The document discusses mobile audio practices and their implications for experiencing urban spaces. It describes how personal audio devices allow listeners to immerse themselves in private soundscapes while in public, potentially disconnecting from shared social experiences of the city. This represents a "radical auditory re-prioritization" of urban experience. The document also examines projects that use location-based audio to amplify spatial experiences or convey a place's auditory past, potentially helping listeners learn to get lost in cities as Benjamin advocated.

1. Amplifying the city-screen:
encounters with contemporary
mobile audio practice
Auricle:
Sound Cultures of the Future
September 2010
Sarah Barns

2. encounters with mobile audio
new domains
for sound practice

3. Not so new…
Jeremy Hight – Narrative Archaeology (2004)
Hildegaard Westerkamp – A Walk Through
the City (1981)
Telefon Hirmondo – Budapest 1901

4. encounters with mobile audio
Urban sociologists – cultures of ‘social deafness’
Immersed in a private soundscape, engaged in another
interactive scene, you do not have to be in the city as a
shared perceptual or social space – Fran Tonkiss
A “radical auditory re-
prioritisation of forms of
urban experience” which
enables listeners to
experience an environment
through privatised, mediated
fantasies.
– Michael Bull

5. encounters with mobile audio
Amplifying spatial excursions –
‘MSG for the senses’
Betsy Biggs – ‘cinematic experiences
for real life’
Toby Butler – ‘Memory-
scapes’ extend the space of the
oral history recording from
outside the museum context
and into a specific place
Soundwalk.com – audio
walks for people who don’t
do audio walks

6. homing in on the street’s archive
Experiencing a contemporary space
through its auditory past
Martin Place, VP Day 1945
Martin Place 2008
Martin Place 1945

7. ABC Sydney Sidetracks
abc.net.au/sidetracks

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9. 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
abc.net.au/sidetracks
pool.org.au
sitesandsounds.net.au