Ximena Alarcón – Interactive Installation: Sounding Underground

Project/Interactive Installation : Sounding Underground
Ximena Alarcón

Sun 27th 2pm—2.20pm
Open Platform Stage & Open Resource Area

http://soundingunderground.org/

Sounding Underground is a virtual environment that invites users to interact with the soundscapes of three underground public transport systems: London, Paris and México City. Commuters’ memories and imaginations are represented in sounds and images that have been selected by volunteer commuters through an ethnographic process. These sounds are assembled in a sound score that acts as a multimedia user’s interface. The score contains sonic features unique to each metro, as well as some shared sonic spaces: Amplified Voice, Steps, Doors, Trains Arriving. Each metro has a unique space: Paris (air and slam sounds), Mexico (street vendors), and London (announcements). This environment allows commuters, through interactive options, to experience a process of listening and remembering, provoking the expression of an aural urban collective memory, through the narrative of an underground journey. Memories left in writing by visitors to the environment, are collected in the section “Listening and Remembering”; any comments to individual memories can be added creating more layers from the underground experience.

This project was first live on the Internet, in June 2006, as an Interactive Sonic Environment: London Underground. In October 2009, it linked Paris and Mexico metros, as counterparts of London, becoming Sounding Underground.

By now the project contains 65 webpages (including pages in three languages), 31 webpages in the section “Listening and Remembering”, one virtual environment created in Flash, with a total of 22 spaces and one information display (in three languages). The environment contained a sound score, with sound categories and spaces, that becomes multimedia interface, a total of 1117 sound files, mostly edited by participants in the project, a total of 794 elaborated images, partly chosen by participants, a total of 15 buttons, a total of 4 general icons, 145 ActionScript 3.0 files, 2 CSS files, 2 php files.

Image: Ximena Alarcón