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"Sound maps are boring. Why? I would argue it's because they've become stuck in a rut that began when the idea of 'sound map' became synonymous with online, Google API-based or other forms of point-and-click, CD-ROM era interface design. If we want sound maps to become less boring, this needs to stop. But how do we as sound artists (or would-be 'sound cartographers') break free of the point-and-click model? "

""Sound maps contain sound records associated with specific geographical points. They are indicated on the map by visible markers through which you have access to playback controls for sound recordings, often they are accompanied by content in the form of texts and images. They tend to be collective and collaborative projects, possibly because they represent territories and regions that are home to communities that are frequently constituted in terms of observation. These often become fundamental factors regarding conceptualizations and content that the maps incorporate, which is why their participation becomes important, as well as for the production of audible and informative content that the map includes.""

Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, while general urban sounds cannot be easily captured at city scale. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we propose a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures. We propose the first urban sound dictionary and compare it to the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours is experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offers wider geographic coverage. From picture tags, we then study the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. We learn that streets with music sounds are associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, while those with human sounds are associated with joy or surprise. Finally, we study the relationship between soundscapes and people's perceptions and, in so doing, we are able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm, and exciting.Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.

"In this project I continue to use creative methods for understanding and interpreting how listening to everyday sounds and soundscapes function as sources or triggers for the imagination*. This involves investigating the roles sound and listening play in visualisation through associative, emotional and memory responses as cognitive functions. In particular, my interest is in understanding how the qualities of these functions change as we age and what can be done to exercise our imagination. In the context of Sounds of our Cities we could sum this up in a few basic questions… one, what happens to our active childhood imaginations as we get older? Two, how do the sounds of Krottegem in Roeselare contribute to how people imagine their neighbourhood? And three, can this method be used for citizens and planners in imagining new ways to understand their city space?"

"Manual for Acoustic Planning and Urban Sound Design (MAP) is a public artwork based on working for one year within the city council in the experimental role of Dublin City Acoustic Planner & Urban Sound Designer, negotiating the projects' agenda and workflow in response to how this concept is received internally within the council. This project emphasizes a dematerialized practice through which practical outputs (in the form of public sound installations) emerge as residual artifacts that are encountered as design prototypes executed within (or even by) the council itself. This approach opens new channels for the city - as an institution - to engender a sense of responsibility and possibility regarding this mode of working with sound in the urban context as an extension of existing planning and design processes."

radio aporee ::: maps has started 2006, based on former artistic research on mapping, spatial conditions and the navigation between the real and the virtual. It develops from the insight that it is basically impossible to map the complexity of todays public spaces. Against the background of an increasing awareness of spatial aspects in media and the popularity and presence of visual geographies like google maps, the idea was to connect sound and space, and to create a cartography which focusses solely on sound, and open it to the public as a collaborative project. Meanwhile it contains 1000s of recordings from numerous urban, rural and natural environments, showing the sonic complexity of these environments, as well as the different perception and artistic perspectives related to sound, space and places. furthermore, it's an exciting playground for experiments with sound and mobile media.

"Pushing off from experiences in which music hails its listener in terms of communal belonging, this essay tries to productively shift our attention towards the queerness of sound itself, as both an agent and a solvent of the political experience of antagonism encountered when identification claims us (or fails to claim to us). Sound- not music but the raw immanence of sounds we cannot identify- can let us hear what is not yet locatable on the available maps of identity. Hearing the queerness of sound might help us echo-locate the edges of subjection, and encounter its ontological outside."

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way-by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

"The format of 'Path of Awareness_Elephant and Castle' explores an individual's personal experience of space through walking, particularly the interplay between sound event (footsteps) and surrounding architecture, influenced by the constantly changing interactions in the environment. A route created around the college of communication offers numerous opportunities to engage with the city's dynamics. Walking itself, the sonic character of footwear, the walkability of this urban habitat, as well as its architectural and atmospheric qualities are all major features of this soundwalk. My soundful shoes become instruments, soloists in the space, creating a dialogue with the surroundings and situating us sonically in the places we walk."

"Sound maps of rivers and songs for cicadas are two examples of a new kind of music inspired by 19th-century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. Inventing his own resonator, the scientist broke down the frequencies of tonal sounds, indirectly showing music as the gathering of disparate elements in space. Foot Notes: On the Sensations of Tone, currently on view at apexart, takes Helmholtz as its patron saint of ecologically minded sound art, with nine practitioners presenting their own experiments with unconventional music."

The London Sound Survey collects the sounds of everyday public life throughout London and compiles past accounts to show how the sound environment has changed.

What kinds of sounds can you find in New York City? With sound-seeker, you can zoom, pan and search for sounds with interactive satellite photos or detailed maps.

Cities and Memory is a sound project that attempts to record both the present reality of a place, but also its imagined, alternative counterpart - remixing the world, one sound at at time. Every faithful field recording document here is accompanied by a reworking, a processing or an interpretation that imagines that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. The listener can choose to explore locations through their actual sounds, or explore interpretations of what those places could be - or to flip between the two different sound worlds at leisure.

This a travel guide to our Sound World - listing places where what you hear is an important part of the experience. I'm very interested in suggestions for possible places with interesting sounds and other acoustic phenomena. Find places either via the soundmap, this list of all sites, via a search or click on the Tag Cloud."

Sound map by Peter Cusack

"Almost 200 recordings of international protests are now archived in an online sound map that spans over two decades."

"Soundcities is an online database of the thousands of sounds from around the world and you can visit the various cities and create soundmaps. "

Soundcities was the first online open source database of city sounds and soundmaps from around the world, using found sounds and field recording. There are now thousands of sounds from around the world on the website. The concept started in 1995 with various iterations. In 1996 Stanza devised the term soundmaps and initiated the various works that developed into soundcities.com. Stanza's interactive soundmaps have been online since 2000 and the Soundcities database since 2004. This project allows the audience the possibility to remix the hundreds of samples recorded from cities around the world in an online database. The sounds can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. The Database is also open so anyone can upload sounds they collect from world cities, thereby making a contribution to the project and making an online sounds archive.

"Those of you sonically inclined might be interested in the latest weekend challenge from Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet Junto project: "Read a map of the San Andreas Fault as if it were a graphic notation score," and then post the acoustic results to Soundcloud."

"The digital movies shown on this page are part of the research and production of a new permanent sound sculpture for the entrance hall of MAXXI in Rome called Sonic Mappings that opened on October 23, initially as part of a new exhibition called Open Museum, Open City. These Acoustical Visions were made at some of the sites in Rome where I was making audio recordings for Sonic Mappings and now part of the permanent collection of MAXXI."