Presented to the UTS Symposium Auricle: Sound Cultures of the Future, September 2010.

1. Amplifying the city-screen:
encounters with contemporary
mobile audio practice
Auricle:
Sound Cultures of the Future
September 2010
Sarah Barns

2. encounters with mobile audio
new domains
for sound practice

3. Not so new…
Jeremy Hight – Narrative Archaeology (2004)
Hildegaard Westerkamp – A Walk Through
the City (1981)
Telefon Hirmondo – Budapest 1901

4. encounters with mobile audio
Urban sociologists – cultures of ‘social deafness’
Immersed in a private soundscape, engaged in another
interactive scene, you do not have to be in the city as a
shared perceptual or social space – Fran Tonkiss
A “radical auditory re-
prioritisation of forms of
urban experience” which
enables listeners to
experience an environment
through privatised, mediated
fantasies.
– Michael Bull

5. encounters with mobile audio
Amplifying spatial excursions –
‘MSG for the senses’
Betsy Biggs – ‘cinematic experiences
for real life’
Toby Butler – ‘Memory-
scapes’ extend the space of the
oral history recording from
outside the museum context
and into a specific place
Soundwalk.com – audio
walks for people who don’t
do audio walks

6. homing in on the street’s archive
Experiencing a contemporary space
through its auditory past
Martin Place, VP Day 1945
Martin Place 2008
Martin Place 1945

7. ABC Sydney Sidetracks
abc.net.au/sidetracks

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9. learning to get lost
“Not to find oneself in a city may well be uninteresting
and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to
lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest –
that calls for quite a different schooling”.
Walter Benjamin Illuminations
abc.net.au/sidetracks
pool.org.au
sitesandsounds.net.au