This week I launched the first phase of a project I've been working on (sporadically) for the last several months. Toronto Sound Ecology is a web mapping project dedicated to archiving field recordings collected in and around Toronto. The venture is a collaboration with geography graduate student Max Ritts, who approached me with a rough plan for a sound-map project last summer. The site allows our small team of explorers to upload short (5-20 min) soundwalks and then enter the following information:

• trace their route with a polyline
• note the time their walk started and finished
• note the recording device used
• note the weather and temperature
• tag their walk to identify some of the key sounds that occur
• make basic comments about the walk

This is quite rudimentary but as our archive grows we'll have quite a bit of data regarding regions of the city that are frequently "sampled" and have built up a large taxonomy of sounds. We'll also be able to start organizing the collected field recordings by temperature, season, weather or team member.

Since the site is only a proof of concept prototype at the moment, the navigation options are limited. A viewer can browse the city and pick out walks to listen to or view a simple list (note the above image) that displays each walk with a player and the related metadata. Most of the energy expended thus far has gone into developing the workflow by which our team can add content so now that our documentation and standards are in place it is time for us to get out in the city to collect some field recordings.

It will be quite interesting to see how the main map reads once we've reached a critical mass of collected walks. We only have about a dozen walks at the moment but given that the spring is finally approaching, I think we'll aim to have 50 by the time the summer rolls around.

Toronto Sound Ecology is built in Drupal and site makes use of the OpenLayers module to organize map layers. This was relatively intuitive for me as the OpenLayers module has a "views" submodule that allows you to create custom information displays with geodata. The base unit of content on the site is an audio node, and everything else (polyline entry, taxonomy, date/time entry) has been attached to this. The polylines are converted into well-known text (WKT) strings and these are aggregated onto the master map. I've used CloudMade to create a custom map style for OpenStreetMap data and plan on developing some additional styles in the future. My only regret with the first phase of this project is that I had hoped to develop a display for each individual walk with a zoomed-in/centred map – hopefully I can get that sorted out soon. I plan on documenting the development of this project on the Toronto Sound Ecology blog, so if you're interested in a more detailed breakdown of how the site works, I'll start posting their soon(ish).

If you are based in Toronto and would like to join our team of soundwalkers please get in touch with Max and I.

[Martin Tétrault at MUTEK 2008 / photo: DIS-PATCH Festival]

I hear that Apple Computer Inc. had some kind of product launch today. I spent some time on the Internet this afternoon but unfortunately I couldn't find any information about this alleged event. So, instead of doting on glossy locked-down consumer electronics why not read my review of Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction on Rhizome. Kelly's book functions as a prehistory of glitch aesthetics that is explicitly focused on material culture—phonographs and CDs—and the manner in which 20th century artists subverted "playback technologies" to make provocative objects and glorious noise.