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Technologies
Journal of Research into New Media
Convergence: The International
http://con.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/01/1354856514527191
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856514527191
published online 2 April 2014Convergence
Jordan Frith and Kati Fargo Ahern
soundscaping
Make a sound garden grow: Exploring the new media potential of social
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Article
Make a sound garden
grow: Exploring the
new media potential
of social soundscaping
Jordan Frith
University of North Texas, USA
Kati Fargo Ahern
Long Island University Post, USA
Abstract
The Walkman and iPod have often been viewed as individualizing technologies. People use these
forms of mobile media to impart a sound track of their own choosing over their experience of
physical space. However, newer mobile projects have examined the links that tie mobile media and
sound to experiences of movement. These projects focus on the collaborative construction of
shared soundscapes through mobile media, in a sense responding to the individualizing tendencies
of dominant auditory mobile media. This article draws from literature in sound studies, media
studies, and locative media art to examine these relatively new forms of what we call social
soundscaping. Through our analysis, we show the potential for new mobile sound practices that
allow for the more participatory production of public soundscapes.
Keywords
iPod, locative media, mobile media, mobility, soundscapes, Urban Tapestries
The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t
remember any technological experience since that was quite so wonderful as being able to take music
and move it through landscapes and architecture. (Gibson, 1993, n.p.)
What were once new media are often quickly enfolded into daily life and rendered somewhat
invisible (Baym, 2010; Marvin, 1988). The Walkman is a prime example. As William Gibson
Corresponding author:
Jordan Frith, Linguistics & Technical Communication, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #305298, Denton, TX
76203, USA.
Email: jordan.frith@unt.edu
Convergence: The International
Journal of Research into
New Media Technologies
1–13
ªThe Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856514527191
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suggests, the Walkman was a revolutionary technology when it was released in 1979 that allowed
people to impart a personalized sound track over shared public spaces. The Walkman was a sig-
nificant departure from another popular mobile technology of the time: the boom box. The boom box
made private tastes public by merging the music one listened to with the shared sounds of a public
space. The Walkman, on the other hand, made possible a more private form of listening. The
Walkman eventually made way for different forms ofmobile auditory media, including compact disc
(CD) players and MP3 players. Then, in November 2001, the iPod was released and became one of
the defining technologies of the decade (Kahney, 2005). The iPod became a cultural icon like the
Walkman before it, and the sight of people walking through streets with earbuds in their ears became
commonplace.
The Walkman and the iPod represent a specific, influential example of the link between mobile
media and sound. Both these technologies have been viewed as intensely individualizing (du Gay
et al., 1997), allowing people to construct their experience of space by turning away from the
shared soundscapes that often define public space. As Reimer describes the Walkman in contrast to
the boom box,
A personal stereo on the bus effectively cuts off the outside world while the choice of a ghetto blaster in
the same situation is a rather more expressive way either to privatize the bus trip or make one’s private
taste public. (1995: 64)
Consequently, the Walkman and iPod have both been criticized as enabling people to ‘colonize’
physical space by engaging with an individualized auditory layer at the expense of a shared
soundscape (Bull, 2004, 2007; Williams, 2006). However, there is no reason why the links among
mobility, media, and sound have to be that way. Rather than focus on mobile media and indivi-
dualized soundscapes, we examine how people can use mobile media to create social soundscapes
and emphasize collaborative experiences of sound in public spaces.
To examine the collective authoring of sound through mobile media, we take an inter-
disciplinary approach that combines literature from sound studies, media studies, and locative
media art. We begin with existing studies of sound, particularly focusing on literature that deals
with the study of soundscapes. We then move on to issues of physical space and mobile media by
first analyzing how individuals have used older auditory mobile media as a way to alter their
experience of space and turn away from shared soundscapes. We then turn to case studies of
locative media art, such as Urban Tapestries,Rider Spoke, and Tactical Soundgardens, that
support our argument that mobile auditory media can increasingly be used to enable collective
auditory experiences rather than individualized ones. We use these locative media art examples to
support our argument that location-based mobile media provide opportunities to create more col-
laborative, open soundscapes.
Auditory mobile media has been widely studied in multiple disciplines that have examined the
Walkman and iPod from critical perspectives (Bull, 2000, 2004, 2007; Cooper, 2009; Gunn and
Hall, 2008; Jenkins, 2008), phenomenological perspectives (Hosokawa, 1984), and cultural per-
spectives (du Gay et al., 1997; Kahney, 2005). However, there is less literature on newer forms of
location-based auditory mobile media that focus more on collective experiences of sound. The
explorations of the links among mobile media content, sound, and physical space we detail in this
article suggest that we need new understandings of the potential ways people use technologies to
mediate their experience of space. These new understandings may become increasingly important
as people engage in new mobile practices related to the adoption of smartphone technology. By
combining literature from sound studies with these new examples of mediated, social soundscapes,
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we hope to identify new potential links among mobile media, sound, and physical movement as
well as identify a new area of study for new media scholars.
Sound studies and soundscapes
The study of sound crosses many different disciplines, including music, history, media studies, art,
cultural studies, and communication. Therefore, ‘sound studies’ as a field is both multidisciplinary
and varied (Sterne, 2013). Although there are numerous ways to parse and map this field, we focus
on sound studies research that examines the mapping of sound onto space – the study of
soundscapes. The concept of soundscapes provides an important theoretical perspective on the
potential uses of mobile auditory media, particularly the more collaborative forms of mobile media
we examine later in this article.
Schafer coined the term ‘soundscape’ in the 1970s to refer to ‘any acoustic field of study’, yet
today and throughout Schafer’s own work, soundscapes have often been studied purely as ‘acoustic
environment[s]’ (1994: 7). Although much of Schafer’s work deals with the preservation of
‘natural’ soundscapes, he was also interested in the practice of soundscape design and developed
the concept of ‘the soniferous garden’, described as an ‘acoustically designed park’ (1994: 247).
Schafer’s ‘soniferous garden’ almost exclusively deals with sounds of nature (like water) created in
a single, shared soundscape. He was actually adamant about not adding ‘unnatural’ sounds to the
garden, arguing that designers should ‘Let nature speak with its own authentic voices’ (1994: 247).
While scholars have adapted Schafer’s work by cataloging, archiving, and critiquing sounds-
capes (Augoyard and Torgue, 2005; Keizer, 2010; Labelle, 2010), fewer scholars have focused
specifically on soundscape design. Blesser and Salter (2007) are a notable exception, and their
work explicitly deals with the intersection between sound and spatial design through the concept of
‘aural architects’. The authors examine both how virtual spaces may be designed for music and
how auditory spatial awareness as an ‘intelligence’ may be cultivated to create a new generation of
aural architects. However, Blesser and Salter’s work still focuses primarily on shared sounds in
physical spaces, and they note how ‘iPodspace’ has seemingly divorced sound and music from
considerations of physical, social spaces (2007: 214).
While much of the work of soundscape studies has focused on the cataloging of sounds within
soundscapes and the influence of sound environments on populations, few studies (with the pos-
sible exception of Blesser and Salter’s work) have focused explicitly on the possibility of using
mobile media for the design of new soundscapes. What interests us most in the intersection
between sound and mobile media is the possibility for social soundscaping. Unlike traditional
soundscapes created either naturally or by a single sound artist and listened to directly, social
soundscaping is a practice that allows people to collaboratively author new soundscapes without
necessarily impinging on the shared soundscape outside of headphones. This new form of
soundscaping, though involving individual conditions of listening, would move the relationship
between mobile media and sound from prior critiques about privatized soundscapes to an expe-
rience of sound in space that is individual (rather than collective), yet social and collaborative.
However, before we discuss the possibilities of social soundscaping with locative media, it is
important to examine how older mobile auditory media – namely the iPod and the Walkman –
represent an earlier response to soundscapes. While soundscape literature has focused on catalo-
ging sounds to preserve pleasant auditory experiences, the Walkman and iPod have allowed people
to construct more pleasing experiences with sound by ultimately turning away from public, shared
soundscapes.
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Privatized soundscapes
The sight of people moving through physical space while wearing headphones has been com-
monplace for nearly three decades now. As we discussed in the introduction, it is easy to forget just
how revolutionary it was to be able to walk around while exerting near total control over the sounds
one experienced. As Bull (2000, 2004, 2007) has written about the Walkman and the iPod, moving
through physical space while listening to a sound track of one’s choosing alters individuals’
experience of physical space. People are able to ‘carry their auditory identity in the palm of their
hand’ and exert control over their experience of physical soundscapes (Bull, 2006: 131). Before
headphones, everyone had – to some degree – to engage in the shared experience of the sounds of a
space (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012). If a man fought loudly with his wife on a subway car, no
one could escape listening to that fight. The boom box allowed one person to exert control over a
shared soundscape, but that control came at the expense of everyone else (Reimer, 1995). With the
Walkman, and later the iPod, people could escape the experience of sound in public space by
constructing their own private sound track. In other words, the use of headphones allowed people
to exert control over the soundscapes they experienced in ways not previously possible.
Because of the control over the experience of physical space these mobile auditory technologies
enabled, they have often been viewed negatively by both scholars and the popular press (de Souza
e Silva and Frith, 2012). A common criticism is that these technologies lead to the partial ‘pri-
vatization’ of space, in a sense making space less public because people can engage in individual
rather than shared sound experiences (du Gay et al., 1997). As Bull writes about Walkman users,
‘they aim, through use, to replace the involuntary auditory sounds experienced in public space by
their own personal soundscape placed directly in their ears’ (2000: 186). The personal control over
auditory experiences contributed to the view that the Walkman was an intensely individualizing
technology. In fact, the original Walkman was designed with two headphone jacks so people could
share their music because Sony’s engineers did not believe people would enjoy such an individual,
private experience. The second headphone jack proved unpopular and was removed from later
models, showing that what people were searching for was an individual, private experience of
space rather than a collective one (du Gay et al., 1997).
An important, related criticism of individual mobile auditory media is that people use them to
ignore the physical spaces they move through (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012). Writing about the
Walkman, Bull argues that ‘Public spaces are voided of meaning and are represented as ‘‘dead
spaces’’ to be traversed as easily and as pleasurably as possible’ (2000: 79). The idea that head-
phones and personal music could basically negate the importance of physical space can also be
seen in the award winning ‘Silhouette’ series of iPod advertisements that feature people dancing
with headphones on a featureless, black background (Cooper, 2009). These advertisements, in a
sense, draw from the centuries old idea that people can exist alone in a world of sounds and
disconnect from their surroundings (Sterne, 2003). The idea of disconnection is present in many
criticisms of technologies such as the Walkman and the iPod. For example, Williams (2006) writes
that iPod users are ‘zombies’ who are so focused on their music that they have no idea what is
going on around them.
In all of these examples, people listening to their music through headphones are seen as
somehow removing themselves from the collective nature of public spaces. They retreat into their
individualized ‘mobile media sound bubbles’ and the ‘spaces habitually passed through in daily
life increasingly lose significance and turn progressively into the ‘‘nonspaces’’ of daily life’ (Bull,
2004: 189). While some have criticized these arguments as too extreme (de Souza e Silva and Frith,
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2012), it is important to recognize that mobile auditory media have often been viewed as both
intensely individual technologies and technologies that negate the importance of physical space.
The argument that people use headphones to negate shared experiences of space relates directly
back to our earlier discussion of soundscapes. To Schafer, a public soundscape is a shared acoustic
environment. However, as Hosokawa points out, these shared acoustic environments are often fairly
unpleasant: ‘Planners are in many cases exclusively engaged in planning the spatial dimension of
their city, leaving the acoustic environment to one side’ (1984: 173). Thus, the Walkman and the
iPod offer an attractive alternative to public soundscapes because they enable people to personally
choose their own soundscape. In this way, people with headphones engage in a sort of ‘secret theater’
(Hosokawa, 1984) in which others know they are turning away from shared sounds but cannot access
the sounds they are experiencing. These private aural experiences allow people to individualize their
experience but also, in a sense, negate the concerns of researchers who focus on soundscapes. The
public soundscapes that researchers catalog do not exist in the isolated world of headphones. What
exists is a personalized soundscape of one’s choosing.
New sound art in public space
Sound artists have sought to combat the isolation of typical mobile auditory media by embracing
more public, shared forms of sound art. Often these efforts move away from individual experience
and focus on the collective because all users of the space are subjected to the sounds, much as the
boom box exposed others in surrounding space to a mediated shared soundscape.
One example of constructing or reconstructing public space through soundscaping is that of the
so-called ‘musical roads’. Cho and Lee (2007) detail how engineers in South Korea and Japan
designed these musical roads or ‘melody roads’ using extremely precise grooves at various inter-
vals to create a melody when driven over by a car. The act of driving over the grooves then pro-
duces a series of notes heard within the car. Although these roads were originally developed for
safety reasons and have been placed on particularly dangerous stretches of road in South Korea,
this once safety-based sound practice has been adapted as sound art in the United States. Known
as the ‘William Tell’ road for playing the notes to the overture, a stretch of highway in California
became the first musical road in the United States. The musical road as a form of sound art focused
on soundscaping a shared, collective listening space: While the driver’s mobility produces sounds,
the road as a soundscape can be heard by others in the space and reconfigures the shared sounds-
cape of that patch of highway.
Another example of sound art that creates meaning by reshaping a shared soundscape is the
mobile art project Sound Mapping. ‘Sound Mapping is a site specific music event to be staged in
the Sullivan’s Cove district of Hobart’, and the installation involves four portable computers
housed in wheelable hardcover suitcases to serve as ‘mobile sound-sources’ (Mott and Sosnin,
1997). However, the installation is not just an example of radios on wheels because the sounds
projected from each mobile sound-source change based on path and participation. Unlike the musi-
cal road on which a single driver may reconfigure the soundscape through his or her driving, Sound
Mapping creates a new soundscape influenced by the artist and other individuals in the shared
space: ‘Each individual plays distinct music in response to location, movement and the actions
of the other participants. In this way a non-linear algorithmic composition is constructed to map
the footpaths, roadways and open spaces of the region and the interaction of participating individ-
uals’ (Mott and Sosnin, 1997, n.p.). Sound Mapping takes the streets and sidewalks of Sullivan’s
Cove and ‘maps them’ by constructing location-specific and interactive sound. These
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constructions then alter the soundscape for everyone who passes through the space. Furthermore,
the inclusion of audience reaction in affecting the sound produced makes the project not only
mobile but dynamic.
Many other media artists have also played with the notion of reconfiguring space through
alterations to an expected soundscape. For example, artist Tesia Kosmalski created an art instal-
lation series called ‘echo coats’. Kosmalski (2011) writes the following explanation of her series:
The ‘‘Echo Coats’’ are sound-driven garments that provide a means for women to playfully and soni-
cally intervene in the shared auditory experiences of public spaces. The Andante Coat teases the world
around its wearer by uttering sensual cosmetic titles, originally meant to tempt her own purchasing
power. And at the attack of a boot heel on the pavement, the Staccato Coat releases machine sounds
from its shoulders to urge people to get out of her way (n.p.).
Because these coats can be worn versus wheeled around and are less ‘external’ to the wearer
than a suitcase, the echo coats also offer an example of how new sound art in public spaces
attempts to undo the individual and isolating spaces of ‘private soundscapes’ created through
headphones.
These examples share more in common with the boom box as a form of mobile media than the
Walkman and are important because they speak to or against privatized soundscapes created
through the use of headphones. Rather than the soundscape as individual, interior, or isolating,
these examples of public sound art strive to recreate a connection among sound, bodies, movement,
and space. However, these examples are also limiting in a sense. They connect people to space
through sound that is somewhat inflexible, designed by the artist, and unavoidable to the listener.
The boom box was regularly criticized because people could force others to listen to the music
played through the device, and these sound installations exhibit that same kind of coerciveness. In
addition, like previous comments made on mass media communication, sound art is not ‘by the
people’, although it may be for the people; it is instead a form of ‘top-down’ authoring by artists for
collective consumption. As we discuss in the following section, what interests us most of all is not
the movement from individual to mass experiences of sound (found historically in sites of pro-
paganda, loudspeakers, and boom boxes, just to name a few examples); instead, we are most
interested in the new potential for the collaborative authoring of public soundscapes that allow
people to contribute sounds that others can then access through various mobile media.
A move toward a different type of mobile sound
A major difference between the sound art examined above and literature on the Walkman and the
iPod is that sound art projects tend to be broadcast through the entirety of a public space in contrast
to the interior experience of headphones. As Sterne writes, ‘Headphones isolate their users in a
private world of sounds’ (2003: 87). This ‘private world’ can contribute to a partial disconnection
from surrounding space because rarely do the sounds played through the headphones have much to
do with one’s physical context. However, a few artists have explored projects that show head-
phones do not have to disconnect users from their surroundings; instead, headphones and mobile
media can be used to enact an augmented experience of physical space that adds additional
informational layers to individuals’ physical movement (Farman, 2012).
To understand the ways these auditory layers of information merge with experiences of physical
space, it helps to turn to de Souza e Silva’s (2006) concept of hybrid space. de Souza e Silva
introduces the concept through an analysis of what occurs when people access location-based
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information through their mobile devices. Mobile content, especially text messages and voice calls,
has traditionally been understood as enabling people to interact with information that is separate from
one’s physical surroundings. For example, texts messages and voice calls allow people to stay in con-
stant contact with absent others (Licoppe, 2004; Ling, 2004), often at the expense of people in their
surrounding space (de Gournay, 2002; Gergen, 2002; Habuchi, 2005). However, now that most new
mobile phones feature location awareness – the ability for a device to be located in physical space
and provide information about that space – there is new potential for location-specific mobile con-
tent. According to de Souza e Silva, location-based information – whether that information is in the
form of nearby restaurants, nearby friends, or more germane for this article, place-based auditory nar-
ratives – becomes part of individuals’ experience of the space rather than a separate, distinct infor-
mational layer. de Souza e Silva’s concept of hybrid spaces has been important for the study of
location-aware mobile devices because it refuses the urge to analyze physical space and digital infor-
mation as somehow separate; instead, she argues that we must analyze both together as a hybrid
space that features the physical and digital in a comprehensive whole (de Souza e Silva and Frith,
2012; Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011).
Hybrid spaces and location awareness are important for understanding our argument about the
new potentials of auditory mobile media content. When someone uses auditory mobile media like the
Walkman or the iPod, they are basically introducing an auditory layer separate from that physical
space (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012); the same applies to voice conversations through a mobile
phone. The actual physical location matters little and does not necessarily affect the music being
played through headphones or the voice on the other end of the phone conversation. However, when
people use location-based applications like the ones we discuss below, the content they access
depends on their location and their physical movement through space (de Souza e Silva and Sutko,
2011). The place-specific nature of this informational layer opens up new potential for understanding
the role mobile media can play in experiences of spaces and opportunities for examining the colla-
borative potential of new forms of social soundscaping.
Likely the most influential early explorations of how mobile media can be used to combat
auditory privatization while still preserving individual listening were Audio Walks. Audio
Walks showed how mobile media can be used to alter experiences of a physical space through
auditory narrative. Examples such as Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair;TeriRueb’sItinerant;
and Jeff Knowlton, Jeremy Hight, and Naomi Spellman’s 34 N 118 W overlayed audio narratives
on a physical location. In Cardiff’s earlier work, she recorded spatial narratives to CD and
provided participants with CD players and headphones. The participants then walked through the
space and listened to audio tracks that combined both narrative elements and instructions about
navigating the physical space (e.g. ‘go down the stairs to your left’). Despite the fact that
Cardiff’s early works used the relatively mundane technology of the CD player, Manovich
claimed they
represent the best realization of augmented space paradigm so far – even though Cardiff does not use
any sophisticated computer, networking and projection technologies. Cardiff’s ‘‘walks’’ show the aes-
thetic potential of overlaying a new information space over a physical space. The power of these
‘‘walks’’ lies in the interactions between the two spaces – between vision and hearing. (2006: 226)
Cardiff’s later work used more advanced mobile technologies to explore how mobile auditory
media could be used to connect individuals to their surrounding space in new ways. In Cardiff’s
Her Long Black Hair, people traveled through Central Park on a 35-min guided journey, aided by
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mobile devices equipped with global positioning system (GPS) receiver. As they passed by loca-
tions in Central Park, they accessed audio narratives that interwove ‘stream-of-consciousness
observations with fact and fiction, local history, opera and gospel music, and other atmospheric
and cultural elements’ (Janet Cardiff: Her Long Black Hair, 2005, n.p.). Rueb’s Itinerant func-
tioned in a similar manner, asking participants to travel through Boston Commons and access a
site-specific sound environment that involved both an imagined narrative based on Mary Shelly’s
Frankenstein and aspects of local, place-dependent knowledge. Knowlton, Hight, and Spellman’s
34 N 118 W provided participants with headphones and a GPS-enabled mobile device and narrated
the space of the Freight Depot in downtown Los Angeles, exposing the listener to the hidden his-
tory of that space through an artist-constructed soundscape.
These Audio Walks and other similar projects all explored how mobile auditory media could be
used to explore location-based audio narratives (Farman, 2012). These art projects often involved the
use of location-aware technologies and the overlay of audio information on physical space, situating
those narratives in the physical space occupied by the listener. The projects are not only designed to
impact the perception of the physical space individuals pass through, they also shift the understand-
ing of narrative. The auditory narrative becomes a part of that place’s soundscape, but the place also
becomes a part of the narrative. For the participants, the two become inextricably linked in ways fun-
damentally different from how people use the Walkman and iPod to introduce an auditory layer sep-
arate from, rather than connected to, the physical context (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012).
Just as with the sound art explored in the previous section, these projects are examples of top-
down explorations of links that tie together mobile media, sound, and location. They were
all designed by artists who then created the auditory layer that dictated how people would
move through space. What is missing from these examples is collaborative authoring. These are
examples of artists, designers, and academics intervening to alter existing soundscapes, but
the people who are affected by these interventions then have little (or no) opportunity to determine
those soundscapes. The Walkman and the iPod represent the opposite phenomenon. People use
these forms of mobile auditory media to intervene in the public soundscape by exerting control
over the sounds they experience; however, their interventions operate on an individual level, alter-
ing the experience of sound for them while turning away from the collective nature of more public
soundscapes (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012).
A different category of sound art merges the individualistic control of the Walkman and iPod
with the shared nature of artist-designed Audio Walks. These projects focused on designing col-
laborative interfaces that explored the collaborative embedding of audio narratives in physical
space. For example, Urban Tapestries was a platform that allows individuals to ‘embed social
knowledge into the new wireless landscape of the city’ (Urban Tapestries, 2005, n.p.). The goal
of the project was to excavate the history and social knowledge of specific places, accumulating
the local knowledge of the participants. The user-generated stories became a new way to rhetori-
cally construct the public spaces people move through, and the meanings of the stories were chan-
ged when experienced in actual places. Urban Tapestries showed how mobile media can be used to
compose collaborative soundscapes that move away from the more individual experiences of tra-
ditional mobile auditory media.
Another example of an artistic examination of mobile media, physical location, and sound is
Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke. With Rider Spoke, individuals in London (and other cities) were
provided with a bicycle and a location-aware mobile device. They were then instructed to bicycle
alone and at night through the streets of the city. They were provided with headphones, and through
the headphones a voice prompted them with questions designed to cause them to reflect on their
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lives. They were also urged to find an appropriate ‘hiding place’ to record answers to the questions.
Once an answer was recorded in a specific hiding place, other participants could see the location of
that place on a map through a graphical display and go to that hiding place to access an anonymous
audio recording of an answer to one of the questions. An example of one of the anonymous record-
ings comes from a female speaker who talks about a man’s hands that were ‘like paper’.
His hands always felt like paper. Paper sounds like a negative thing but it’s not, he has the softest
hands, and but there’s something dry about them that’s so [pause] beautiful I feel like I can feel the
creases and there’s a comfort and when I hold his hands I felt held [pause] and and [pause] Just so
many things I want but don’t feel like I have right now at this moment [pause] and yeah, that’s it.
(Rider Spoke, 2008, n.p.)
Rider Spoke imparted an extremely personal auditory narrative on the often ignored, out of the
way hiding places present in any large urban area. When a personal reflection was embedded in
that hiding place, the place became more than just an anonymous place. It became a location to
access a mnemonic soundscape that was both highly private and publicly shared. Ultimately,
through the merging of personal narrative, sound, and location, Rider Spoke encouraged the
collective authoring of a new kind of urban soundscape based on anonymity and experience.
Projects such as Urban Tapestries and Rider Spoke show the potential for location-based audi-
tory media to open up new spaces of critical self-reflection and new opportunities to challenge
entrenched social and political power structures. As de Certeau (1988) argued, social memory is
embedded in place, ‘That’s where old lady Dupuis used to live,’ and ‘You see, here there used
to be’ (1988: 108). Yet so many of our social spaces have attempted to erase memories of the past.
Gentrified neighborhoods erase traces of the less privileged who have been forced to leave. Sites of
sexual violence, such as the Ariel Castro’s Cleveland home where he kept three women captive,
are destroyed as a way of erasing the unpleasantness of the past. Imagine a version of Rider Spoke
that explicitly creates soundscapes designed to bring forth the memories of the past and challenge
dominant narratives. Projects like Urban Tapestries and Rider Spoke show the potentiality for
using auditory location-based media to collectively create soundscapes that speak back against
‘official’ spatial narratives and open up possibilities for new voices to collaboratively construct our
experience of place and movement.
While the two projects discussed above focus on spoken word soundscapes, Mark Shepard’s
(2011) Tactical Soundgardens focuses on the collaborative authoring of nonverbal soundscapes.
Tactical Soundgardens explores how people can use the platform to cultivate ‘‘public’’ sound
gardens within contemporary cities’ (Shepard, 2011, n.p.). Individuals use the authoring platform
to ‘‘plant’’ sounds within a positional environment’ (Shepard, 2011, n.p.), and then other people
can use headphones to access these digital soundscapes as they move through an urban area. The
goal of Tactical Soundgardens is to invoke the idea of public community gardens cultivated
through local participation, and unlike Urban Tapestries and Rider Spoke, Tactical Soundgardens
focuses on the cultivation of a nonverbal public soundscape to ‘reintroduce a form of active
participation in the articulation of public space’ (n.p.). By encouraging people to ‘plant’ sounds,
Tactical Soundgardens responds directly to the privatization of mobile media like the iPod, turning
‘passive mobile listeners into active participants in shaping the sonic topography of urban public
space’ (Shepard, 2011, n.p.). This project enables the soniferous garden that Schafer first proposed,
but rather than a soundscape with shared values aimed at letting ‘nature speak in its own authentic
voices’ (Schafer, 1994: 247), Tactical Soundgardens allows people to collaboratively share,
access, change, and negotiate the public soundscape.
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The final exploration of mobile media and sound we want to discuss is the mobile application
RjDj, which in some ways is significantly different than the examples examined above. Unlike the
other projects discussed in this section, RjDj is a mobile application freely available in the Apple
app store that reimagines the relationship between mobile media and place. As Crawford describes,
RjDj encourages listeners to use the app while walking around, hearing the sounds of the city or
countryside refracted through the filters and effects of the application. It creates a compelling sensa-
tion of displacement in the real, as the everyday sounds of the environment are heard through head-
phones, still present but strangely modified .... It reverses the assumption of headphones being worn
as a sign of disengagement from the immediate aural surroundings and produces new forms of
immersion. (2012: 216)
RjDj works as a response to the traditional conceptualization of mobile media as ‘dis-
connecting’ people from the spaces they move through. It instead shows how mobile media like the
iPhone or the iPod Touch can alter experiences of shared sounds, in this case by taking a space’s
soundscape and altering it through the combination of a mobile device’s microphone and a pair of
headphones. While the collective authoring emphasized in the other projects we discussed is not as
present in RjDj, the application does feature social elements that are equally interesting. People
have the option of recording the set of filtered sounds created through the combination of their
movement and the application’s algorithms. They can then share those recordings with other
people. As Crawford writes, these recordings provide ‘even temporarily, a sense of listening to a
place as heard by another – a transmitted listening to location’ (2012: 217). This represents a
different type of social soundscaping, showing the different potentials of new media for changing
the way we conceptualize the links between mobile media and sound.
While most of the examples we detailed focused on locative media art projects, applications
available on iPhones and Android phones have begun exploring similar topics. For example,
applications like Socialight (Humphreys and Liao, 2011), Foursquare (Frith, in press), and
Textopia allow people to textually annotate their surrounding space by uploading geotagged
messages (Løvlie, 2011). de Souza e Silva and Frith (2012) argue that these location-based appli-
cations and locative media artworks enable new ways for people to both ‘read’ and ‘write’ space.
In a sense, the uploading of geotagged messages becomes a form of digital graffiti that allows peo-
ple to contribute to the ways people experience place in new ways. People can write geotagged
reviews on Yelp or upload geotagged images on Instagram. Other people who go to these locations
are then able to access this information. These forms of collaborative spatial authoring create a new
layer of user-generated information that merges with the information (e.g. street signs and store
fronts) already present in a place. We can expect that in the future we will see more and more appli-
cations enable the uploading of auditory, location-based files as a relatively new way to annotate
physical space. As Fagerjord (2011) notes in a study on the design of locative literary texts, sound
is often a better medium for conveying location-based information than the relatively small screen
of mobile devices. The examples we discussed allow for a new collaborative authoring in con-
structing urban soundscapes, and as smartphone adoption continues to increase, there is even
greater potential for new forms of social soundscaping as more people contribute to the ways phys-
ical space can be mediated through location-aware mobile media.
While our discussion here has focused on the positive and empowering possibility of colla-
boratively authored soundscapes, it is also important to note a potential critique of the types of
social soundscaping discussed in this article. Dourish and Bell argue that mobile media can
become a new ‘lens through which the spatialities of urban space can be viewed’ (2011: 120).
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What we are arguing is that these technologies also allow for a new way the spatialities of urban
space can be heard. However, the danger of creating increasingly dense layers of location-based
information is that people who do not have the correct technologies or digital literacies will be
unable to access these spatial markers (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2010; Frith, 2012). Unlike Scha-
fer’s soundscapes, hybrid spaces are not necessarily available to everyone, and the types of
mediated social soundscaping detailed here will only be accessible for people who have the ability
and willingness to access and contribute to these new social soundscapes. If these social sounds-
capes continue to develop, we may introduce new forms of differentiation and exclusion to public
space, allowing certain groups to construct shared soundscapes while others are left with the unfil-
tered ‘noise’ of the city.
Conclusion
Mobile media have undoubtedly changed over the last half decade. Increasingly, people carry
around devices that act as phones, tools to access the internet, and music players. These improved
technological capabilities provide new opportunities for connecting with physically proximate
others and accessing information about one’s surroundings. The literature on new mobile practices
is growing quickly, with an increased focus on mobile social applications, mobile embodiment,
mobile gaming, and location-based information. However, there is a lack of existing research that
examines the new auditory potential of mobile media. As we showed in this article, mobile media
can increasingly be used to create new forms of social soundscaping, allowing people to contribute
aural layers to the authoring of hybrid spaces.
This article examined the links between mobile media, sound, and physical space from an
interdisciplinary perspective. We drew from literature in sound studies, media studies, and locative
media art to show how new mobile practices may force us to reconceptualize traditional under-
standings of mobile auditory media. Increasingly, people can contribute to the information present
in a space by, in a sense, ‘writing’ that space (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012). As we showed,
people may also begin using auditory information as a new way of sharing experiences about
physical space, contributing to new forms of social soundscapes that are user generated and
dynamic. To understand the potential of these newer forms of mobile auditory media, it will be
important to draw from existing literature on sound and physical space as well as more media-
focused research. This article provided an initial step in that direction, and we hope that in the
future, media scholars will play an active role in shaping how these sound gardens grow.
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Author biographies
Jordan Frith is an assistant professor in the Linguistics and Technical Communication Department at the
University of North Texas. His research focuses on mobile technologies and social media, with a specific
focus on location-based social networks. He is the coauthor (with Adriana de Souza e Silva) of the book
Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces.
Kati Fargo Ahern is an assistant professor of English at LIU Post. Her research primarily addresses the inter-
section of sound studies and auditory rhetoric within the theory and teaching of writing.
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