ABC Sydney SidetracksExploring a city of lost sounds

British Library Sound ArchiveUnlocking Audio 2

Connecting with Listeners

Sarah Barns

abc.net.au/sidetracks

Partners: ABC Archives, ABC Local Radio 702, National Film and Sound Archives, the Dictionary of Sydney, the City of Sydney, the State Library of NSW, the Powerhouse Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art

Copy goes here for each slide……………………………………….Copy goes here for each slide……………………………………….put some more copy to ewxplain the slide here

‘we’re all map-makers now’Wired June 2007

Geo-tagging: 2.5 million things geo-tagged on Flickr this month

Sydney Sidetracks abc.net.au/sidetracks

the ‘street as platform’ encounters with post-pc information technology

“In a sense, the entire street itself can now be thought of as having an API, conveying its overall behaviour to the world, each aspect of it increasingly beginning to generate and recombine data.”

listening in…

“Who could resist the invitation of those dainty headphones? They gleam in living rooms and entwine themselves around heads all by themselves”. Siegfried Kracauer 1929

“By filtering out the natural and man made sounds of the city we are able to immerses ourselves in a alternative reality of our choosing.” - Digital Urban

The iPod - a “sublime marriage between mobility, aesthetics and functionality, of sound and touch” that offers an auditory reprioritisation of urban experience Michael Bull, Sound Moves

listening in…the user experience

‘Auditory looking’: Interaction with the visual present framed by its auditory past

Martin Place, VP Day 1945

Martin Place, 2008

Top: Victoria St today ……………………………………….Bottom left: Mural of the BLF Green Bans in W’loo……………………………………….Bottom right: Plaque to Mick Fowler on Victoria St

city of lost sound

QuickTimeª and aDV - PAL decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

George St 1906. Reproduced courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive

an archaeology of the invisible city of recorded action… not surviving artefact

Clockwise from Left……………………………………….212 Devonshire St……………………………………….Protesters gather outside 115 Victoria St in January 1973……………………………………….Day of Mourning Conference 1938St in January 1973……………………………………….Juanita Nielsen outside 202 Victoria St……………………………………….Construction of the Sydney Opera House, 1964……………………………………….The Pyrmont Incinerator 1977……………………………………….The Pyrmont Incinerator c1938

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

thank you

sarah barns