Following Bluebrain’s album concept, I emphasise here that the core of this investigation is the location-based musical album app. The starting point of this research was the analysis of the first two album apps in music history: The National Mall by Bluebrain (March 2011) and Biophilia by Björk (October 2011). In this case study I intend to raise a discussion on a recent new format of musical album: “the album app”. From concert halls to the privacy of our homes, in our commute, music has been presented to us in different formats and materials. Over the last decades, sound appreciation (as music listening) has been naturally transformed by the use of technological apparatuses. Throughout this thesis I draw upon a range of critical theories and methodologies both from within, and from outside of, sound art studies, which help to shed new light on sound as it relates to, for example, the city, the politics of everyday life, the production of space and place, and the relationships between site-specific art, urban environments, and social actors. This thesis addresses this lack, by offering conceptual perspectives and methodological tools for understanding and producing what I call ‘locative soundscape composition’. Such technologies have received little attention through existing sound art discourses. In the second half of this thesis I provide a detailed analysis of my own work, with a particular focus on my mobile sound walks, which use location-aware technologies as a means to map sounds across a landscape. Murray Schafer, who are noted for their use of everyday sounds as compositional material the sound installation artists Max Neuhaus and Bill Fontana, who create site-specific, environmental sound art works and Janet Cardiff, a pioneer of mobile sound art. These include the composers Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and R. The first half of this thesis is dedicated to an in-depth discussion of the work of six artists with whom I align my own creative practice. All five works are site-specific, meaning that they have been designed for a specific space, in response to a specific social and environmental context, and take into account the cultural, historic and political significance of the hosting site. The portfolio comprises five works of sound art: two are sound installations, and three are what I call ‘mobile sound walks’. This thesis chronicles the practical and theoretical research that has been undertaken in conjunction with, and in support of, the creation of a portfolio of original works. To this end, the work presented here concentrates on developing prototypes from existing work in the domains of oral history and sonic arts as steps toward a more fully-fledged system for geolocative oral histories. The focus for this work is largely technical and theoretical, since to also engage in further fieldwork, research and composition within the domains of oral history and sonic arts would likely extend this project far beyond the reasonable scope of a masters-level project. This dissertation explores the area of mobile phone apps in relation to oral history, particularly the potential that they have for further contextualising oral narratives by presenting them in the physical environments to which they relate, as part of a 'curated' sonic experience. The online world presents us with diverse educational applications and archives, while, more recently, iPhone and Android apps have been released that are tied in with heritage and popular historical themes. Within museums, for example, we find the presence of touch screen computers and the use of digital reconstructions. Within the last 15-20 years, digital technology has become ubiquitous as a component of how history is presented in the public domain.
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