By Charlie Harman

“Behind the reality of the city before you, another dimension lies concealed in rich sounds and images that will transform a simple city walk into an interactive artistic experience.”

We have recently been working on an AppTrail for Onassis cultural center in Athens, Greece.  Soundscapes Landscapes offers a parallel route through the city via your smartphone or tablet device. Beginning from the Onassis Cultural Center, the route extends over to the other side of the Syngrou Avenue with every pavement, street corner and building along the way potentially concealing an audio visual surprise – it’s up to you to walk, wander and discover.

The  Soundscapes Landscapes app uses eleven layers of sound, image and video amounting to an impressive twenty six points of activity. The content was created by Medea Electronique, a company comprising of a wide range of artistic individuals with skills in music, video, design and robotics to name a few.

“We all share a predisposition for innovation in the performing arts.We allow the integration of our distinctive areas of research and practice to define a unique style in the realisation of collective projects which range from multimedia theatrical plays to experimental audio-visual shows, and from improvised noise music through to field recordings and electroacoustic composition.”

– Media Electronique

To support this ambitious project we added eleven layers to our AppTrail Soundwalk Designer. This is the tool that our clients use to build up their soundscapes. It allows them to focus on one layer at a time, but also see how the layer interacts with the others. So for example in areas where many layers overlap there will be multiple channels of sound all mixed together. The art of the AppTrail designer is to sculpt this symphony of sound in relation to the landscape.

The Soundscapes Landscapes AppTrail launched in June 2014 and received great reviews in the local press and is now available for the public to download from the Appstore and Google Play. 

SoundscapesLandscapes from Medea Electronique on Vimeo.

Photo Courtesy of Onassis. Taken by Stavros Petropoulos