On June 19th and 20th, as part of her Milieux-Hexagram residency, PhD candidate Amanda Gutiérrez [student, Concordia] held a public workshop at LePARC cluster, inviting members of Milieux, Hexagram, and the general public to design a soundwalk using an augmented reality (AR) platform collaboratively.
The project, Augmented Reality Sound as Collective Thinking, creates a shared space for sound design connected to sensitive cartographies (Cao, 2018), exploring the potential of geolocative sound in public spaces and the everyday acoustic environments experienced by gender-nonconforming and female-identified individuals.
Technology as a means of enhancing sensory perception
Ecosensing is the process – or practice – of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to environmental signals or ecological conditions, here explored through auditory settings. In a group, ecosensing enables us to approach technology thoughtfully, fostering the development of new technological skills, while considering its application in a direct relatioship with our environment, through a public soundwalk.
As a result, the workshop aimed to improve listening and embodiment, aligning the use of augmented reality sound design with wave technology and sensory experience. In this project, we learned that the technical aspects of sound geolocation in augmented reality (AR) were crucial for envisioning the collaborative creation of a soundwalk design.
Explanation and introduction of AR technology and soundwalking. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
Augmented Reality sound design as an expanded field
The workshop started by grounding ourselves in the space and discussing our everyday life experiences in terms of acoustic ecologies. After that, we planned a route around Concordia Campus and beyond, seeking out areas that emphasize pedestrian accessibility, sensory stimulation, and resonance. We began by tuning our ears through a deep listening exercise, taking as a reference Pauline Oliveros (2005) embodied practices.
As we traveled the route, we recorded its sounds. Eventually, we ended up in a park, reflecting on the sensory experience based on our subjective listening, expressed through our sensible cartographies. From this initial walk, we analyzed the route and developed the main idea for the collective design. This approach investigates the semiotics of public space through the sonic imagination of geolocating these sounds. Thus, exploring how public space is understood through the way we imagine and map sounds.
From this perspective, AR sound design calls for attentive listening that takes into account the cultural and social dimensions embedded in public space and its sensory environment. Exploring this connection, AR also coexists with the subjective implications of the participants, who interpret the codes embedded in the spatial cultural context while experiencing the sound design.
Deep listening attunes our ears to the sonic environment. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
Geolocative sound: a three-dimensional immersion
Geolocative sound –a recording tied to a specific location and triggered by a listener’s position – extends into three-dimensional space by tracing a virtual route that incorporates sensory inputs associated with immersive sound. The sounds are triggered by the mobile GPS on the cellphone and the user’s movements. This feature allows us to experience it both through the body and through digital data – embedded and translated via the AR interface. Here, sound acts as an extension that detects the user’s movement by identifying their GPS coordinates, enabling us to listen within the acoustic ecologies of the surroundings. What seems like a poetic metaphor reflects the functionality of augmented reality, which appears as a sonic palimpsest, blending the soundscape with geolocated sound design.
During this workshop, we designed and tested an immersive AR walk experience around this principle. While creating soundwalks, the group’s themes of interest guided the augmentation of public space sounds, including oral histories and sound field recordings of diverse environments. For the overall project architecture, I used the custom-made platform Echoes.app, which provides basic access to its web-based interface for creators.
Sensitive cartographies to trace the AR walk. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
Screenshot of the mapped AR sound design walk in the Echoes app interface.
Soundwalk methodologies in connection with AR
These research-creation methods are already integral to Amanda Gutierrez’s soundwalking practice, utilizing participatory techniques to foster collaborations grounded in local experiences. Therefore, more than half of her journey as a socially engaged artist stems from her roles as an activist, teaching artist, and researcher, which have expanded into the realm of media technologies. Augmented Reality as a tool of engagement helps us navigate public space by identifying connections between geographical elements and the content and meaning of their oral histories. These become accessible through the audio walk, which emerges from interviews and activist experiences.
AR was first explored in the early 1980s by the pioneering collective Manifest.AR. The group created the meaningful AR Art Manifesto and a dozen tactical media AR artworks geolocated in public spaces and strategic locations inside and outside museums. The artists’ collective also published significant academic articles that framed augmented reality as AR(t), a term coined by artist and scholar Rewa Wright in her seminal essay, Mobile Augmented Reality Art and the Politics of Re-assembly (2015). Wright delves into the political implications of AR as a tactical media tool enacted in the public environment, utilizing mobile technology as an affordable and accessible device for visually activating artworks.
Today, augmented reality (AR) sound is widely accessible through sound design platforms such as Echoes.app, which offer semi-free services, and through immersive hardware like wearable bone-conduction audio sunglasses compatible with mobile devices. These AR sound experiences are enabled through three-dimensional spatial sound design, typically delivered via smartphones connected to a 3G or 4G network.
On how soundwalks can activate AR sound design
In her walk development process, Gutierrez employs methods rooted in the site, adapted to the environment, and shaped by each specific situation, particularly with AR media technologies, which facilitate collective engagement in public space. The primary goal of listing these methods is not to suggest a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather to view them as tools that foster dialogue, co-creation, and participation.
1. Listening to the space
Walking in space and listening is a sensory survey that explores the architecture, soundscape, and social and cultural layers present in a given space.
First walk to sense and ground our sonic perception. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
2. Sound landmarks
Thanks to the initial walk, we selected sonic landmarks that both contrast and amplify the spatial meanings associated with the walk itinerary, since the walking route is understood in relation to the social and political layers of the spaces it traverses.
Group discussion on sensory perception to develop the sound design. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
3. Reading the space
We mapped and traced these spatial relationships to develop a walking score, an augmented reality (AR) sound composition and itinerary, shaped by the political, cultural, ecological, and social meanings of the context. To achieve this, Gutierrez engages personally and creatively with local inhabitants as co-creators of the route, sensing and discussing the location’s visible, audible, and symbolic layers. These significant clues become the sonic landmarks for the walk.
Map of sensorial and acoustic perceptions. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
4. Score and space
The AR sound design highlighted themes drawn from oral histories, narratives, or sound field recordings. Using sound technology, the project’s participants and Gutierrez planned the participatory experience executed in the soundwalk, discussing acoustic prompts and sound amplification in the case of a pre-recorded sound design.
Sound design development at LePARC Lab. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
5. Testing the walking through rhythm
When conducting a soundwalk, special attention is given to the physical and temporal aspects of the space. It requires a sense of rhythm, which philosopher Henri Lefebvre described as ‘rhythm analysis’ (Lefebvre, 1992), involving all the senses and spatial awareness. From this perspective, it is essential to consider the cyclical rhythms that change in the soundscape since they transform over time within a day.
Sound testing by the group, using speakers and headphones. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
6. Walking with the public
The process of walking with the public begins with Amanda Gutiérrez positioning herself as a guest and adopting a listening stance, highlighting the participants’ experiences and the knowledge of local co-creators who took part in the walk and workshop. This intuitive approach fosters a group dynamic through sound-grounding exercises and listening positionality, helping to create a space of trust. This group dynamics facilitate conversations concerning ecology and urban design accessibility.
Special attention must be taken while narrating memories of systemic violence that we, as racialized individuals, live, experience, and witness in a white supremacist, patriarchal society. A space for healing and restoration does not always require the exposure of trauma or personal testimony as performative evidence. On the contrary, a radical space for care and listening involves breaking down the dichotomy between spectator and actor, thereby allowing for the witnessing of unresolved conflicts.
Sound testing by the group, using speakers and headphones. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
7. Documenting
The ethical challenge of documenting without intrusion remains essential. As an ephemeral practice, capturing it through documentation presents inherent difficulties. In this context, sound becomes the primary medium, while video is used selectively to highlight specific moments during the walk.
Audiovisual materials provide a general representation of the spatial setting but lack the dialogical dimension of the walk. When capturing field recordings, video or photo documentation during a walk, it is essential to consider the interpersonal dynamics established through the walking experience, as well as the conversations that occur afterward.
Sound testing by the group, using speakers and headphones. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
Technology as a grounding experience with local territories
Augmented Reality is a vital topic in Amanda Gutiérrez’s research, rooted in co-creation and collective thinking, and involving the implementation of immersive sound-based technologies in relation to sensible cartographies. This workshop marked the culmination of her PhD studies at Concordia University, serving as a creative farewell to Tiohtià:ke, known as Montreal. Gutiérrez’s PhD dissertation builds on the development of decolonial soundwalking methods, expressed through sound works that reflect locally based, situated listening, fostering meaningful connections with both theoretical and artistic practices. These sound walks open a dialogue with collaborators as co-creators, researchers, artists, and facilitators within listening spaces. The goal is to connect practical and relational methods grounded in local experiences through walking and auditory participation, responding to the site-specific environment.
Amanda Gutiérrez is an artist and doctoral candidate in the Arts and Humanities Program at Concordia University. Her work explores political listening, gender, and spatial justice through decolonial soundwalking practices.
Trained as a stage designer at the National School of Theatre and holding an MFA in Media and Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gutiérrez integrates sound, memory, and collective agency in urban space. Her research-creation practice has been exhibited internationally, including at FACT Liverpool, ZKM (Germany), TAV (Taiwan), and Bolit Art Center (Spain). Her soundwalks and installations have featured in the Liverpool Biennale, Tsonami Festival (Chile), Sur Aural (Bolivia), and En Tiempo Real (Bogotá), as well as in the En Otros Mundos collective at the Rufino Tamayo Museum (Mexico City). She has presented immersive sound work at Habitat Sonore (Centre PHI, Montreal) and participated in XR projects at Harvestworks (New York). Recent presentations include ENSEMS (Spain), POP Montreal, and the City of Women Festival (Ljubljana).
Acknowledgements
I extend my gratitude to the participants who attended this workshop and shared their creative, sound, and embodiment perspectives, as well as to LePARC for fostering this space at Milieux Institute in Concordia University. Special thanks to Malte Leander, V.K. Preston, Lilia Mestre, and Meghan Moe Beitiks for their support on this project.
Team credits:
Photo and video documentation by Laura Caraballo
LePARC Coordination, Malte Leander
LePARC Direction, V.K. Preston, Meghan Moe Beitiks, and Lilia Mestre.
References
Cao, Santiago. 2018. Apuntes Sobre Cartografías Sensibles En Espacios Públicos. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Independent Publication.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2010. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Reprint. London: Continuum.
O’Neill, Maggie, and Phil Hubbard. 2010. “Walking, Sensing, Belonging: Ethno-Mimesis as Performative Praxis.” Visual Studies 25 (1): 46–58.https://doi.org/10.1080/14725861003606878.
Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. iUniverse.
Wright, Rewa. 2015. Mobile Augmented Reality Art and the Politics of Re-assembly. ISEA 2015 Procedings.
Smolicki, Jacek, ed. 2023. Soundwalking: Through Time, Space, and Technologies. London ; New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Skwarek, Mark. 2018. “Augmented Reality Activism.” In Augmented Reality Art, edited by Vladimir Geroimenko, 3–40. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Cham: Springer International Publishing.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69932-5_1.
Tiliani, Katerina, and Dimitris Charitos. n.d. ‘Soundwalk’: An Embodied Auditory Experience in the Urban Environment.
Yoon-Ramirez, Injeong. 2021. “Walking-Sensing as a Decolonial Art and Pedagogical Practice.” International Journal of Education Through Art 17 (1): 115–33.https://doi.org/10.1386/eta_00053_1.
Weishaus, Joel. 2014. “Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. By Karen O’Rourke. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 2013.” Arts 3 (2): 298–302. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts3020298https://manifest-ar.art/
Header image credits : Sound testing of the AR walk, using speakers and headphones. Photo: Laura Caraballo.
