Creative Sonification of Mobility and Sonic Interaction with Urban Space: An Ethnographic Case Study of a GPS Sound Walk

This chapter explores how mobile media and sound are experienced and in particular how locative technologies such as GPS can be used for the creative sonification of mobility. An artwork forms the key case study of the chapter. Participants equipped with headphones and a GPS-enabled backpack explore a city while listening to generative sounds that depend on their movement and location, as well as on how many people have been in the same location before. An analysis of empirical material including interviews with audience members and the artist show how the work adds an invisible digital sound layer to the existing architecture. The sonic, embodied, and mobile experiences articulated in the interviews are discussed in light of de Certeau’s arguments developed in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) concerning spatial practice in urban space, including the distinction between views from above and maps as reading and the embodied mobility of walking paths as writing.