Professor Michele Koppes & Associate Professor of Teaching Siobhan Wittig McPhee, Geography
The Vancouver Soundscape Mapping Project builds on the city’s foundational role in soundscape studies by creating an interactive, publicly-accessible sonic map and archive that extends the longitudinal acoustic record begun by the World Soundscape Project (WSP) in the 1970s. By revisiting 30+ recording locations across Vancouver that were documented by the WSP and revisited in subsequent decades, the project will reveal patterns of urban transformation over the last 50 years, capturing not only technical indicators like gentrification and environmental stress but also how these changes are differentially experienced by Vancouver’s diverse communities. Having secured access to Dr. Barry Truax’s WSP catalogue containing over 220 recordings, the team has begun geocoding historical recording locations and now seeks funding to hire a computational web designer to build an interactive mapping platform that will host the archive, serve as a pedagogical tool for geography classrooms, and invite community contributions to create a living archive of the city’s evolving acoustic character.
Digital Scholarship in the Arts (DiSA) RA Sara Deutscher provided comprehensive technical in kind support for developing the interactive soundscape interface, including trialling appropriate code for integrating geocoded data with audio files, implementing responsive website design, developing metadata schemas for recording information and contextual details, and creating interactive information windows that display layered data about each site while enabling community contributions.