Timeout
Exploring London with audio walks
http://www.timeout.com/soundmap
By Natasha Polyviou
Wed May 21 2008
Time Out experiences a Soundmap audio walk around Brick Lane and gets insular
Soundmap's audio tour offers a very personal perspective on an area
We’re all familiar with picking up an audio tour along with our ticket at the museum admission desk, but how many of us are willing to have one of our senses overridden by someone else’s recorded directions out in the maelstrom of the teeming city? Downloading an audio walk on to your MP3 player and stepping out into traffic you can’t hear is a disorienting experience, one that wraps you in an insular pod and distorts your spatial awareness.
Canadian artist Janet Cardiff exploited these sensations to extraordinary effect with ‘The Missing Voice (Case Study B)’, a participatory piece which equipped visitors with headphones and a portable CD player and sent them on a fictionalised narrative journey around Spitalfields. That remarkable project ran from Whitechapel Library before it closed in 2005. If you want to explore the area with audio guidance now, you should turn to Soundmap, a company set up in August 2007 by sales and marketing expert Jo Bryan, her scriptwriter husband, James Bryan, and sound engineer James Vyner.
Soundmap created the ‘Sweeney Todd’ audio walk for Warner Bros and now offers five guides, including tours of Camden and Brixton, in which a narrator’s instructions are mixed with music, atmospheric background sounds and historical snippets about each area.
Choosing the sounds that accompany and bring alive the story is a matter of much debate, reveals Jo Bryan. ‘If we let James [Vyner] have his way he would go a bit crazy and it would be stimulus overload! The footsteps you can hear are a subliminal message to set the walker’s speed,’ she explains. ‘They work as a reminder and a reassurance.’
Interspersed with the narrator’s voice are interviews with local shopkeepers, which are among the best sections of Soundmap and certainly those that that provide most interest for residents who already know the neighbourhood. They add a personal perspective which would be hard to get otherwise.
‘I know some Americans who would, but as Brits we would never go up to someone and ask them what it’s like to live there!’ laughs Bryan. The Brick Lane walk features fascinating chats with locals recalling how they rallied to oust Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts, and the shock after the Brick Lane nail bomb in 1999. The interviewees are often legends in their own backyard. Sandra Esquilant, the Golden Heart landlady who speaks on the Brick Lane walk, is a local hero beloved as much by her regulars as the East End artist community she nurtures with beer and sympathy, including Fournier Street residents Gilbert and George. Since you set the pace with audio walks, unlike on a group tour, there’s nothing stopping you from pressing pause and joining Sandy for a pint.
Why take an audio walk instead of poring over a guidebook? ‘It’s a way of becoming immersed in the area,’ says Bryan, ‘a bit like being in your own film complete with a soundtrack. Plus it’s useful to have a hand free for your umbrella!’
Soundmap walks cost £5.99 from www.soundmap.co.uk.