Curating the aural cultures of the Battery: Soundwalking,auditory tourism and interactive locative media sound art

Abstract

Inside Outside Battery is a mobile media sound art installation for smartphone technologies that uses global positioning system (GPS) locative software to narrate walking visitors through the Battery, a heritage neighbourhood of St. John’s (Newfoundland, Canada). Auditory tourists, or soundwalkers, come to know the aural cultures of the Battery through the dynamic interactions of sound and place using site- and time-specific archival materials, stories, soundscapes, and expressive culture sourced from the Battery that play alongside real-time encounters with the physical and sonic materiality of the Battery. Employing practice-based ethnography, this article examines how site- and time-specific soundscape interactive documentary technologies engage socioenvironmental knowledge and foster a sense of place attachment for visitors to the Battery.

Keywords

auditory tourism cultural heritage interactive media mobile technology place sensory studies site-specific sound art sound studies soundscape sonic cartography aural culture

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