CITY SOUND MAP | FIELD OF STUDY |
Mapping My project aims to explore the possibilities of bridging the gap between public space and personal space, inviting its users to experience their own auditory sense of place.
As my project explores the relationship between sound and space, part of my investigation included mapping systems. During the development of my methodology, I was confronted with a series of questions that I had to answer to, so as to make the visual reproduction readable and the presentation successful. The problem was to represent sound in space in an accurate manner, as sound is not visual whereas the map is two-dimensional, also maps are static while sound is highly dynamic. In order to solve these issues it was essential to look at a series of maps and their different representations, studying the usual way adopted to reproduce space. Being aware that the purpose of cartographic representation is to communicate to the user, the information that the map maker has encoded in the map, I had to look for graphical solutions that were fitting my purpose. In an age of information overload, the map has become a favourite interface for data sets of all types, geographic and otherwise. A map embodies the vision of a place that
we may never have seen, or shows a previously unseen pattern of things we thought we knew intimately (Owen 2008, p.8). Much more than just functional instruments or aids to fixing destinations and following routes, maps are bearers of urban meaning and character: so the map becomes to some extent the territory. (Abrams, Hall 2006, p.148). Cartography is indeed a creative intervention in urban space, shaping both the physical city and the urban life peformed there. In his theory of the DĂŠrive, the founder of the Situationist International Movement, Guy Debord quotes the sociologist Paul Henry Chombart de Lauwe: 'an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors but also by the image that its inhabitants have of it' (Abrams, Hall 2006, p.201). My project aims in fact to explore the possibilities of bridging the gap between public space and personal space, inviting users to experience their own auditory sense of place.