A sound that sounds will do so at a certain place and at a certain time. These are typically the sort of data that practitioners of the art of field recording will keep track of, as part of the documentation of their work. Phonographers therefore have always had a natural interest in sound mapping techniques (the linking of acoustic and geographical data).
When in 2003 I was invited to come and record the sounds of the island of Ameland with my little dictaphone, I made an interactive sound map (in Flash) that allows one to virtually roam the island and listen to the sounds (one by one) by clicking the spots where they were recorded. The offline version was somewhat more sophisticated, as it allowed one to play several of the available sounds simultaneously: this made it possible to actually *play* the Ameland sound map: it became an instrument. For of course that is, ideally, what a sound map - as an interface to a collection of sounds - should (also) be.
The arrival in 2004 and subsequent public availability of Google Maps and its API brought about an avalanche of sound mapping projects world wide. A couple of recent entries on the Weird Vibrations - The Politcs of Sound blog give an overview, which is far from complete, though.
Most of the current sound maps indeed use the Google Maps API. (A notable exception is the BBC World Service 'Save Our Sounds' projects, which uses Microsoft's Bing). And most posit themselves as collaborative projects, allowing and encouraging the users to upload and add their sounds to the map. The bulk of these projects are documentary, and lack the idea of enabling an 'instrumental interface' to the collection of sounds. An exception is Udo Noll's Radio Aporee, one of the most interesting among the currently active collaborative sound map projects. Indeed, the seventh in my series of radio(dicta)phonic 28 minutes reports on the 2008 Tuned City Conference in Berlin was made exclusively by using the Aporee site's online 'mixing' interface, to play its set of Berlin sounds. As an instrument.
[ Radio Aporee - Berlin Soundmaps is part of the "Tamed City - Berlin, Neuköln" Raudio web stream. That's RAUDIO IIIII's number 18 on your iPhone. ]
next: Tape Salad
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