Teaching and Learning Guide for: Memoryscape: How Audio Walks Can Deepen Our Sense of Place by Integrating Art, Oral History and Cultural Geography

This article explores how the sound walk (audio trail) has developed from the fields of sound art and oral history. The author uses cultural geography to understand how such trails can use sound and spoken memory to give us a sophisticated understanding of place and engender feelings of connection with our surroundings. He argues that sound walks could become a significant medium as location-based media becomes more widespread. In the last 50 years the audio guide has generally been an experience reserved for the museum or art gallery. Visitors have become accustomed to being offered a set of headphones when they arrive in the exhibition foyer and the audio guide has become a well established means of offering ‘expert’ interpretation. In recent years my research interest has been in trails that use recorded sound and voice to interpret the outside world of the historical, cultural and physical landscape. Until very recently there were only very isolated examples of using recorded sound or voice in an outside setting – most commonly compositions by musicians and experimental sound artists. But now the popularity of MP3 players and a crash in the price of the equipment and software necessary to record and edit professional quality sound and voice has opened up new realms of opportunity for people to narrate, layer and intervene in the experience of moving through places. A small industry is developing in creating audio trails delivered through portable media players as a result of commercial enterprise, sponsorship or state funding (Blue Brolly London Audio Walks, 2006, ; iTour website, 2005, ; Sound Travel Audio Guides, ; Soundwalk website, 2005).