UT Snapshot: Sound Mapping

   In her blog post for the Digital Writing & Research Lab Links to an external site., Shaherzad Rashin Ahmadi Links to an external site. (History Links to an external site.)   explains the use of audio maps in connecting students to the content in meaningful ways,

"Audio maps offer instructors a unique method to situate students geographically, temporally, and aurally. By examining these maps, students may listen to the evolution of jazz, for instance, as musicians and vocalists tinkered with the genre in various pockets of the country.

But audio maps can be used for more than just music. For instance, Cities and Memory Links to an external site. invites us to record street sounds. An invaluable and innovative archive, these recordings may capture the transformation of a street from a quiet residential block to a trendy district filled with entertainment, or vice versa. It might also, on a more visceral level, fill us with nostalgia as we listen to distant sounds of home or a city we once visited. Linguists have also successfully used audio maps to chart accents and dialects. More commercially, museums Links to an external site. and tour agencies offer audio maps in order to provide viewers a deeper flavor of local cultures, digitally experiencing (and perhaps eventually visiting) the sounds...A valuable tool, audio maps engage students visually, by situating them within a geographic space, and also aurally, by offering them content to evaluate and judge (rather than textual information to commit to memory)." 

 

Read the other audio mapping tools Shaherzad reviews in her blog post. Links to an external site.

 "How Do UT Instructors Build Connections and Community?"