Musician Travis Thatcher’s laptop performance on the Atlanta Beltline. 

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... of the soundscape. They can share the resulting soundscape on the site. Users can also ‘perform’ with the paths, creating several different paths and then triggering, looping and scrub- bing through them in real-time. These performances can likewise be captured and shared on the site. Finally, we added functionality that enables users to instantly mix soundscapes from the mobile device application itself, so that they can experience the sounds in the physical space in which they were recorded. The application looks at the current GPS and compass readings, along with user-defined search criteria and parameters such as sonic density and radius of search, to create a continuously evolving mix of sounds near the user’s current location. The algorithm is similar to that in the web-based tool. Essentially, the application creates and renders a virtual path that encircles the user at the specified radius; its exact shape changes based on physical movement as detected by the compass. Again, the audio is rendered on the server and streamed to the mobile phone. The circular shape of the rendered path ensures a smooth, continuous soundscape even though each loop around the circle is actually a discrete audio file. The phone’s display shows images from the database within the same radius of the current location as the sounds. Electroacoustic musicians and DJs can also mass- download search results as an archive of uncompressed audio (and high-resolution image) files and then quickly import this content into professional music and video production software. While the website’s map-based tools encourage the casual creation and sharing of soundscapes, this export facility encourages more prolonged, intense engagement with the material in the context of live performances, installations and fixed media works. A central part of UrbanRemix are participatory workshops and public events in urban neighbourhoods. We focus on particular events and locations to create a meaningful density of sounds. These events are designed around existing communities, involving local residents and community stakeholders for sound recording, online soundscape creation and live performance. Each event typically begins with a period of sound and image collection: this may last as little as an hour or as long as a month, and may involve group walks through an area as well as open-ended invitations to contribute. After collection is complete, electroacoustic musicians prepare a public performance in the neighbourhood, using only the contributed sounds in their performance. The public is invited to explore the content online and to create and share soundscapes, both during and after the event. During the summer of 2010, we presented UrbanRemix at three public events. At the City Centered Festival of Locative Media in San Francisco, we worked with Glide Memorial Church, which provides extensive support services for the community of the Tenderloin neighbourhood. We collaborated with about a dozen members of the Glide community to venture out into the Tenderloin to record sounds (Figure 4), capturing snippets of conversations, traf- fic, an argument, security keypads, and so on. Over 170 sounds were recorded during the one-day workshop. Based on this collection, Bay Area musician Ken Ueno prepared a performance. He improvised on his laptop to shape a granular synthesis algorithm that merged these sounds into spatialised clouds, moving between moments of recognition and abstrac- tion. The result was a dual re-interpretation of the Tenderloin district: once through the selective collection of sound, and again through the performance incorporating those sounds. One of the biggest challenges we faced with this presentation concerned timing and preparation. Ueno noted to us that his biggest challenge was that he had only a day after the collection of the sounds to prepare his performance (Ueno 2011). There were two key reasons behind this tight schedule: the short timetable of the festival itself and our desire that the community members who had helped to collect sounds attend the performance while the experience was fresh in their minds. Ueno’s solution to this challenge was to develop his approach in advance, using a small set of test sounds recorded at a previous UrbanRemix event, and then to work intensively with the new sound collection to refine and adapt that approach with the available time. We organised a second event in summer 2010 in collaboration with Art on the Beltline, part of a larger public project in Atlanta that seeks to transform old urban railways into walking and biking paths that will connect city neighbourhoods (Gravel 1999). Over the course of a month, we invited Atlantans to walk the Beltline and capture the sounds they heard. As in the City Centered project, we chose a local musician, Travis Thatcher, to create an ambient performance of the resulting 180 sounds in a show that took place outdoors along the planned Beltline route (Figure 5). Our biggest challenge with the Beltline event was to attract a critical mass of participation in field recording. We relied entirely upon email blasts and word-of-mouth, and did not organise any formal workshops or walks for sound collection. Ultimately, only eight distinct users uploaded recordings to the database for this project, while over a hundred came to the performance. Clearly, an open-ended invita- tion to download the mobile app, locate the Beltline (which at this early stage of construction is quite difficult to do), and contribute was not sufficient to garner the scale and depth of participation we had hoped for with the project. We explore this issue further in the discussion section below. Finally, we collaborated with the Woodruff Arts Center and Atlanta Public Schools to hold a two- week summer camp for middle school students. During the camp, twenty teenage participants captured nearly 800 sounds and images from the neighbourhood surrounding the arts centre. Instead of involving professional musicians (as with the previous two projects), we made the development of a live performance an integral part of the camp. Students first explored the content and created soundscapes through our website and then used professional DJ and VJ tools to prepare and present performances with the material. The curriculum, developed in partnership with arts educators, aimed to raise students’ awareness of the sound environments they encounter and also to introduce them to skills in mobile device use, map-reading, and music and video production. At the camp, most students mastered these skills with relative ease. The biggest challenge they faced, unsurprisingly, was in working together to create compelling performances. A low student–to-teacher ratio ensured that the students received ample guidance and support in this regard. As we continue to collab- orate with Atlanta Public Schools to refine this curriculum for use in general music classes we are developing curricular modules which focus more explicitly on group collaboration, structural and notational paradigms, and rehearsal techniques. In addition to these UrbanRemix events, independent researchers, artists and organisations have also used the UrbanRemix platform for their own purposes, organising their own independent projects. Mark Godfrey, a local Atlanta musician, used UrbanRemix to develop a multi-channel sound installation for a local art exhibition about mapping neighbourhoods. Using a high-quality external microphone attached to his iPhone, Godfrey recorded approxim- ately 130 sounds, mostly in Atlanta’s midtown neighbourhood, as he walked on a series of unplanned excursions. Using the UrbanRemix map view as a guide, he then composed a 14-minute loop, with his own music production tools, representing his walks through Atlanta. Unlike our own UrbanRemix events, there was no collaborative element here. But the platform was still an important tool in Godfrey’s process because it could so easily record, geo-tag and organise his field recordings. Sarah Vaden, a Georgia Tech student, recently used the UrbanRemix platform in a similar manner, but with a focus on documenting New Zealand’s South Island. An Atlanta public radio station, WABE, is currently developing a project with the UrbanRemix platform, with much more of a focus on participation and collaboration. The station’s popular news short series Atlanta Sounds focuses on the interesting but over- looked sounds of the city. The station is integrating the UrbanRemix platform into their website as a mechanism for listeners to suggest ideas for future stories and to build a community with each other as they share sounds online and create soundscapes from them. For the station, the platform is a powerful means to develop a practice of community journalism and engage their audiences via new media. For us, the project represents a new model for motivating participation, particularly in field recording: the possible inclusion of sounds in an on-air feature. At the end of the Atlanta Public Schools workshop, one teacher said to us that UrbanRemix gave his students an entirely different way to think about music in the world. This precisely reflects our original intentions: to spur participants to consider their surroundings in a new way and, upon reflection, to arrive at their own individual realisations and conclusions. We were also encouraged by the ways in which participants used UrbanRemix to document and express unique and personal interests. For example, a teenage participant in our City Centered workshop went to great lengths to capture the sound of a table- soccer game at his youth club because it was one of his favourite activities, an important part of his identity, and thus important for him to share. Participants felt connected to collections of sounds as well as to individual sounds. Once all sounds of an event were collected and mixed into unique soundscapes, these resulting ...