Launch of the Belfast Soundwalks App, in association with Belfast Music Week

Staff and PhD students from the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queen’s University Belfast, in collaboration with Belfast City Council, have been developing an app over the past 10 months for iPhone and Android smartphones.  Entitled ‘Belfast Soundwalks’, the app uses GPS to track the user’s location within the city to trigger site-specific sounds that provide unique listening experiences.  A range of sounds can be heard, including voice, natural environments and abstract imagined sound worlds, revealing something of the city’s environment, history or culture.

Ten soundwalks located across the city are currently available for download.  The soundwalks explore a variety of themes, including Belfast brass bands, poetry, memory, fantasy, the ‘Troubles’, food, nature and noise, and are available in areas such as Belfast City Centre, the Lagan Towpath, Victoria Park, Botanic Gardens, Belvoir Park Forest and West Belfast.

Belfast Soundwalks was made possible through funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Cultural Engagement Fund, the School of Creative Arts and the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Queen’s University Belfast. The project is led by Pedro Rebelo, Professor of Sonic Arts at Queen’s.

“The Belfast Soundwalks project is a unique way of exploring the city through experiences designed by thirteen artists using sound as their primary medium. The project uses current mobile technology to engage citizens and visitors in thematic walks throughout the city. We have been extremely fortunate to work closely with the Belfast City Council and Belfast Music Week in the context of Cultural Engagement project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are looking forward to see how the public responds to how both familiar and unusual places in Belfast have been reframed though the use of locative sound.”

Prof. Pedro Rebelo

Walk through the city and immerse yourself in the sounds of Belfast.  Listen to Belfast through the Belfast Soundwalks app: a unique sonic exploration of the city based on site-specific walks that reveal and reinvent the city.

The Belfast Soundwalks App is now available for download on the App Store and Google Play. Read more at www.belfastsoundwalks.org

Calvium are pleased to have developed this app for Queens University. The Soundwalks within the app were made using our AppFurnace platform.