Sounds Like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event took place at The Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) Research Institute, Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge) on 17th May 2011, Organised by Frauke Behrendt.

noTours was present at the Conference with a big success of feedback, opinions and future expectations.

I just want to leave some photos and saying thank you very much at the organisers and the speakers.

1. Introduction
noTours is an application for Android capable of running a soundwalk designed by noTours Editor. All has been developed by the members of Escoitar.org.
This tutorial introduces you to main tasks like installing noTours, starting the application and designing your own soundwalks.

2. Installing noTours app in your smartphone.
The app can be easily installed in your android phone using adb. It is a developer tool that can be downloaded within the Android SDK. If you need to install it, please first go to the Android SDK site and proceed with all detailed instructions.

After the previous step you can install noTours on your phone executing the next command from a terminal:

adb install <path_to_noTours.apk>

Note for intrepid people. You can always copy a apk to your phone, open it with a file browser and Android will install it for you.

3. Starting the application

If you succeded installing the application, a new icon pointing to noTours will be visible in your device´s menu.

Open noTours app by clicking on the icon and noTours will start automatically. First, a splash image of the project is appearing with noTours logos and credits/introduction sounds.

Secondly, a screen with a big Play Button will appear. Click and the soundwalk will be started.

4. Walking

After clicking on “Play” your noTours app will try to get connected to the GPS. In this moment you will listen some sound signals and a soundscape for accompanying you. Usually this process takes from some seconds to a few minutes long depending if you are connecting in a location closer to the last soundwalk or even depending on your actual location in the world. Usually, when you are always  working within the same location it will take less than 30 seconds for getting a GPS connection.

What is particular critical with GPS (and not only in particular with noTours) is the fact of having or not a good view of your sky. That means that if you are among high buildings covering almost all the sky  you will never have a realiable or good connection.  Then, try to work in spaces with the biggest open sky available.

When you are connected you will discover you position with a rounded marker in the middle of the screen. If you have an available Internet connection you will see a google map on the screen and if not, it will appear just a grid making reference to the place you are. Aditionally the application draws the areas with sounds that you have designed in your noTous Editor. They will appear in different colours: soundpoint (blue), soundpoint with speaker (green) or soundscape (red).

noTours follows your location in the map, trying to update your actual position every second (or less) with the finest precision available. Eveytime you are entering in an area with sound, your phone will vibrate during two seconds giving some kind of feedback to the user. At the same time the sound that was chosen to be sound in that area will start playing with a short fade in. When you go out of an area the phone does not vibrate but applies a short fade out as well.

We always recommend trying to forget that you are wearing a hardware with the project. Try to put the phone in a pocket or inside your hand bag (you don´t usually loose very much precision) and just walk. Then you will be able to enjoy your soundwalk in a more natural way.

5. Creating your own soundwalks

noTours Editor is hosted in www.editor.notours.org. For starting editing your soundwalks go to the Editor´s website and create a new user. Every user has an entry in a database so you will be able to store your soundwalks in our server and load or modify them later.

All the Editor is a browser oriented application. It makes use of Google Map API, PHP and java scripts. You don´t need to install anything in your computer. Go to our editor and start designing your soundwalks. It is available in three languages: English, Spanish and Galizian (easily you can create a new language if you want to contact us).

Create your user and type a name for your soundwalk.

The next step is choosing a location for your soundwalk. Move the map to the place in the world you can to geolocalize sounds. You can also give a small description to the project and change the title. Choose the zoom you want for the project and click on Save if you want to start editing the map.

This is the moment for adding sounds to your location. First click on Add New Sound.

You will see that an area in magenta appears is drawn in the center of the map. Automatically a new entry is created in the left bar with the parameters of that sound. Now you can:

- Move the position of the sound dragging the icon that is situated in the center of the circle.

- Change the radius of your circles: click on the white circle and move it.

- Edit the properties of a sound:

• Give a name to your sound
• Give a short description
• Choose if you want a soundpoint or a soundscape
• Edit some attributes  for playing the sound
• Choose a sound file

When you have finished editing a sound you can add another sound. The application will automatically save your changes.

Ok, now you have finished editing your soundwalk. For sending it to you phone follow the next steps:

- Click on “download” for getting a .zip file with all your project

- Unzip your project in your computer

- Connect your smartphone to the computer and allow copying files to the device.

- Create a folder in your SD Card (or your External Storage Directory) called “notours”. Then the final path could be/sdcard/notours

- Copy the contents of your project (your .zip) to this folder in the device and extract it. You will have a file called soundscape.rss and a folder /sdcard/notours/your_project

- Copy to /sdcard/notours/your_project/sound all the audio files that you used for editing the soundwalk.

Everytime you want to load a new soundwalk, just overwrite the old “soundscape.rss”.

5.1. Soundpoints and Soundscapes

noTours have in this version two different primitives that can be chosen doble clicking on the label” Soundpoint“:

- Soundpoints:  a circular area with one sound.

- Soundscapes: a circular area containing four sounds. The hardware application knows your orientation at every moment because it can read the values of an internal sensor. Depending on your orientation noTours will play a different sound with a particular volume, in a way that they will be fading in and out for morphing to the other sounds imitating a natural soundscape. You can edit the angles where each sound will be played.

For changing the soundscape angles click on the end of lines separating the areas. Each area is labelled with an area for later having the oppotunity of choosing the soud files without errors.

5.2. Attributes

Atrributes are some particular effects that can be applied to the sounds. They are only applicable to the soundpoints and not to the soundscapes.

The available effects are:

- Speaker: this is an attribute affecting the volume of the sound. It varies with the distance to the center of the circle. It will be zero at the perimeter and maximum at the center.

- Loop: The sound is played in a loop when it finishes or just stops when it has been completely played.

- Microphone: it is an attribute that sends audio captured in real time from the smartphone microphone to the sound output. Then it can mix a sound file with the actual sound captured in your location. This attribute can be only applied in some smartphones. We discovered that when using some phones (like Acer) the operating system directly switches off the internal mike when headphones are connected and opens the bluetooth or headset one.

6. More help, questions, comments or bugs advice

Please, contact us through your personal noTours contact or  through the general one here.

The work is a 360º soundscape of the city of Rotterdam. Audience can explore it while seated in a spinning chair because the playback changes depending on view´s orientation. It was built on Android and the code will be included in a future version of noTours. Enrique Tomás (the programmer, and the main Android/noTours software developer), has presented this work in Rotterdam on December 2009.

Enrique says:

During the last two months (October and November 2009) I enjoyed an Artist in Residence period at Foundation b.a.d. in Rotterdam.

For the final presentation I decided to show four new electronic compositions in an installation format . The particular interface that I did (a spinning chair) makes possible to enjoy a 360º degrees soundscape that changes with listener´s orientation. All the audio has 3D spatial properties due to the use of binaural and ambisonic recordings.

For the composition I recorded many hours at natural soundscapes of the city of Rotterdam. Each composition is about some aspect of the city (if you want to listen these four recordings, go to the author’s website)

NAME: Rotterdam Soundscapes
DESCRIPTION: The work is a 360º soundscape of the city of Rotterdam. Audience can explore it while seated in a spinning chair because the playback changes depending on view´s orientation.
MATERIALS: Spinning Chair, Headphones, Android Phone, Android Programming, Binaural Recordings
YEAR: 2009