Audio Tour
due December 15

The audio walking tour is a familiar and often formulaic feature of art museums, historic sites, tourist agencies, and architectural history organizations. However, a growing number of artists have been experimenting with the genre in order to enervate its conventions, highlight repressed information, mix fact and fiction, or create unique experiential pieces that play with the intersection of communal ambient sound and private listening spaces.
Taking your cue from the artists presented in class and working in a group of no more than three, you will create an original audio tour of a real place. The tour audio is designed to be heard in the intimate space of stereo headphones. Your tour may be a well-researched, factual tour, a well-written fictional narrative set in the tour’s location, a collection of found texts that bring layers of meaning to the place, or some innovative combination of these. However, you must use both voiceover narration and other sound, either musical or ambient, in your final audio piece. You will also create a simple website documenting the tour with photographs and audio and permitting your visitors to download mp3 and video ipod files to take into the field.

Unless your tour and the audio is explicitly dealing with issues of creative reuse, please use copyright-free music and ambient sound (canned or recorded) in your piece. It is arguable not creative reuse to simply lay someone’s instrumental track down behind a voiceover because you are not commenting on or changing the meaning of the original track. Sources for copyright free music are www.freeplaymusic.com and ccmixter.org.

Turn in your project by taking the website live on your individual space on the NMC server. This project is worth 20 points.

Sound Artist Reports
In addition to specific assignments to be given later in the semester, you will be responsible for preparing a 20-minute presentation on the work and life of a sound artist of your choice. sample rss

Previous Projects
Sound Generator Composition
Audio Portrait
Audio Narrative
Mash-up
Installation