Neil Spencer Bruce

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Building a sound map

Neil Bruce

Background

I have always loved sound maps, I fondly remember one of the first I came across many years ago, Soundtransit.nl (sadly no longer live, but you can visit it through the awesome Wayback Machine archive site).

Soundtransit enabled you to search for user uploaded soundscape recordings and then plot a soundscape journey around the world. You could select stopovers at the locations where soundscape recordings had been uploaded and then the site would assemble a unique sonic voyage for you.

Once you had created your sound transit, you could download the sound file, see a map of the journey or share it. I spent many hours creating sound transits and was happy to have been able to contribute some of my field recordings to the project.

During my PhD at the University of Salford, I also had some involvement in the Sounds Around You project, a sound mapping project which set out to collect user submitted sounds from around the world, with the aim of examining how soundscapes make us feel. I am glad to see as of writing this post that the site is still live and there are a large number of recordings still being contributed.

Once you start digging you discover that there are a range of fantastic sound maps out there, and sound mapping feels like a great way to engage listeners in soundscape research, but also soundscape exploration. One of the most ambitious, in my opinion, is the Radio Aporee project which (to my surprise!) Has been running since 2000. It is a global soundmap radio station which is dedicated to ‘field recording, phonography and the art of listening’, well worth checking out, and of course submitting your sounds to!

With a love of sound and of geography, I had always wanted to create my own map. Whilst working on my up coming ‘World Soundscapes’ library, I decided now was the time to build one. You can view my map by clicking here. This is an on going project and one that I plan to continue to contribute to for the rest of my days, creating not only a sound map of my recordings, but also a sonic diary of my life.

Building a sound map With Google Maps

With my coding days well behind me, I was looking for a simple solution which I could implement on my website. I currently use Squarespace as my web provider so I needed something which would work with this platform. The first place I tried was Google Maps.

Creating a sound map with Google Maps is very straight forward. 

Go to Google My Maps https://www.google.com/maps/d/

1) Select ‘Create A New Map’.

2) Give your map name by editing the map title and description (you will place the embed code here later).

3) Click on ‘Untitled Layer’ and name this.

4) On the search bar, locate the place of your first sound recording.

5) Select the ‘marker’ button and then pin point the location of where you would like your sound marker to go.

6) You will be prompted to give your marker a name, and it will then appear in the list on the right hand box (See above).

Adding a sound.

Currently, Google maps only supports uploading of images natively to the map. To add sounds you will need to use a third party host, such as SoundCloud or Disco, this is because you will need to add a playback link which they provide to the description box for the marker on the Google map.

  1. Once you have a file on SoundCloud, select the ‘Share’ button and copy the link (See below)

  2. You then need to insert the link in to the description box in you Google Map, under the title.

  3. Users will then be able to click on the link and hear the track via SoundCloud in another window.

  4. If you click on the picture icon, you can also add pictures to go along with your marker.

  5. Once you are done, you can then embed the map on your website page.

Setting up a sound map in Google My Maps, is very straightforward and free….

But…. 

Personally, I don’t like the fact you have to open the sound link in SoundCloud on another page, I wanted to be able to play the sound clips from the map itself. 

For this reason I did not use Google My Maps for my sound map.

Instead I used Squarespace’s built in map block and an additional plug-in called Advanced Map Block from SquareWebsites.

Whilst this was a paid for plug-in, the benefits and the functionality meant that I could achieve what I wanted, quickly and easily. Primarily, the ability to click on a marker and have the sound file embedded in the marker description so the user could play it, whilst still remaining on the map page.


Building a sound map with Squarespace and Advanced Map Block

Installing the Advance Map Block plug-in was quite simple, after purchasing the plug-in, moments later SquareWebsites emailed some code which I had to insert in the code into Footer Injections on my Squarespace site.

The code was pasted in to the following location :

Settings->Advanced->Code Injection->Footer Injections

Then it was just a case of adding a Squarespace Map Block to a page. 

When editing this map block with the plug-in installed there are a range of new functions which were previously unavailable.

For the the sound map, a collection was required to store the data for the map.

This could either be a Gallery, Blog or Events Collection. I chose the Blog option as it seemed to be the most flexible for what I needed, and (I think) it is the only collection which enabled you to paste code into.

With a collection set up, it then needs to be enabled in the Settings->Multiple of the map block.


It is then possible to choose what you wish to display with the marker, by going to Settings->Markers

For my map, I chose to display Item Excerpt and Item Image. 

The next stage was to start creating some blog posts.

For each sound clip, I added :

  • Title (although this wasn’t used by the map it makes it easier to see when you view the list of your blog posts in Squarespace)

  • Excerpt - This is where I pasted the embed code from Disco (Soundcloud or whatever you are using). The embedded data contains the player and the title, artist etc, so that is why there was no need to add anything else to the blog post.

  • Thumbnail Image - This was to display an image related to the soundscape. I could have added this in Disco as a song cover, but I found this method worked better for me.

With the Advanced Map Block you can also add in a map colour scheme of your choosing from Snazzy Maps which is a great additional function to allow you to customise the look of the map. You can also categorise makers, something which I haven’t tried but plan to in the future as I think this will make navigating the sound map easier as it grows over time.

And there you have it, a fairly straight forward process, and one which has enabled me finally to achieve my dream of creating my own personal sound map, which will now become my own personal sound diary for my field recordings and sonic life!

Thanks to Michael Mashai from SquareWebsites who was extremely helpful and patient with some questions that I had around implementation.


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I hope that you found this article useful and enjoy my blog, podcast and YouTube channel. I’m always happy to share my thoughts and to help others as much as I can and I will never charge for my blog content. Having said that, I truly appreciate when someone supports me in return for the time it takes to write articles, produce podcasts and videos, where I share my years of work and experience with you.

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Peace

Neil

World Soundscapes // Sound Map