Sound Cities educational project in Abrantes (PT) – Jan 29th – Feb 1st

Cidades Sonoras (Sound Cities)
A Sound Mapping project of Portuguese Cities
29 January – 1 February 2013
City of Abrantes

Directed by Luís Costa (Binaural/Nodar)
Co-Production by Artemrede and Municipality of Abrantes
Multimedia support by Ricardo Frade

Target audience: Youths between 16 and 23 years old.

Sound Cities is a sound mapping educational project of Portuguese urban spaces. Guided by monitors, a group of participants from the specific social / geographical context record sounds that according to them best characterize the area, also noting the geographic coordinates of each sound, alongside with other contextualizing information and photographic records.

The project seeks to highlight the specific acoustics of each city and each neighborhood, despite the growing homogenization of contemporary urban spaces. The project is structured to stimulate both the attention to small details like the intergenerational contact in which the voices of the city’s memory of other times can play a decisive role.

This connection with local participants and their memory of the city is a crucial aspect of the project. That is, the project specifically proposes new insights and technological tools to re-connect communities with their urban spaces, to trigger sound memories, perhaps to add some sparks of self-esteem to those who are attending irreversible transformations of the city.

The end result of the activity will be the creation of a collective catalog of sounds mapped on a digital map, that will also be publicly presented to the city / neighborhood.

Abrantes is a municipality in the central Médio Tejo subregion of Portugal. With a population of 39 325 inhabitants (2011), the municipality includes several parishes divided by the Tagus River that runs through the centre of the municipality, an area of approximately 714.69 square kilometres (275.94 sq mi). The urbanized, city of Abrantes located on the northern margin of the Tagus, includes a resident population of less than 20,000 inhabitants and is the municipal seat of this regional authority.