An Imaginary BART Map makes the rounds in the blogs
My friend Nico wrote a post about a map I made (many thanks Nico!), which led to a small flurry of internet activity. There’s something about transit diagrams that can really tap into people’s imaginations. And in true Web 2.0 form, a map can provoke a range of opinions and emotional responses. Have a look at Laughing Squid, Muni Diaries, Mission Mission, and SFBay.ca. I host this map on my site and it looks a lot better there. (Someday, I’ll consolidate these sites, but not today.) I originally posted this update/shout-out on the Spatial History Project blog.
No Little Plans: Exploring Rapid Transit Development Through the Lens of Plan Design
Below are slides I presented at the NACIS Annual Meeting in Madison, WI on October 14, 2011, and a write-up to accompany it. This talk discusses themes from my Master’s thesis, completed and published earlier this year. Electronic access to this thesis can be found here via the San José Library Catalog.
TITLE SLIDE
The research project I’m going to discuss today began with my discovery of the original plan for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (commonly referred to by its acronym, BART). Published in 1956, 16 years before the system first went into operation, the plan seemed to me, at the time, to capture a sense of unbridled optimism. The massive region-wide system of modern trains, depicted in well-designed maps and with stylish illustrations, embodied a confidence in technology to shape the rapidly changing post-war city. Poring over its pages, I felt a connection to a moment in the history of the Bay Area, and a moment in the history of urban transportation in the US. Additionally as a frequent patron of today’s BART system, I’ve had ample opportunity to contrast the daring, massive plan and the considerably less massive BART system that managed to be built. Even in its only partially-realized form, BART seems a complete anomaly: high-tech public transportation on the west coast of the United States, a land where the private automobile is by far the preferred transportation mode. Perhaps even more remarkably, BART is one of a handful of unlikely rapid transit systems built in the United States and Canada in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when transit continued to lose patrons to private automobiles and public support for new transit projects withered.
NO LITTLE PLANS
The title of my thesis and today’s talk refers to Daniel Burnham’s famous quote, which I’ve included here. Burnham is famous for his epic Plan of Chicago, from 1909. It seems Burnham realized that the grander the vision, the more dramatic its proposed changes to the urban environment, the more a cautious public needed to be assured of its merits. Addressing the BART Board of Directors in 1961, BART’s first Board President, Adrien Falk, appears to follow closely in Burnham’s footsteps. I’m not sure if he was conscious of this or not, but the similarity in sentiment is striking.
I present these two statements together because plans, the visions of the city’s future both pragmatic and fantastic, matter. Rapid transit advocates at midcentury, in particular, needed to speak with firm conviction for their proposals, and rapid transit plans provided an ideal medium to express big, sweeping visions for the future, and rally support from a wary public.
ENVISIONING THE BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEM-1
They developed documents, comprised of text, images, and maps in support of an idea. They chose to include some images, and not others. Their maps express variables in support of their arguments and suppress elements that do not. The process of inclusion and exclusion is essential to any act of design and assures that the resulting works are never neutral documents; these plans express the desires and aspirations of their authors and patrons, their visions for the city.
ENVISIONING THE BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEM-2
BART occupies a central role in my research due to the significance assigned to it by contemporary observers. The development of BART has been characterized as a pivotal moment in the history of rapid transit planning, and one of the most publicized in recent decades.
AND THE RENEWAL OF RAPID TRANSIT IN THE UNITED STATES-1
I follow the American Public Transportation Association’s definition of rapid transit, which distinguishes it from other rail-based transit modes, like streetcars and light rail, and commuter rail systems often pulled by diesel locomotives. The main features of rapid transit (also known as metropolitan railways, or metros, subways, and elevated trains) are exclusive rights-of-way, multi-car trains, and power supplied by electric current, allowing for operation in tunnels and high acceleration. When BART began carrying passengers in 1972, it was the first rapid transit project of its scale and scope to be built from the ground up in the United States since the venerable systems of Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York half a century earlier.
AND THE RENEWAL OF RAPID TRANSIT IN THE UNITED STATES-2
However my research does not focus solely on the BART system’s design. I had a sense that the BART plan was a potentially extraordinary document, at least partially responsible for the unlikely renewal in rapid transit development that emerged in a small number of cities in the US and Canada in the post-war era. To calibrate this perception to reality, and better understand how this renewal in rapid transit development came to be, I needed to place the BART plan in a broader context. I sought out similar plans produced before and after the BART plan for several cities in the US and Canada. While the BART project was ambitious, it was not the only one in its era, and its planners did not work in a vacuum.
TIMELINE ONE
With the next two slides, I greatly condense nearly a century into simple timelines to situate these plans in relation to each other, and provide an overview of the broader historical events and trends in transportation. Developments in transportation technology, primarily the popular adoption of the private automobile, and the financial strains incurred during the First World War, the Depression, and World War Two, effectively hobbled public transportation generally, and made the development of new, expensive subway systems a tough political sell.
In its earliest days, however, rapid transit was a potentially lucrative business opportunity, providing a faster alternative to street-level transit. The development of New York’s elevated trains and subsequently the Interborough Rapid Transit subway, completed in 1904, were strictly business ventures.
The introduction of the mass-produced automobile, of course, changed everything. For the first time in its existence, rapid transit technology had a true competitor. As the 20th century progressed, transit shifted hands from privately-owned, for-profit operations to public franchises, operated like public utilities, and increasingly unable to recoup revenues at the fare box.
World War One led to inflation and a scarcity of materials and labor, causing the costs of rapid transit projects to skyrocket. Cincinnati’s rapid transit project went bankrupt during this time and was eventually buried under an expressway.
The Depression deprived transit operators of downtown commuters as unemployment reached unprecedented levels.
World War Two reinvigorated industrial production and employment while limiting the use of automobiles. Transit ridership spiked for the last time during these years, but aging transit systems essentially buckled under the strain.
Meanwhile increasing numbers of motorists on urban roadways created worsening traffic in cities across the US. Once wartime restrictions on car production and petroleum consumption were lifted, the numbers of cars on the road soon outpaced highway construction.
TIMELINE TWO
These are the circumstances that the planners of BART and other projects in the US and Canada faced. Just as automakers returned to peacetime production and construction commenced on the Interstate Freeway System, these plans promised to save the public transit option, and reverse the overall decline in patronage from its peak in 1925. This formidable task would require persuasive plan-making. This work seeks to shed light on how rapid transit proponents appealed to their audiences with their proposals. In addition to the BART plan of 1956, I’ve selected five plans predating the BART plan, and four published subsequently. This shows how they are aligned on the timeline.
LIST OF PLANS
And this lists the ten plans.
METHOD: ALTERNATE READINGS
These plans provide a lens through which to explore this period of rapid transit development. These plans were intended to be read as impassive documents produced by engineers–straight presentations of technological facts. Looking closely at how these plans are constructed–their packaging, choice of imagery, arguments, and the sequencing of the content–suggests there’s more to the story.
THE MAJOR FINDINGS
In my thesis, I review each plan in detail, drawing out larger themes that spanned all plans collectively, while also pointing to subtle differences tailored to suit the needs and interests of each patron city. Today I’ll focus on those larger themes and provide visual examples of each.
BART’s EXCEPTIONALITY TEMPERED
The excitement surrounding the early days of BART’s development are understandable, especially when encountering its epic original plan. The document’s dimensions span 22 inches wide by 17 inches tall. The utmost care was taken in its composition and design. However several of the other plans reviewed also went to great lengths to present an appealing vision for rapid transit, and lend credibility to the idea with numerous maps, charts, photographs, and illustrations. These works, in concert with the BART plan, helped make a broader renewal in rapid transit, such as it was, a reality. As this technology gradually reclaimed a precarious foothold in US cities, the plans produced to articulate them grew in size and in graphic complexity and sophistication.
SHIFTING VISUAL STRATEGIES
Early plans rely heavily on maps to reinforce ideas expressed in the text. Tasked with representing the virtues of the proposed systems, the resulting maps are visually dense and detailed, and in cases where larger formats are used, they envelope the viewer’s gaze and provide commanding viewpoints.
Amongst the plans reviewed, the BART plan perhaps carries this cartographical orientation to its most fully realized extent, providing numerous large maps packed with an array of data culled from governments and institutions lining the Bay Area.
The last two plans in the study break with their predecessors by providing a large number of striking architectural sketches and visualizations that conceptualize the near future with rapid transit woven into the urban fabric.
The role of firms in determining the visual strategies employed: De Leuw Cather vs. Parsons Brinckerhoff vs. Daniel Mann Johnson Mendenhall
A COMMON THEME: THE CURE FOR TRAFFIC
One theme remains constant across all the reviewed plans. Their authors maintain that increasing rush-hour automobile traffic posed the greatest threat to the proper functioning of an urban region. Coupled with this is the common assessment that existing surface transit systems were unable to ameliorate traffic problems on their own. All plans present rail rapid transit as a cost-effective solution to these problems. Several plans select photographs of grinding traffic congestion to emphasize this idea.
EMERGING WITH THE BART PLAN: THE REIMAGINED ROLE FOR RAPID TRANSIT
pt1: PRE-BART PLANS
Earlier plans focus on moving commuters comfortably and efficiently to downtown employment districts. Occasionally some mention of anticipated economic benefits to the area might be made. For the most part, the authors find it sufficient to market rapid transit as cost-effective transportation.
pt2: BART
The BART plan specifically articulates a connection between land use and transportation, providing the first regional land-use plan ever developed for the entire Bay Area region. The land-use plan both strengthens and is strengthened by the rapid transit system.
pt3: POST-BART PLANS
The plans produced after the BART plan follow suit in enumerating the ways that rapid transit could positively shape the urban environment, though in each case, the message is tailored to the specific city.
In Washington, DC, rapid transit could ease congestion and provide an orderly pattern of urban development necessary to maintain the prestige of a world capital.
Atlanta’s rapid transit proponents sought support for their system by extolling numerous benefits to economic growth.
In Baltimore, rapid transit was presented as a powerful tool for urban renewal, and a cure for the hardships endured by an aging mid-Atlantic port.
Finally, the Los Angeles plan of 1968 perhaps points to the limits of using rapid transit as a tool to shape the future development of the city. A nostalgia for Los Angeles’s earlier streetcar era introduces the plan, and the allure of sleek trains carrying passengers into the future concludes it.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
I hope that what I have presented today speaks on some level to the value of revisiting the plans of years past to better understand how today’s cities came to be. The scope of my research project placed limits on the amount of material I was able to review. Future work could ideally–
Look more broadly at rapid transit planning, from 1860s London to the present. What plan-making conventions remained a constant, while others changed with the times?
Look at transit planning generally, across modes. Do different design tactics indicate different priorities, and is this driven by the chosen transportation technology?
Thank you for listening.
2010 in review, and a new website in the works
2010 was a mildly eventful year on this blog, as WordPress.com has summarized below. With the new year, I’m launching a new website that will allow me to better display my cartographic works: Jake Coolidge Cartography. Though the summary below is flattering, as it turns out I’m not really a blogger. And though I’m not truly a web designer either, it’s fun to have the creative control to make divs as ridiculously wide as I like. Within the next couple of months, I will be gradually moving works onto the site, while maintaining a non-multimedia version of this blog. I apologize in advance for any broken links on the new site. And now, a kind word from WordPress:
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 7 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 13 posts. There were 78 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1gb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was May 12th with 93 views. The most popular post that day was I [bike] Oakland 2010 Bikeways Map.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were youcanbikethere.com, mail.yahoo.com, google.com, linkedin.com, and mail.live.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for cartography, anish kapoor sketches, jake coolidge, arthur h robinson, and cartography art.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
I [bike] Oakland 2010 Bikeways Map May 2010
7 comments
Arthur H. Robinson: A Look at a Career October 2009
Cacophonography: A Community-Generated Map of Sound Powered by Pervasive Computing January 2010
1 comment
Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois August 2009
About Jake Coolidge August 2009
1 comment
A map of the Oaklavía route
Walk Oakland Bike Oakland (WOBO) is orchestrating a car-free Sunday Streets-style reclamation of several roadways in downtown Oakland, from Jack London Square to Grand Ave, with additional car-free branches on 7th St out to the Kinetic Arts Center, at Brush St, and Grand Ave out to Bay Pl, on Sunday, June 27th. Mark your calendars and read more about it here. It should be a great time. The typically bustling streets will be closed to all automobile traffic; pedestrians, cyclists, roller skaters and anyone else non-motorized will have the run of them for four hours, accompanied by live music and other goings-on.
The City of Oakland’s Bike/Ped Program contributed a map of the route for a large poster (recently displayed during Bike to Work Day) and a round of postcards promoting the event; I’m pleased to have made a modest contribution to the cause by designing it. I’ve included a web-friendly version below.
I [bike] Oakland 2010 Bikeways Map
May is Bike Month, and the Oakland Bicycle and Pedestrian Facilities Program is pleased to roll out the first-ever free map of Oakland bikeways. With an initial print run numbering over 10,000, we’ll be distributing the map at bike shops throughout Oakland and in grab bags on Bike to Work Day, this Thursday, May 13th. Come see us Thursday morning at Oakland City Hall Plaza, grab a stack of pancakes, and pick up your own copy of the map. Learn more about this year’s Bike to Work Day festivities here and download a pdf version of the map from this page.
This is the first map I’ve designed to be professionally printed and folded, and I’m quite pleased with the outcome, to say the least. You have to hold one in your hands to get the full effect, but I’ve attempted to document some elements of its design and the end product below. My supervisor, Jason, instigated the project, and having pored over many bikemaps himself over the years, had some early layout ideas that provided me with a good starting point. My other supervisor, Jennifer, assisted with some of the non-map layout and secured the contract with the printer. Both provided crucial feedback during the design process, as did the Oakland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, the San Francisco Bay Trail Project and Bike/Ped programs in Berkeley and Emeryville. Finally, the staff at Lithographic Reproductions, Inc. were terrific.
Excerpts from the digital file:
Photographs of the printed map:
(above is a printer’s proof provided by Lithographic Reproductions, printed on one side and not yet trimmed/folded)
The map measures 3″ x 5″ when folded: very pocket-compatible.
Unfolding the map first reveals a word from the program explaining the types of bikeways found on the map and the network of destinations supported by our wayfinding sign system.
Fully unfolded, the map extent includes Berkeley and Emeryville on the left, spanning to the Eastlake neighborhood on the right (the map has been rotated 50 degrees, so that North points up and to the left). The city continues on the other side of the map, from Eastlake to San Leandro. The right-most 5 inches on one side overlap the left-most 5 inches on the other side, to reduce having to flip the map over.
The map scale is 1:24,000. At this scale, 5″ is apx 1.9 mi, and 3″ is apx 1.1 mi. With my scale bars, I call attention to this, so the map viewer can use the folds of the map to quickly estimate cross-town distances. I don’t think I’ve seen this on a map before, and I’m curious if cyclists will make use of this feature. And yes, I included a metric scale as well.
Current Thesis Proposal
I find examples of work done by other graduate students particularly helpful in framing my own perspectives on research. With that in mind, I’m placing a pdf of my current thesis proposal to aid those who are either thinking about topics, or how to structure a proposal. Clearly, it’s a proposal geared towards historical geography and has a decidedly qualitative orientation. No one proposal format will work for all types of research, even within geography. Regardless, hopefully other geography graduate students can benefit from this humble proposal:
New audio for a new robot drawing
This past Saturday (Feb. 20, 2010), the Worth Ryder Gallery hosted a closing reception for the Cynosure show, which placed a solid collection of works from Bay Area galleries together under one roof. Peter and I kicked off the performances for the afternoon, with two robots drawing to about 25 minutes of bass loops and drones culled from recent studio works and arranged especially for this performance–a debut of completely original material. Generally the sound was more melodic, and “riffs” were more easily discernible, although washes of atmospheric loops under-girded much of the set. I kept the signal chain much simpler: two loop pedals in series plus the bass guitar, feeding to one input on Peter’s newest sound table, most recently deployed at the Interaction 10 Conference in Savannah, Georgia. Peter documented the set with video; when I get a copy I will post an excerpt here.
Following our performance, Mark Dukes read from his forthcoming book, which should be incredible when completed; Justin Hoover and Jonathan Grover revisited their Push Red Pull piece, integrating spoken word into the sparring and affecting Foucault’s robots; and two carrier pigeons were released into the early evening skies above Berkeley. My hat’s off to curator Anu Vikram for putting a great show together.
This is more like it: The Smalls Street Sounds
To briefly follow up on an earlier post describing the hypothetical Cacophonography project, I encourage anyone interested in the intersection in sound and geography to check out this site: StreetSounds. This web application has many of the features I envisioned. It does not provide an interactive mix of simultaneous sounds, but I don’t find this surprising, really. I will probably have to take the initiative on that one, perhaps making a mash-up some of the “geo-sounds” increasingly available through sites like StreetSounds and SoundTransit.nl (among others). In the meantime, my hat’s off to those making situated sounds on the web a reality.
Drawing Under the Influence (of Sound): Foucault, Grover, and Coolidge at Micaela Gallery
The third installment of our collaboration took place last night at Micaela Gallery, and all involved agree that this is the best result yet. Specific refinements made this iteration better extend ideas explored in September at the LAB’s art.tech festival. Thanks to the know-how and gear-requisitioning of Jonathan Grover, the drawing table is equipped with a pair of transducers, turning its surface into a hi-fi resonator. Peter Foucault, the visual artist whose work is on display this month at Micaela and the creator of this drawing project, made new enhancements to the robot that heightened its sound sensitivity. For my part, my audio performance mashed loops and tracks culled from my studio work with bass-drone riffs, yielding new syntheses for three compositions.
Note: slide #17 makes a reference to a flash demo, currently unavailable. I plan to host multimedia on a new website in the near future.
Pushpins riddle a tattered world map in an office, each pin representing the travel destinations of co-workers. A smartphone user calls up a map of coastal Somalia on Google Earth and begins exploring the Wikipedia entries posted there. A person listens to a recording of a gurgling stream, bird song, and wind rustling the leaves of trees, and is reminded of a summer picnic enjoyed years before. These experiences might seem only tenuously related at first glance, but a closer look reveals an opportunity to link these experiences to both create and listen to our locally situated sounds in a web map application, distributed across platforms, including desktop computers and smartphones. What would a map sound like if people placed their recorded sounds on it, like pushpins? What if we could hear those pushpins, or sound-points, playing simultaneously, just as the map allows us to view those locations simultaneously? The result might be a riot of sounds, or a mild chorus of disparate murmurs; in any case, each portion of the map would render its own mix based on what previous visitors left there for us to discover. We might consider this a geography of cacophony, or a Cacophonography. What sorts of potential sonic experiences, cultural knowledges, and geographic perspectives might result from the unique mix of sounds presented by each locality? And if the din proves too unruly, how can we interact with the map and the data to focus on specific types of sounds, or specific places?
Cacophonography is a conceptual project that seeks to imagine the possibilities of a community-generated, web-based map of sound. Underpinning this map application are the ever-expanding capabilities of the latest mobile computing technologies, chief among them smartphones, both for collecting sound recordings associated with specific map coordinates, and for viewing/listening to maps associated with the user’s location. It should be noted, however, that ownership of a smartphone or other mobile computer is not required to use the application. The application is designed to be by and for the community; it will be freely available to anyone with an internet connection regardless of their cell-phone usage, it will be based on open-source geographic data, and its content will be community-monitored. This paper will discuss related research in associating sound with place, efforts to map sound, design and interface considerations, anticipated challenges and constraints, and at the close, speculations on the sorts of geographic perspectives the system could provide if implemented.
To map sound is to situate it in space. Just as places vary in terms of local climate, population density, architectural styles, among countless others, so too do they vary in how they sound, or in the types, frequencies, and intensities of sounds that occur there. Much of the literature on the relationship of sound and place has been spearheaded by landscape architects, environmental designers, and urban planners who have sought to improve urban spaces by understanding how ambient sounds either enhance or diminish their quality. Designers understand sound to be an important component of the information field of urban environments—the means by which we perceive a place to be either relatively inviting or unappealing (Salingaros 1999). Inviting places will be well-used and hostile environments avoided; the ambient sounds permeating these places help to shape this perception. Urban ambient sounds combine to create the urban soundscape, an idea first put forward in 1969 by R.M. Schafer in The New Soundscape (Botteldooren 2006, Guastavino 2006). Since this early work, research on soundscapes has proliferated, including analyses based on sound data collected in the field, at times referred to as noise surveying (Mydlarz, Drumm, & Cox 2008). Once the soundscape of a particular area is understood, the ultimate goal of sonically-oriented planners is to compose new, less stressful soundscapes (Raimbault & Dubois 2005). Contemporary examples have made an explicit connection between sounds and their mapped locations for the purpose of urban planning and design. Architect J. Cohen touches on the efforts of M.J. Shiffer to build multimedia GIS applications that can “accurately simulate traffic noise and model the effect of sound-screening devices or that simulate aircraft sound from various locations, accounting for wind and other variables” (2004, n. p.). A project at the University of Salford, Manchester, UK, is building a web-map of sound by compiling participants’ recordings, captured using a mobile phone, and asking the participants to describe how that sound made them feel (Mydlarz 2009). The work of these urban planners and designers begins to suggest what sorts of information we can glean from a sound map: both the locations and distribution of sounds and their qualitative associations.
Others are interested in what sound can tell us about place in a more broad sense. Sound is complex and evocative; the opportunities afforded by the internet to share sound and map it as a means of documenting the rich variety and diversity of urban experience have inspired a number of interesting applications to date. According to the authors of NYSoundmap.org, “Maps are tools for understanding the world from different points of view—political, cultural, personal, and historical…(NYSoundmap) is at once a historical record and a subjective representation of the city. It is what each user wishes it to be and it is ever growing, ever changing and totally interactive” (n.d., n.p.). Produced by members of the New York Society for Acoustical Ecology, NYSoundmap.org provides a variety of sound locations peppered throughout the city, using Google Maps as a base map. When an icon is clicked, a marker appears with a small amount of metadata, and the map user can press play on the default media player to listen to the associated mp3 or aiff file. In addition to the NYSoundmap, a basic internet search using the terms “sound map” and “sonic map” produces several hits; among them is a sonic map of the island of Capri (radioanacapri.com), a compilation of field recordings produced by the artist Diego Cortez and the Architectural Association Independent Radio, London (n.d.). A particularly useful feature of this web application is a pre-defined list of tags that the user can select to filter for certain types of recordings, i.e. “transport,” and “night/evening.” The map itself is quite minimal, composed of horizontal lines that mimic music notation and refer merely to the island’s coastal outline; the sound-points become “notes” distributed across the island based on their relative locations. A graduate student in music at Queen’s University, Belfast, has created Soundpoints: Belfast, an immersive sound experience, or “locative media piece,” in which sounds collected at various locations throughout Belfast are triggered to play through a mobile phone based on the user’s current location as he or she strolls through a park; the path taken determines the sequence and juxtaposition of sounds experienced (Drury 2006). The application perhaps most removed from a tangible map is the SoundTransit project (soundtransit.nl), a collaboration of three Netherlands-based artists. Initially exhibited at the Museum De Paviljoens (Almere, NL), visitors to the website can “book a transit” by selecting an origin point, destination point, and up to five stopovers. The application then produces an “itinerary:” an mp3 comprised of sounds drawn from locations along the route, aligned linearly. Contributors from across the globe continuously add more field recordings with location details and metadata, expanding the application’s capabilities. Each of these web-based applications expresses an exuberance for the myriad sounds that permeate our world, coupled with a desire to relate them in some way to places, and in doing so, promote knowledge and interpretation of the nature of those places. Cacophonography shares this aim and seeks to build upon these applications by better collecting, sharing, and distributing those sounds in a location-based service context.
Cacophonography creates a web map application that passes sound data and associated coordinates and metadata tags to and from smartphones and desktop/laptop computers. Audio recorded in the field using a smartphone’s built-in microphone is then directly uploaded via a WiFi or cellular connection to the server, along with a GPS coordinate or cell-tower locational fix and any descriptive tags. Those using more conventional field recording equipment, or uploading other types of audio, can post audio to the map using a desktop or laptop computer connected to the internet, specifying the sound-point’s location and descriptive tags in the process. When a portion the map is then viewed at a particular zoom level, the server creates a mix of all the audio available in the map’s viewable extent, panning individual audio sources left and right based on the location of the sound-point relative to the extent, and streams this combined audio out to the user. The user can also choose to call up a descriptive tag cloud available in the extent and filter for specific sounds. Selecting an individual sound-point isolates that audio. Any changes to the map extent, by panning or zooming, has the potential to change the sound-points visible and their position relative to the extent frame, which also modifies the mix of sounds. Smartphone users see their current location on the map relative to nearby sound sources; moving from one place to another has the approximate effect of panning the map and changing the extent. With each change, the server recalculates the mix to send to the user. This aspect of the design may pose the greatest technical challenge, and would rely on a particularly robust cellular connection. Early implementations would likely experience interruptions in the audio stream while re-buffering occurs. Third-generation networks (“3G”) are increasingly able to handle larger data rates while expanding coverage areas; once released, 4G networks should be more than able to handle the Cacophonography interface (International Telecommunication Union 2005).
The smartphone application, or “app,” is an important component to the Cacophonography project. The high cost of mobile devices is an unfortunate reality of implementing pervasive computing applications, as is the exclusive control of cellular networks by a handful of private corporations. Earlier sound map projects with mobile functionality have relied on partnerships with software developers and mobile-phone providers to develop and distribute the applications that collect their participants’ multimedia and locative data. In the case of the Urban Tapestries project, which began in 2002, partners included Hewlett Packard Research labs, France Telecom R&D UK, and the Ordnance Survey (Proboscis 2008). Similarly, the Soundpoints: Belfast project was built upon the Mobile Bristol Toolkit developed by Hewlett Packard (Drury 2006). The Sound Around You project is developing Java-based software for low-end mobile phones with audio capture capabilities and a parallel app that can run on Windows Mobile 5.0+ (Mydlarz 2009). In contrast, Cacophonography would utilize the software development kits (SDKs) that have been released since 2008 for Apple’s iPhone and the Google Android mobile operating system. Recent analysis points to the increasing popularity and market share of these mobile operating systems over their competitors (Hansell 2009). Most promising is the rapidity with which apps for these operating systems can be developed, distributed, and updated, free of charge and directly to the user’s device. The hope is that more and more mobile device providers will follow the example these operating systems and similarly make apps built with SDKs freely available for download. Cacophonography could then operate on a larger number of mobile platforms.
Cacophonography utilizes OpenStreetMap.org as its base map data with a custom map style akin to those currently available and editable through the service provided by CloudMade (2009). Using open-source geographic data assures that the data will always be freely available and sharable. An added benefit in using this base map is the incredible flexibility in manipulating the cartographic appearance of the data. The Cacophonography interface would highlight those sound-points as bright, star-like points on a dark background. The “brighter” the map, the more data the user can anticipate handling in a particular area. When the selection of a particular sound-point, or a tag filter is applied, those points no longer audible would then dim (but not black out entirely). In this way, the relationship between the audio and the visual is further reinforced. Yet since Cacophonography is a map of sound, a manipulation of sound variables is central to the overall experience.
Just as visual variables like hue, saturation, and texture are manipulated in visual design, sound varies in a multitude of ways, offering opportunities for those who produce and manipulate sound, from musicians to acoustic engineers, to contribute to the infinite diversity of sonic experiences available to us. The addition of sound to a map presents specific design opportunities and constraints. Much of the cartographic research on the role of sound in maps and data visualization has focused on the difficult cognitive leap of making sound represent abstract data, with particular emphasis on making data visualization accessible for the sight-impaired (Zhao et al, 2008). Krygier (1994) first formally enumerated sound variables with regards to their application in multi-media maps, which were just beginning to be designed in larger numbers owing to advances in personal computing technology in the mid-1990s (Harrower 2004). Krygier’s approach to the problem is cartographic in nature, assessing the suitability of sound variables for handling either nominal or ordinal data, much like Bertin (1983) had earlier with visual variables. For example, the variable of pitch (the relative frequency of a sound) can be manipulated to express ordinal data, with low sounds representing low values, and high sounds, high values. In contrast, Cacophonography does not represent abstract data, and handles nominal data exclusively: each uploaded audio file is unique to a particular time and place.
Two sound variables in particular, however, can be manipulated to enhance the experience and create correlations between the map extent and the resulting audio stream. The map zoom level is one of the most important interactive features in the map interface. Zooming out from the map greatly increases the number of sound-points in the map extent, adding more and more audio to the stream. While this may be an interesting experience within a certain range of zoom levels, at a certain point the din could become a sort of white noise. Zoom levels are ordinal by nature and present an opportunity to determine the loudness of the audio stream based on zoom, loudness being one of the sound variables enumerated by Krygier (1994). Loudness increases as the user zooms in. Fully zoomed out to a worldwide extent, none of the sound-points visible are audible. The effect is analogous to the silence of near-earth orbit. Sound-points only begin to be barely audible at approximately the regional scale, in keeping with the analogy above, and from a practical standpoint. One can imagine the cacophony of the five boroughs of New York, with many audio sources simultaneously audible. The bird soaring above it would hear quite a range of sounds, all at a reduced level of loudness (the analogy works best if we subtract out the rushing winds of high altitudes). At the neighborhood zoom level, individual sound-points are clearly audible without becoming deafening. Some audio compression at the server end will be required to handle certain neighborhoods that have become dense with sound-points.
The location of sound can vary in two or three dimensional sound space, depending on the complexity of the system emitting the sound (ibid.). It is another variable that can be manipulated in the interface, though it requires (at minimum) stereo speakers, and even a simple left/right stereo experience presents severe limits to the type of variability attainable. In such a set-up, sound can be shifted from the left speaker to the right, but up/down and forward/back shifts are impossible. The interface will allow the user to perceive a sound-point shifting left to right as the map extent is similarly panned left to right, further reinforcing the relationship between the audio stream and the visual map.
As with any application that embraces the tenets of the “Web 2.0,” the Cacophonography project would need to address issues pertaining to copyright, privacy, and inappropriate content that arise when the anonymous multitudes are both the creators and consumers of the application’s content. At any given moment, thousands of audio and multimedia files are streaming, uploading, and downloading all over the globe, and copyright infringement remains a hot-button issue. It is therefore imperative that anyone sharing their audio with others via Cacophonography own the copyright of that audio. All users would create a free account with the service, and agree to terms of use at that time. At the time of account setup, users should also be provided with some basic guidelines in order to protect the privacy of themselves and others. GPS coordinates placed on the map can be accurate to a few meters or even less; users should keep this in mind when uploading audio associated geographically with their private residences. In general, audio should be captured in the public realm and not in the private domain. Similarly, users will also receive be notified of what constitutes inappropriate content upon account setup, and that policy violations will result in account termination and the deletion of offending audio files. It is ultimately up to the community to report inappropriate content so that site webmasters can delete the offending audio appropriately. Details related to community oversight and editing remain to be resolved; one option would follow the currently evolving Wikipedia model. Increasingly, edits to Wikipedia entries are less open to everyone equally, and many entries are protected with grace periods during which an experienced editor signs off on the edits proposed (N. Cohen 2009).
Cacophonography is a project that bases its audio data capture and distribution upon pervasive computing technologies—principle among them, smartphones and desktop/laptop computers connected to the internet. Simultaneously, it is a project that seeks to provide a broad forum for sound, from as many voices as possible. Technology-oriented projects must be cognizant of the deep divides that remain in our society in terms of access to technology. Cellular phones are becoming ubiquitous, but smartphones capable of handling an app like Cacophonography are not. Similarly, reliable access to the internet, and the acquired skills to use it, pose major challenges for disadvantaged communities (Thompson 2007). A full discussion of these challenges is beyond the scope of this paper, but future partnerships between the online community, community groups, libraries, and arts and education organizations may be able to bridge the divide by creating opportunities to both experience the map and to capture field audio using community-shared mobile recording equipment, GPS receivers, and/or mobile computers.
A question posed in the beginning of the paper asked: what sorts of potential sonic experiences, cultural knowledges, and geographic perspectives might result from the unique mix of sounds presented by each locality? What would it be like to “listen to” our communities beyond the confines of privately-owned mass-media channels? We can begin to answer that question by imagining a number of potential uses were such an application to become widely implemented. Local radio stations could mark their studio locations with a sound-point, making their contribution to the community mix. Spoken word and live music performances could be mapped and searchable. A band could provide a link on their website to their sound map: all locations associated with their recorded live performances, tracing connections to the sound, their set lists, and their tour itinerary. Audio blogs could trace the paths taken by their authors while recording the ambient soundscapes captured along the way. The number of descriptive tags for audio is potentially epic in its proportions, and could help us associate places with anything from blaring train horns, jackhammers, and gunshots to bustling markets, Saturday recreation league games, and flamenco dancing. Political action and social justice efforts could find geographic as well as sonic representation and a mass audience. These examples only begin to scratch the surface.
Another potential definition of Cacophonography is “dissonance writing.” When the web and the emerging technologies of pervasive computing deliver on a promise to democratize information and information access, the result will be a chaotic and vibrant mirror of our world. Too often, a map presents the voice of one or a few over the voices of the many. Cacophonography provides a forum to celebrate the multiple voices and perspectives of our urban spaces, while relating those voices geographically to their neighborhoods, regions, and the world.
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