Welcome
12 Gates to the City is a series of podcasts based upon 12 different walking routes through Edinburgh.
Each podcast is a collection of original sound recordings of the city, interviews, music, and other collected sounds.
For details on the who, why, what and where of the project, please see the about page.
This homepage will act as an occasional blog for the project (below)
12 Gates to the City at the Royal Geographic Society
As part of the Royal Geographic Society’s Annual conference, 12 Gates will be presenting a paper about soundwalking.
An abstract and more details about the ‘Sonic Methods’ sessions can be found here.
12 Gates to the City at Betamaps
Over the last few months, we have been involved in organising Betamaps, a three-week array/collection/exposition of art works that deal with various notions of maps, movements, charts, instructions and recordings at the TotalKunst Gallery, Edinburgh.
For Betamaps, 12 Gates to the City will be presenting a work-in-progress acoustic walk through Edinburgh’s Old Town. We will be in TotalKunst gallery to loan out physical copies of the walk (on cassette tape and cd players) on the following dates: June 21-22, 28-29, and July 8 -9, between the hours of 12pm-5.
We will also host a digital version of the walk on this site, for the duration of Betamaps (go here).
Experimenting with Geography
Earlier this month I was lucky to be a co-host and attendee of a week-long workshop entitled ‘Experimenting with Geography,‘ held at the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh. The aim of the workshop was to think through new methods of collaboration between art and geography practices.
As a form of documenting the event, I have put together the following audio/visual slideshow. I was busy at the event, so I didn’t take nearly as many photographs and sound recordings as I wish I had, but I still captured a few personal highlights. Included are: a DIY session on making contact microphones/hydrophones; a visit to an anechoic chamber and an echo chamber; a live violin/vocal piece produced by Tansy Spinks; a playback performance of the sound of a nuclear bomb centrifuge at Orford Ness, Suffolk, by Louise K Wilson; and snippets of a soundwalk.
Sound has been recorded with binaural microphones, hydrophones, and an x/y condenser microphone. Best listened to on headphones. To view fullscreen, click on ‘Experimenting with Geography’ in the video box. This will take you to the original file where you can also download the video.
Acoustic map
In the Extras section you’ll find a new and ongoing project called the acoustic map. This, essentially, consists of 1-5 minute recordings of ambient sound embedded on a World map at each recording’s location.
Hopefully it’s more fun than that description sounds.
Updated links
Some new (to me) sites have been added to the links section. Here are some of my favourites:
London Sound Survey Wonderful site, including sounds of ‘…places, events and wildlife in the capital’
Montreal Sound Map Snapshots of sounds across Montreal, supported by Concordia University
Soundtrack Soundwalks at various locations, from Istanbul to California
Psychogeography radio documentary
The wonderful radio blog Speechification have alerted me to an Australian radio documentary on psychogeography, which can be found here.
Here at 12 Gates to the City, we are currently working on compiling and editing a walk we took through Dundee based on maps of Dubai (for they are sister cities). More on that soon.
British Library Archives: accents and dialects
The British Library has an excellent online archive of sounds; from music to environmental recordings to oral histories.
The geographical mapping of sound data now seems to be a popular means of online archiving sound files.
This is a particularly useful tool for the Library’s amazing collection of British accents and dialects (available here).
My favourite that I’ve heard so far is an interview with James Weare, a retired farmer from Kennford, Devon, talking about cider in April 1963 (listen here).
BBC Save Our Sounds
There’s a new campaign launced this month by the BBC World Service that’s worth checking out if you’re in to soundscapes and environmental sounds, called ‘Save Our Sounds’.
The idea is to get people to upload their recorded sounds, particularly those that are potentially endangered, on to a global map, allowing other users to ‘journey through sound.’
Though the project is in its infancy, there are already some interesting sounds to be heard: from fish sellers in Luanda, Angola, to reindeer being round up in Kautokeino, northern Norway.
Two documentaries accompanying the project are being broadcast on 8th and 15th July (more information here.)
