Sound and the environment are both personal experiences. They engage different people in different ways. The goal of this project is to expand on those individualized experiences by generating a personalized sound walk of the Reed Canyon for you. This soundwalk is generated by your walking speed and random numbers that gauge your experience with the Canyon. There is also a unique interaction between technology and nature here that we hope to explore as creators. The site itself houses code that will generate a personalized soundwalk as well as a map that outlines where sound either can be found on the walk, or where the audio files were recorded during the recording process. Importantly, after recording the sound, sounds were run through an identifier software in order to identify what specific songs are present (most relevant to birds). This allowed for us to include information about the ecosystem within the Canyon, which we felt was important for both community members and non-community members alike. We hope you all enjoy the ability to create a personalized sonic experience.
In order to create this project a production was focused in a few main places. First, sounds were recorded in the canyon at various times throughout the day and over the course of a couple weeks. After these sounds were recorded we used the technology from the Cornell Ornithology Bird Lab to identify which birds were present in each recording. These are labeled on the map and information about the species is listed on the program below. Then code was written to map these sounds onto a map of the canyon and generate a sound file that used your answers to generate a soundwalk of your own.
Something to think about either while you walk or after walking is how technology adds to this experience, and how it might detract from it. For example, without technology we would have been able to identify the birds, or generate the walk even. Does this elicit anything for you? Something else we did not integrate into the technology or product, but is an interesting guiding question is how “natural” nature is. The canyon is unique in that it is a “natural environment” nested within a campus, it is not in the wilderness. How does this shape your interaction with the physical space and how does space map onto what you hear? The concluding note is similar to the opening, sound, relationships with nature, and space at large, are personal, so soundwalking should be no different. One final question to reflect on, is in what ways do you feel like this is a personal experience, and in what way could it be a shared experience?