Open Sound New Orleans

Short Synopsis

Open Sound New Orleans is a community project that invites and enables New Orleanians to document their lives in sound.

Description/Treatment

Open Sound New Orleans is a community project that invites and enables New Orleanians to document their lives in sound. Residents can participate by recording, or making recording requests for, the important sounds and voices in their lives and adding them to the soundmap. We lend recording equipment to community organizations, neighborhood groups and individuals – and train them in its use – to facilitate a diversity of direct dispatches from around our city.

Our intent is to make more accessible the authentic, unedited sounds and voices of New Orleans. Archiving the sounds of our city as everyday people hear them, move through them, and create them, is an act of preservation. But it also serves the archivist as a simple way to extend their experience to others, and participate in New Orleans public culture with intentionality.

The main components of the project:

Website: The public face of the project is the website at http://opensoundneworleans.com, where contributions by New Orleanians are organized in a "soundmap" of the city. New Orleanians are invited to search existing contributions and to upload, geolocate, and tag their own contributions to the map.

Training & Lending: We intensively train individuals and community groups in recording techniques, audio editing and uploading, and lend them equipment to facilitate their participation in the project. Our goal is to leverage existing community bonds and encourage groups to take an active role in their own representation: defining themselves, their experiences, and their histories as they understand them.

Site-Specific Projects: Encouraging participation at a series of specific locations around the city in "the people's places" – explicitly inviting and enabling visitors to a specific location to record in sound their experiences and stories about that place.

Distribution: Encouraging distribution and dialogue around the contributions made to the project. This includes traditional distribution via radio broadcasts, viral (web-based) sharing of recordings, and other less traditional methods (contributors have, for example, "remixed" recordings from the site in musical performances and artworks).