[photo: Grant Hutchinson]

For the meaning of the Walkman does not necessarily lie in itself—it sits there, neat, usually black, often wrapped in leather, and quite oblivious—but in the extension of perceptive potential. People who walk around with a Walkman might simply seem to signfy a void, the emptiness of metropolitan life, but that little black object can also be understood as a pregnant zero, as the link in an urban strategy, a semiotic shifter, the crucial digit in a particular organisation of the sense. For the idea of the void, of nothing, always introduces us to the paradox that nothing can only be known by knowing nothing, that is something.

- Iain Chambers, "The Aural Walk" in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York City: Continuum, 2004. Pg. 99.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the response to Toronto Sound Ecology [see my overview of the project]. Despite being launched as a "proof of concept" prototype the project has generated a fair amount of interest. TSE received coverage on Fast Company and over the last few weeks we've presented it at Dorkbot Toronto and a workshop organized by Michele Perras for the Canadian Film Centre's Interactive Arts and Entertainment Program. We're now hustling to collect more walks and rethinking the means by which contributors may do so. Thus far we've been using a single Roland pro-am recorder and sharing it hasn't worked out so well – additional recorders are in the cards, but I'm thinking we may need to lower our (recording quality) standards. I'm hoping to take a pass at overhauling the interface and develop a "node view" for individual walks in May and it is looking like I'll actually have time to attend to this. Max Ritts and I have also started to document TSE through a project blog – thus far we've situated the project theoretically and technically, but we'll probably start posting more general ruminations about sound and the city soon. If you are interested, please tune in.