Collaborating with the TRCA!

I'm back with a long-overdue update to this blog! During the semester, I was fairly busy with managing SpiritLive, but the summer is the perfect time for me to further refine the various branches of this project.

Many months ago at this point, I was approached by folks at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority about a project they had been working on since 2016, called the West Bolton Sustainable Neighborhood Action Plan (SNAP). The TRCA had been working on several different initiatives within the town of Bolton, Ontario, working to mitigate issues with flooding and erosion, helping the residents make their homes more energy efficient and "climate-ready", and doing research in the archives to uncover some of Bolton's history and make that information more accessible to the folks that live there. In 2020, they came up with the Trails and Places Master Plan, which proposed a series of walking paths that could enable discovery and teach about history and sustainability. By 2026, they had drawn up a map, done a bunch of research, created webpages, and installed a real-life sign on the first stop of the first trail, the "Hidden Creek Walk". So named for Jaffary's Creek, a tributary of the Humber River that once was a landmark in Bolton, but kept getting buried during new development (and then developers discovered why that is often a bad idea!)

While they did have a very nice looking sign at the first stop, they had encountered some resistance from the powers that be when it comes to sticking any further signage or informational plaques in the ground, so they thought that turning the content on the website into a sort of self-guided tour would be a good way to create a cohesive experience without needing further physical materials or making any impact on the landscape. And that's where I came in!

The Process

Before discovering my work, the TRCA had planned to do a pretty simple voiceover of the website's text, probably done by someone at the office. But they still weren't exactly sure how they'd implement that so it could be experienced as a perpetual walking tour. At this point, I had completed my proof-of-concept app, but hadn't made many strides in terms of adding GPS functionality. So when they did approach me, I used it as an opportunity to look into what products were already out there for this purpose, what their pros and cons were, how expensive they were, and whether people in this geographical area had had any success with them.

We eventually settled on a program called SonicMaps based out of the UK, but here are some of the other options we considered:

• Echoes.xyz, also based in the UK, which plays off of an app. We didn't end up going with this one because it was more in-depth than we really needed and the subscription was more expensive

• Aporee, based out of Germany, also ran off of an app but doesn't seem to have been supported past around 2019

• Soundtrails, based out of Australia, which came with its own educational tools for creating the soundwalk, but was prohibitively expensive

• VoiceMap, based out of Singapore, which seemed more designed for paid tours but does have quite a bit of users operating tours in Toronto

• Driftscape, a Canadian company that works with various tourism groups but seemed more focused on tourism destinations intending to make money

  
  

SonicMaps was cost effective and very customizable, which was good because I wanted to have maximum control over the platform to be able to stretch my artistic wings a bit. The TRCA gave me early access to their website (it's public now so you can see it too!) and essentially gave me carte blanche to transform that material into a sound walk! I also thought this would be a great opportunity to create some workshop opportunities for students and get some extra assistance in the process.

The plan was:

• Familiarize myself with the material on the website

• Get together a group of students who I would meet with regularly

• Visit Bolton with my fancy microphones and take the walk myself

• Re-write and re-format the material on the website to make it more pleasing to the ear and record myself reading it as voiceover

• Hop into my beloved Foley studio and record anything additional that I wanted

• Take a little hop skip and jump into the mixing studio and play around in Vital to create a bunch of ambient music

• Edit everything together and then put it into a sound walk in time for the launch event in June

Things mostly went according to plan. We decided to make this an official collaboration between the TRCA and TMU, so that meant there was a lot of paperwork back-and-forth that took longer than expected, so by the time I was instructed to actually start work on this, the semester was already over and the only student who was interested in coming in on a regular basis was my former employee at SpiritLive, Kamal Punitharajah (Anyone reading this who is looking for people to hire, he was fantastic on my team and he'd be fantastic on yours too!!)

That being said, we had some very productive discussions and he helped me get some of the first drafts of the voiceover recorded, so he definitely deserves his flowers for this one, even though the final product was largely completed by myself. I like to think he learned a few things, and if a project like this comes up again (which I think it likely will!) I'll be able to make it a more true workshop experience based on what I learned this time.

Visiting Bolton

Bolton developed originally because of its proximity to a train station. This train station is no longer there. Back in early May, I made my way out there via the tried and true subway->bus->uber strategy and met up with some folks from the TRCA. They gave me a great guided tour of the walk, even though the chilly drizzle wasn't exactly what we were hoping for weather-wise. I brought a Zoom H6N with the XY mic attachment and a shotgun mic, and recorded the entire walk for my own reference, then bid the TRCA folks adieu and spent the next few hours wandering around looking for nice serene areas to capture on the XY mic, and getting as close to the creek as I could with my shotgun mic. My bus back broke down so I had to wait an extra hour, but my SD card was full of tasty sounds of birdsong, breeze in the trees, distant street hockey, and a surprisingly good recording of the creek (the drizzle turned out to be a blessing in this situation, as it ensured that the creek was flowing to an audible degree).

Creating the Soundscape

Another benefit of going and taking the Hidden Creek Walk myself was that I was able to visualize a lot of the auditory choices that I wanted to make in the sound walk, and get a more 3-dimensional sense of the space, and where the boundaries of each stop would be. I did a lot of thinking, presented to the other people who had received Cluster Seed Grant funding at TMU, and met up with John Shiga, who had also done sound work relating to water and the TRCA (small world!) While we weren't able to get his project loaded up in the immersive studio like we'd planned, I screened a portion of my practicum to him and we had a very inspiring discussion about immersive audio, nature, and artistic expression. I very much look forward to hearing his project in 5.1 whenever we get around to it.

This was the presentation I made for the Cluster SEED folks!

Working in SonicMaps

SonicMaps has a lot of really interesting tools, and while I wasn't going to use all of them for this project, I'd definitely be interested in exploring deeper functionalities for the future. This project required a pretty precise balance between making something that was engaging and immersive, and something that someone who was fairly technologically-challenged could understand and navigate on their own. This was very much illustrated to me when I brought my laptop to the launch event and a prime member of my target audience (an elderly man who had lived in the town for decades and contributed a lot to the actual research) struggled to even click the trackpad without assistance. Being in these scenarios (and working with Kamal, who has a disability requiring him to use a walker to navigate) has really opened my eyes to the fact that the gearhead pursuit of perfect fidelity and interactivity always leaves someone in the dust, and finding creative ways to work within stricter limitations can make your work a lot more accessible.

I considered a few different methodologies for putting the recordings into the software, and while I settled on making things very linear in the end (one audio file for each of the 5 "stops" along the walk that just plays start to finish or pauses if you exit that area and resumes when you re-enter it) I do think it would be fun to play with strategically placing different elements of the mix in different geographical locations. It would give me less control over the timing and the mix, which makes me a bit itchy, but it would be cool to have the music draped over one area and the voiceover more precisely aligned to the exact spot you were standing in, so you could even do a specific stop in a non-linear way. Buuuuut that's placing a lot of trust in the software's capabilities and it also puts the audience in charge of the experience, which just didn't really fit for the easygoing, relaxing, informative vibe that we intended for this project.

Ultimately, the map is simple, with polygons of assorted shapes and sizes representing the different areas you can go to, ambient music I put together with Vital, and a mix of field-recorded sound effects and created scenes from the SFX libraries.

The Launch Event

On June 18th, I got to head back to Bolton with my laptop and show the sound walk to the real people that were going to be listening to it: the TRCA and the residents of Bolton. It was a really lovely little event with great catering and a lot of informational poster boards. I seem to keep getting myself into events like these, and I'm certainly not complaining!

I got the stamp of approval from the older feller who gave my demo a listen, "Good narration. Good content." (the best I could hope for, honestly!) and some other folks seemed interested in procuring my services for their own initiatives, which is quite exciting. Some folks from local government and representatives from the TRCA discussed all that they had managed to do in 10 years, while I tried not to think too hard about the fact that I was 15 years old at that time. We then got to take the walk as a guided tour with one of the people who had done the actual archival research, which was a very interesting experience. It has never been so hard for me not to finish someone else's sentence!!

Pictures from this event are to come :)

What Now?

I think that this project was an excellent way to get my foot in the door in the conservation and community education space, and I would absolutely love to make more things like this. The concept of taking a neighborhood, any neighborhood, and giving its residents the experience of an immersive self-guided history tour gets me really hyped. I love "making special" and finding the gems buried in the history of a place. I think my next quest is going to be to develop a way that I can create the entire project from scratch, using the skills I learned during my URO to create something similar to SonicMaps, but that specifically suits the needs that I have, and that doesn't require a subscription fee for continuous use. This is a pretty big undertaking, but I'm committed to continuing to learn more about the different facets that it requires, and while it may be very slow goings, I definitely see a world in which I have the ability to create something entirely bespoke for a project like this.

If you'd like to check out the sound walk for yourself, you can do so by visiting its webpage, or by using the nifty little embedded map right here! Instructions are also embedded below.