Dylan Bradbury, Language Based Area Studies, Manchester (2020 Cohort)

Now well into the third year of my studentship, I’m starting to think about life outside the PhD and ways to continue on with my area of research. That sometimes-vague demand for a tangible ‘impact factor’ has also begun to nag at me a bit more with each passing week. My PhD thesis looks at the ways in which different practices of listening, recording and otherwise dealing with sound have shaped the politics of Indigenous identity in central and southern Argentina. Part of this has meant engaging with the fields of Cultural and Sound Studies in order to work out how to approach the links between sound, politics and identity. Having all this time to study ‘theory’ has been a real pleasure, but the question for me is how do I now start to bring these quite abstract concerns outside of my own convoluted university project?

As it happens, a few friends and me have started something called AudioSpaces: a project that explores the various social possibilities that emerge from recording sounds and creating public, collaborative sound maps. We’ve developed an app, which allows you to easily record audio with your phone and pin it to a navigable online map. Everything shared on the map can only be fully listened to from the physical location in which it has been pinned, with the idea being that all the recording and listening activity using the app, by nature, bridges the virtual and the outdoors.

All of us involved in AudioSpaces are from a mix of different backgrounds, including outside of academia and the arts, and we’re all coming at the project from very different angles. The idea is to make room for using sound recording, listening practices and interventions in everyday spaces, in a way that is open enough to be applied across disciplines, interests and social causes. The project is completely autonomous and horizontally organised, and free for anyone to get involved.

The app already has over 100 regular users after only a few months since properly launching, with several hundred individual audio clips already on the map in 27 different countries. Our contributors have been using the app to document quite a wide range of things, and we emphasise that the project isn’t just for dedicated field recordists or sound artists, but for anyone with ears and a smart phone. As you might expect, a lot of the audio uploaded is simply people’s everyday lives, audible diary entries archived in various spots around the world. This is great in itself and has produced some of the most entertaining and aesthetically interesting audio so far.

However, some people have also begun to use the app to actively explore things they’re interested in using the medium of sound. This is something we’re actively seeking to encourage, and we’re now working with people to produce thematic series and collections. One example that we recently published is a collection of sound works by the artist Jo Scott about her multispecies interactions with a river near her new home in Portugal, which she produced specially to be listened to through AudioSpaces.

We’ve got a load of other collaborations in the works for a variety of other collections: on the changing audible and multisensory experience of British pubs across time and space; on the practice of everyday storytelling and orally retelling dreams; the sounds of ASMR and the intimacy of the home; and even one that I am doing myself on the cultural undersides of tango in Buenos Aires (where I’m still based, finishing off the final bits of my fieldwork).

My personal role at the moment is principally writing and editing our fortnightly newsletter using the Substack platform. The goal here is to provide an accessible, pedagogically minded supplement that underlines and informs the project. We want to encourage readers and potential sound recorders to think about sound, space, audible heritage and memory in new ways. We emphasise the social, the cultural and the everyday, and the priority is to make the often highly specialised field of audio & sound accessible to non-experts. We have already received thousands of individual reads and interactions, using the medium to connect AudioSpaces with different online communities: from field recordists, music producers and sound nerds, to mindfulness enthusiasts and culture and media criticism circles.

This has been an interesting way to apply my own training and disciplinary formation in a context outside of my immediate PhD project and has helped to deal with that nagging concern for ‘impact’ that I described at the start of this post. It’s been especially rewarding working with and writing for people outside of academia, while still trying to maintain the critical lens that postgraduate research helps to develop. The project hasn’t really taken away from working on my thesis, either; on the contrary, it has allowed me to reflect on the theoretical aspects of my research from a different perspective, and practice putting it into multiple formats and framings.

We’re currently reaching out for people to get involved beyond just being an app user or reader/listener. For example, in the next couple of months we have two guest articles coming out for the newsletter, one on archives (written by an archivist from the National Archive in London) and the other about spatial identities (written by an artist working with plastic and space-oriented methods). We’re also teaming up with friends to organise in-person events that combine listening and recording with other cultural activities, such as electronic music nights and community gardening.

Part of the reason for writing this blog post is, you might have guessed, a kind of call for participants: to invite anyone in the DTP whose PhD work seems relevant to AudioSpaces to get involved in some way. Students working on sound, anything related to space and place-making, memory studies and heritage may be especially interested. We’re open to any creative ideas at the moment. We could, for example, work together to create a featured audio collection related to your research, or perhaps you could write something short for the newsletter. We recently published a more detailed CfP, which I link at the bottom of this text.

At this point we wouldn’t be able to give anything back financially, but getting involved is  a great way to practice applying your academic interests in a setting outside your thesis and away from the university.[1] It’s also a bit of low-stakes fun, and the community of amateur audio recordists and sensory explorers that we’re building is very friendly and eccentric. Of course, everyone is also welcome to download and contribute to the app in whatever way they wish (unfortunately it’s still iPhone only at the moment), and to subscribe to the newsletter on Substack.

If anyone is tempted to contribute or get involved, you can write to my university email: dylan.bradbury@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk or contact AudioSpaces directly. I imagine everyone feels quite busy at the moment, but it can be just an expression of interest at this point. I’ll probably be back in Manchester in the Autumn semester, so you can save up your ideas for then as well if you prefer.

Newsletter:

https://audiospaces.substack.com

Call for Participants:

https://audiospaces.substack.com/i/142952374/get-involved

Most recent article:

https://audiospaces.substack.com/p/against-audiogram

Jo Scott’s collection “The Rio Cavalos trio”:

https://audiospaces.substack.com/p/the-rio-cavalos-trio-arts-of-noticing

Our Instagram, which has lots of examples of audio pinned to the map; check for the “AudioSpaces of the week”:

https://www.instagram.com/audio.spaces

To download the app on iPhone

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audiospaces-follow-your-ears/id1637862675

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[1] One next step for us is to apply for funding. This is firstly to build a stable Android version of the app, but also crucially to be able to commission small events, groups or individuals—for example paying artists to build larger-scale sound works in collaboration with AudioSpaces, or to be able to pay guest writers on our newsletter.