Locative Audio / Augmented Auralities

Mobile technologies, such as the GPS smartphones employed for Locativeaudio.org project and custom made software provide the core tools for its realisation. These unique tools enable sound artists to apply locative audio and media technologies to creative thinking and to take the results to our streets and own pockets as an extension and reinvention of the concert hall.

By 'Augmenting the Aurality' of a specific every-day location, composers can recover memories of a particular place, can produce sonic alternatives to repositories of visual information; and even attempt to forecast desired futures through sound. What else can be done?

Locativeaudio is a sonic-centric walk experience started in the city of Manchester, UK which has progressively incorporated a network of people, institutions and cities around the world. To become a locativeaudio walker, all you need is a smartphone and headphones, (we can provide them too), a pair of sport shoes and the desire to explore the sonic journey (you bring these two!). To design the next generation of experience in the Augmented City, we place the walker at the centre of our thoughts to create unique immersiveness and understanding of a place. Locativeaudio has reconstructed history and architecture, has transformed noisy streets into beautiful soundscapes, has implanted secret thoughts onto solitary statues, and even extended the boundaries of the concert hall experience. Locativeaudio's contribution to the Augmented City may include converting urban spaces into citizen's livingrooms, where people could plant site-specific thoughts in every street, including their fantasies, desires and fears.