hearthisworld:

What’s walking to work sound like? How about waking up on a Sunday morning? Or a cafe after the rush, at 4 pm, say?

Sitting at a wedding, Marc Weidenbaum, author of Disquiet, started talking about listening to the sound of the world in a fascinating way. It was something along the lines of music being just one subset of the total possible world of things that we could listen to.

I’ve long wanted to make a sound map of my walk to work. The fountains in Yerba Buena, the people doing Tai Chi, the wind in the small walkway/wind tunnel between the Jewish Museum and whatever that other building is. I’m not sure who else would be interested in just my walk but what about The Walk to Work, more generally.

If you could get a hundred people all over the country to record a couple minutes of their walks to work at roughly the same time, you would have built a sound collage of those few private minutes before mechanization takes command.

As it turns out, Marc tells me, there happens to be a tool for just this sort of thing. It’s called AudioBoo and it lets you record up to three minutes of sound to the Interwebs and tag it with your location and any other tags you might like.

So, suddenly, what would have been an incredibly difficult tape-mailing project becomes as simple as a bunch of us picking up the free app, recording our walks and tagging them all HTW_work.

Of course, walking to work would just be the beginning. There are so many other times and places to record what things sound like. Berkeley library, say, where I’m sitting is quiet and kind of scary. (Here’s what it sounds like where I am.) Bars, parks, the highest hill in a city, inside elevators, underneath bridges, bathrooms of gas stations, oil refineries, at uncontrolled intersections in housing subdevelopments. There will be something for everyone.

This isn’t going to be a big, fancy project. There’s no money to be had, no gain really available or sought. It’s more just because sometimes you’ve had a couple glasses of wine and something occurs to you and it’s practically as easy to follow-through as it is to forget it and go make a sandwich. Low buy-in, it’s really the beauty of the Internet, no?

I’ll start posting some calls for submissions here and at the Twitter feed, @hearthisworld. We’ll see what we get. Maybe nothing. Maybe something awesome.

In the meantime, if you want us to see something, tag it HTW.

[Image: flickr/adamneilward]

I like this idea— passing it along.