NoTours is a pioneer project by the collective Escoitar.org, that allows touring a place while living an augmented acoustic experience connected with the actual spaced visited and the rizhomatic situation of the territory involved. This project will use mobile devices based on open source code (Android) as well as GPS technologies (which provides the position of users) and 3D audio contents (binaural and ambisonics).

NoTours proposes a sound-walk through a defined territory, a historical and acoustical journey narrated by protagonists of the territory. NoTours incorporate to this journey sound elements relative to the area where the visitant is located as well as soundart works or other sound elements in relation with the concrete space where the walker is.

HOW DOES IT WORK? [Format]
Using the extended format of touristic audio guides, understanding them as devices giving us information about spaces cataloged as relevant or for the public interest, this project would like to question their real value as well as the official discourses that contain. Our objective is the deconstruction of this old-framed format for designing a new one opened to the collective memory of the inhabitants and connected to the real time situation of the city involved. It can be considered as an intervention in the perception of the urban space, for us understood as a stream of complex actions, as a performance and as an act of collective memory. Between fiction and reality, our focus is the intervention on those strange or familiar spaces and converting them into mutant spaces. Touring them under the effects sound will reveal a hidden city filled with personal stories and interferences. All this, using WIFI and GPS technologies that allow to know the actual position of the visitant as well as the real status of the city in as many layers is possible (temperature, pollution, traffic, news, number of visitants, etc). The use of 3D audio technologies will provide immerse audio experiences linked particular spaces and to the extracted data from the environment.

CONTEXT [Sound as a producer of sense]
Every place, as every inhabited space, is loaded with a meaning, with a “historical and relational identity” that has been made out of an individual or collective process of memory. It is the result of our listening acts. Each environment and moment are inexorably tied to concrete sounds that characterize, identify and individualize them from the acoustics of other spaces or contexts. The sound that surrounds us and the sounds that we produce while a conscious or unconscious act have become an interesting material relevant to the artistic creation, the anthropology, philosophy, architecture, urbanism, ecology, history, psychology… In this context the project NoTours proposes and strategy for assuming the sound complexity of a territory, for understanding how much the sound is informing us about a that place and for elaborating new ways of knowledge and expression for the ear, avoiding the silence and the usual frontality of the vision, always with the intention of creating new possible sensible cartographies of the place that surrounds us.

COORDINATION AND PRODUCTION
Escoitar.org

PROJECT TEAM
Enrique Tomás (Engineer and sound artist, Madrid/Rotterdam, Juan-Gil López (Musicologist and sound artist, Santiago de Compostela), Chiu Longina (Anthropologist and sound artist, Vigo), Horacio González (Artist and programer, Santiago de Compostela) and Berio Molina (Artist and programer, Lugo).