What-3-Songlines
I’m guessing you’ve heard of - and perhaps even used - the popular location-addressing system, what3words. You may even know the three-word address for your home. But do you know your home’s personal songline?
Aboriginal songlines are ancient pathways that crisscross the land, created and sung into existence by Ancestral beings during the Dreaming. Each songline is a living map: through song, story, and ceremony, it encodes knowledge about geography, water sources, seasons, law, and culture. Songlines can therefore be used to navigate and transmit knowledge across time and space.Inspired by the concept of Aboriginal songlines, Earthsounds allows you to create an audio track for any place on Earth by converting that location’s elevation data into sound. Simply click on the Earthsounds map, choose from a selection of sampling modes, and you can quickly listen to your local landscape expressed through audio.
Earthsounds even includes a basic sequencer that lets you combine different sampling modes and layer, chop, and stretch those samples to create your own unique “songline.” The video at the top of this post features the tune I created for the Houses of Parliament in London (just try singing it to the driver the next time you want to catch a black cab to Big Ben).
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