Soundtrails: in search of a geolocative home; putting stories back on country

<p dir="ltr">This practice-led PhD focuses on the prevailing forces surrounding the deployment of locative audio in today’s increasingly augmented storied world. It does this through the lens of the author’s locative audio platform, Soundtrails: being both a tech platform and a production house for commissioned works. While revisiting the locative media discourse that began 20 years ago when theorists, artists and practitioners began exploring subverting, contesting, and disrupting notions of the place-based experience through spatial technologies, this thesis departs from this line of thinking. Instead, it focuses on the locative audio experience: its underlying power and the opportunities inherent in place-based voices and narratives, to determine new types of stories and shape the meaning of the world around us.</p><p dir="ltr">Where is Soundtrails positioned today amidst a field of competing forces, a panoply of commercial ‘to do’ locative audio applications and ongoing obsolescence? What value might be attributed to locative audio that recognises orality, creative authorship and transparency? How are locative audio apps like Soundtrails making tangible creative work that give power to communities by bringing to the surface reflections and memories, and through reperforming their stories? These questions are addressed in this thesis and the author’s creative practice, the <i>Portland Soundtrail.</i></p><p dir="ltr">As much about ownership and control of the platforms as it is about the capacity of locative audio to drill down into the world around us, this thesis is borne out of the creative radio documentary form, and concerns communities reimagining and reperforming place-based stories that bridge the present to the past. Suggestive of early locative media but emphasising audio’s natural proclivity for the embodied spatial experience, Soundtrails and the creative practice, the <i>Portland Soundtrail</i>, afford a contemporary through-line.</p>