London soundscape

My favorite part of today’s Media Exploration Day in Digital Storytelling at DPL 2018 was this project.

I did a slightly modified version of a prompt asking us to record sounds from a particular space and create a 5 minute soundscape of that space. But here’s the thing: for storytelling to feel real and important to me, it has to be rooted in a place (or issue, memory, etc) that’s meaningful to me. Even though I’m having a great time at this conference, I don’t have enough of a connection to the University of Mary Washington to feel like crafting a soundscape here would be an authentic thing for me to do. I needed to find a different place, and I chose London.

A little online research brought me to the London Sound Survey and their Creative Commons-licensed collection on archive.org.

I’m pretty happy with the results – I’ve never really done much audio work, and haven’t touched Audacity in years. In the spirit of full disclosure, I spent about 2 hours getting myself oriented in the software, choosing my sound files, and creating the soundscape. I hope that you are able to discover some different aspects of London than you might be expecting, and to experience several different parts of the city all at once – something that can only happen through the magic of digital storytelling.