The sound walk is in many ways the dialectical opposite to the sound map; it is spatially situated, rather than removed/abstracted and tagged to a cartographic rendering of space/place and it is typically highly narrative orientated rather than primarily based around documentation, as so many sound maps and the archives of recordings they host tend to be. From another perspective though they can be seen to occupy poles on a continuum of acoustic ecology practice/s; as all such practices bleed into and support each other. As within a single work (or an extending body of work) from an artists such as Hilderkamp etc one will see soundwalk techniques, field recording, soundscape composition, sound mapping etc combined in various ways to create a particular listening/revealing of a particular sound enviroment.
Much of the sound work within the sound walk frame though, does seem much more highly developed and elaborated than the current fair one see's within the explicit sound map frame (Although there are various more progressive examples which we will look at in upcoming posts.)Two of the primary developments within the sound walk frame, (which as aforementioned are explicitly embodied in Westerkamp's work) are the productive use of narrative, and a creative engagement with the inherent dislocation that seems implicit in the process of field recording. Both of which could be appropriated to sound map practice as possible extensions.
Narrative: The use of narrative here-in allows for a greater revealing of context, and relationship as present in the sound environment, when it is employed successfully. Which is something significantly lacking from the mere documentation, point and click approach to recording that seems to populated sound map projects. It also can be used to highlight the participatory relationship of the listener to the environment, and the constructed perspective implicit via the representation/mediation of the recording process. The main limitation here is that the use of narrative constructs a privileged position (i.e the artist/composer) whereby a singular primary narrative/logic is imposed on the listener-environment relationship, whilst at the same time reducing the listener to a degree of second rate participation in the experience, as a audience member, rather than truly a listener-composer oneself.
It seems to me that the employment of narrative techniques within the sound map frame pose one of the primary avenues whereby sound map practice could begin to go beyond the mode of mere documentation that has thus far dominated it's history. It is my hypothesis that the architecture of the soundmap interface/platform can be designed to facilitate inter-textual multi-media narrative/s as a way of extending the basic field recording and listening practices that form the basis of the platform. Furthermore the aforementioned limitation of the authorial voice/privileged position of the artist/composer would be limited by the inherently participatory nature of the sound map, as it's recordings are constructed by myriad artists/users, who themselves continually switch between the logic of composer/audience member within their engagement with the platform, it's archive of recordings, and other users.
Dislocation: The aforementioned dislocation is similarly present within sound map practice (as it is inherent within field recording to some degree) though one would hope that through narrative-emphasis and site-listening integration the dislocation could become productive as it often is within sound walk practice rather than limiting. The emphasis here being to find a way to use the dislocation to produce difference, and transformation rather the just disassociation.
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