Mapping the maps

Traces from the three walkers (Russ, Jane, Jackie) last Tuesday - overlaid on a new map for the live area, co-ordinates to be used by Ben for the web playback too - although the map image will be redesigned for the website.

Live from the field...

Mapping traces and soundfeatures for interactive avebury.

(sent by mobile from the secret little area in Avebury that does have phone signal!)

Triple Traces and Rainbows

Mapping Sand Point.

3 traces by 3 walkers.

All the colours of the rainbow...

Sand Point - making the Trace

Me slowly turning round - Russ determinedly striding out!




Amazing sunset over Cardiff ..... strange green light on Exmoor, shimmering edges where land meets sea, on and on into the west.

Test 2 - for Whitesheet Hill

So here's the second test - lots of different combinations of layering sound to test in the open spaces and ancient landscape of Whitesheet Hill on Sunday with Strata.

This is a screenshot from the mscape software I'm using to map the sounds onto the land.

Should be an interesting walk...

First Soundwalk!

Walks in Lower Coleford after dusk...
Elemental rythms, melodies and ambients as first demos of the Soundlines experience. Wonderful! Soft beautiful imagery watching a shadowy figure, lit by PDA, twisting and turning exploring the sound of the place - each figure moves in its own special way, soft round lines, dashing zig zag marks, structured solid blocks.

22 Letters/Rider of the white horse

These books were recommended recently... anyone got a copy??
From wikipedia:
The 22 Letters is a children's novel by Clive King written in 1966.
In the Phoenician city state of Gebel the master builder Resh has three sons, Zayin, Nun and Aleph, and a daughter, Beth. The three sons go on three journeys: to Egypt (Sinai), to the court of King Minos (Crete) and north to Ugarit. They return and save the city from invasion with the help of the three inventions they find or discover: celestial navigation, horsemanship and alphabetic writing. Then Thera explodes. Gebel is now known as Byblos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Sutcliff
Rosemary Sutcliff was a British novelist, best known as a writer of highly acclaimed historical fiction. Although primarily a children's author, the quality and depth of her writing also appeals to adults, she herself once commenting that she wrote "for children of all ages from nine to ninety."
Due to her chronic sickness, she spent the majority of her time with her mother, a tireless storyteller, from whom she learned many of the Celtic and Saxon legends that she would later expand into works of historical fiction. She then worked as a painter of miniatures.

snowlines

We were exploring animal tracks on the snowy wood margin. Hare, deer, fox, badger. All seemed to do the same thing - meander - round and round - it's not just humans and dogs then!

The joy of being in the landscape, crunch of snow, just going from here - to there - with no sense of arriving. Another kind of journey.

Lots of human trods too, way away from anywhere, doing the same thing - meandering. Making snowlines.

Snowsounds, snowlines

We went to the sun temple at Stourhead in the snow and low-hanging mist today.
The atmosphere is so still, new and ancient. Just single bursts of birdsong, ducks, geese, the water, and two woodpeckers echoing eachother. Sounds became crisp and clear, individual and tangible. The snow and mist together held the land in a way that made me feel just a glimpse of what it might have been like for HER, travelling through the woods and over the hills, on her journey back then.

We found a perfect bowl of untrod snow, surrounded by beech, to make our snow lines running in circles and rolling on the ground.

Squiggles

I am excited by the idea of the trace unfolding as the music plays.

Sometimes I use a music workshop warm up called 'squiggles'. Players pair up, and both draw a squiggle. (- these look very similar to the traces.)

The idea is that you then play your friends' squiggle on your instrument - it's another way of writing music. Responses and interpretation vary a bit as you can imagine.

The traces of our significant journeys across ritual landscapes could be close to geomancy.

It also opens questions of how landscape affects our culture, our language, our vernacular architecture, our music..... perhaps less now than before : time to reconnect?

traces in the wind and rain

Here are a couple of gps traces from Whitesheet Hill - the bottom one was yesterday's visit, you can see the centre circular ditches as I walked round them a couple of times.
This top trace was today, in a storm, with 3 short films made through walking. The trace to the left is driving back down the track afterwards...

One of the idea's we want to explore through Soundlines is having the trace appear (animation) whilst the soundscape composition plays, as re-presentation on the web. I imagine those traces will be very different as the incentive to move around the landscape will be very different too.