, step out of the rain and enjoy your musically-augmented reality, with a cup of tea and a bun. 
 In order for this to work, I think each of the songs would need to tell a story about the particular part of the city to which is it geolocated. All of these songs, for instance, paint a rich and colourful picture about different places, whether in the past or present: White City by The Pogues, Sunny Goodge Street by Donovan, Victoria Gardens (and plenty of others) by Madness, Denmark Street by The Kinks, just for starters.  

I'm waiting for the call to start work on the'Saint Etienne's London' app.
Jeremy link
10/11/2014 02:34:24

Brilliant idea! Wouldn't it be fantastic to set aside a day for walking through the city, and seeing what you came across?

I guess one question I'd have would be to do with who decides where particular tracks are geolocated. Are the locations and tracks curated by a central team, or is this more of a crowd sourced affair? So this comes down to whether this app is something you experience as a listener, or something you participate in actively. Clearly the second option is more 'web 2.0', but then a lot of what you describe seems to be about 'real' connections between the song writing and the place in which it happened. So, is it about the real cafe that inspired a song, or about a random user locating a song to their own experiences of it? This seems quite central to what the app is about. In some ways I prefer the curated version - all this participation nonsense is getting a bit boring now. Lets get back to web 1.0

james858499
11/11/2014 07:52:31

'Curated': exactly what I was thinking.

As a listener-wanderer, you’d experience someone else’s take on the city: not just that of the curator (or team of curators) responsible for selecting the tracks, but also the artists who recorded the featured songs.

If there's a place for active participation, maybe it's through people nominating songs attached to particular locations. The curators could then include tracks that specifically describe or are understood to have emerged from a particular location, whilst discarding those that were simply overhead in, or loosely evoke a particular place.

For instance, I could nominate a track because I used to choose it on the jukebox in a particular pub, but that doesn’t mean that it's in any way rooted to the place itself. However, it would be different if the song was written about the pub, or told a story that unfolded there.

There’s a place somewhere for the democratic, crowd-sourced approach, but I don’t think it’s here. This isn’t open mic and it’s not the Top 40.

Of course, the whole thing would be dependent on the quality of the music from the perspective of the listening-wanderer. I’d say though that The Kinks, The Clash and The Pogues are a decent place to start.

Michael Gallagher link
15/11/2014 21:46:41

Hello there. Sorry to be late to the party here, but good ideas all around. I basically affirm everything you said here, particularly about this being more curated than crowdsourced. That is indeed growing tiresome in many instances.

However, I might add that we needn't see these things as exclusive, at least not technologically. It could support both the curated and crowdsourced approach simultaneously and only make visible one or the other based on some parameter or role/permissions to certain users. Additionally, everyone could have personal and curated playlists about place simultaneously without one stream interfering with the other. And, you could position music in space based on any number of parameters (songs about places vs. songs associated sentimentally with places, etc.); it would just require some tag associated with it that would make categories. So from a design perspective, not that hard. I bring all of this up to say that is indeed possible technologically and you two said all the smart things about the idea itself so I am left with technological suggestions. There are issues with annotation (this standard, which is good, has yet to be readily adopted so everyone is designing things that don't inherently speak to one another: http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/) but that shouldn't deter us.

Should we put some outline in place for London? We could outline it, scope what we wanted to do, try it out, and then see if we could get it built after the fact. I feel like I would also like to listen to music about places vs. ambient sounds from those spaces to see if they cohere (James, I can't get that chapter out of my head). Like the Guns of Brixton vs. the slightly gentrified sounds of Brixton today.

james858499
25/11/2014 03:24:04

Glad to hear you have the technical know-how, Michael. Presumably there's still the issue of copyright, though? Unless of course there's a way of drawing the songs from a web-based resource where they are already being (legally) shared?

And if not, we've inadvertently created a decent pub-game-for-music-lovers, if nothing else. You 'travel' around the city naming different songs with a specific meaning to different you 'pass'.

"What, you can't think of a song about Carnaby Street? That'll be three pints on Pride, then."


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