Ephemeral cartography: on mapping sound

ABSTRACT

With the concurrent rise of internet cartography (e.g. Google Maps) and low-cost digital audio recording devices, soundmapping has become a widespread phenomenon. But soundmapping has a much longer history, reaching back centuries and arguably millennia. Taking a kind of media archaeological approach to such cartographic practices, I consider a number of approaches that have been used historically in systematically combining sound and mapping and offer a rough media taxonomy to elucidate the particular relationships between them (e.g. mappings in sound, of sound, etc.). I begin with Homeric epic and then move through medieval mappae mundi, Ottoman nautical charts, linguistic atlases and sonar. My historical endpoint is a cluster of practices that (usually implicitly) constitute the beginning of contemporary analysis of soundmapping: the soundscape, both in its well-known form, as articulated by Murray Schafer, but also in the work of Michael Southworth, whose ground-breaking mapping practices influenced Schafer’s own ideas about sonic cartography. Beyond this archaeological rethinking of origins, I also seek to rethink mapping generally from the perspective of soundmapping: not only do soundmaps remind us of the audiovisual mediations of mapping more generally, they specifically assert the temporality of experiencing all maps, whether explicitly sonic or not.

KEYWORDS:

• Mapping
• audio
• cartography
• media archaeology
• mappa mundi
• sonar
• soundscape

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I thank Alexander Rehding for encouraging me to write this article, as well as all the cartographers who so readily made time (often repeatedly) to speak and correspond with me: Annea Lockwood, Udo Noll, William Romey, Michael Southworth and Emily Thompson.

2. These transcriptions and translations are taken from Westrem (2001, 5–7). On the question of language, Westrem clarifies, “The angels on the Map speak French (just as the heavenly beings speak Italian in Paradiso 25). In 1300, French – or more exactly Anglo-Norman – was the preferred vernacular language at the royal court and in upper-class, educated English society” (4).

3. My rendering here is based on Gerber’s translations of both the Trent and Munich manuscript versions (1984, viii).

4. This is perhaps the inverse of an idea suggested by Josiah Royce, Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, of a map with a one-to-one scale (that is, the physical space of the map is exactly the size of the territory it represents). In this case, that literalness seems to transfer, though the size does not: to see the mappa mundi is to see the whole mundus. By sonic extension, to hear the poetic or missal reconstruction of the mappa mundi is to hear the whole world. For more on such maps, see Peters (2008).

5. In addition to these explanations, Allan Atlas offers several other possible connections between mass and mappa mundi connections, but the majority seem to involve an actual mappa mundi, even if indirectly (Atlas 2008, 63).

6. The translation here, as with all translations that follow from Piri Reis, is my adaptation of Robert Bragner’s published translation. See Piri Reis (1988) in bibliography for more details.

7. Other instances of his injunction, “Listen”, abound: “Listen now while I tell you what [storms] can do” (71); “Listen now and I will explain the winds” (73); “Now that you have heard of the classification of the winds, listen to those you do not know” (75); “listen to the nature of maps” (79); “Listen now and you will see why” (81); and even a more interactive imperative, “What I have here related to you was known to you. Listen well and in time you will relate them to me” (77).

8. Lameli (2010, 569). The centrality of rivers and bodies of water to many of these mappings – all the more so in the twentieth century with hydrophonic cartography and projects like Annea Lockwood’s River Archive and soundmaps – highlights the central place of liquidity as both a critical site and metaphor for sonic history and geography, a point emphasised in at least two major histories of sound: Douglas Kahn in Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts (2001) and Veit Erlmann in a similarly titled chapter, “Water, Sex, Noise” in Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (2010).

9. Lameli even reports of a project, initiated in 1823, to produce “a French sound atlas”(2010, 570). While beyond the scope of this overview, Lameli also co-edited a two-volume book of maps and essays (Lameli et al. 2010) on language mapping using contemporary mapping tools, an intriguing extension of this historical practice of producing language atlases.

10. On the ambiguity of the word “sounding”, Wilford writes: “The term sounding in the depth-finding sense is derived from the verb ‘to sound’, meaning ‘to probe’. In its original usage, sounding had nothing to do with acoustics, though early oceanographers did cast a wistful eye at the possibilities. [The American oceanographer Matthew Fontaine] Maury wrote of ‘exploding petards and ringing bells to attempt to hear an echo when the wind was hushed and all was still, but no answer was heard’” (2000, 332).

11. Less famously but more directly relevant here, Lynch had also been involved in a kind of mapping-in-sound project in collaboration with Donald Appleyard and John R. Myer on the aesthetics of highways. In the resulting book, The View from the Road (Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer 1964), they mapped out visual sequences encountered while driving on urban highways (especially into Boston). They did so by tape-recording (and writing down) viewers’ running, real-time commentary on their experiences during the drive (1964, 27). The technique presages Southworth’s documentary techniques (real-time tape recording and note-taking), producing a similar style of “sequences” of sensory passage through the city and of cartographic notations.

12. That project also set the precedent for much contemporary soundmapping, in which a single audio track is assigned to a particular location, with an implicit assumption that the audio is an obvious and “real” index of the latter.

13. For a broader overview of the origins of GPS, see also Wilford (2000, 372–388) and Easton (2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter McMurray

Peter McMurray is a Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Cambridge. He is currently completing a book and film project, Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin, focusing on the sonic practices of transnational Muslim communities between Germany and Turkey. Other research interests include the history of tape recording and oral poetry.