The Loop Beijing Tour: sonic journeys on Beijing's buses

LOOP Beijing is a sound system made for the Beijing public bus network that is currently being showcased in the 2014 Beijing Design Week. The idea is, you can get on a public bus and listen to a recording that has been made for the specific bus line you are travelling on. What's more, it is designed to allow people to submit their own recordings making it a platform for the sharing of sounds, whether they be music, speech or otherwise.

Beijing buses are numerous and the timetables next to impossible to make head or tail of if you don't read Chinese. They are, however, extremely convenient, if you know how to use them, and remarkably inexpensive too. The bus I took was the 731, I was on it for about half an hour and it cost £0.04. There are still one of two leftovers from communism in today's market economy. 

I plugged in my headphones and using the application Wechat (it's also possible to listen from the website) tapped in 731. At first the streaming was poor and the sound came in fits and bursts but, with 3G, it began to flow much better. The sound turned out to be a five minute piece of electronic music, not the most obvious sort of dance music but nothing that particularly stretched the ear either. I read that it was composed by a musician in London, whether or not he made it with this specific route in mind or not was not clear. When I came to think about the mechanics of it, it is quite difficult to make something very specifically for a route as the starting and ending point of the listener's journey is impossible for the composer to know, as is the time of day the listener will take the bus and the direction they will take it in. With all these variables, the possibility of predetermined relations between the outside the bus and the sound file are next to impossible so this is never going to be like an audio tour on a tourist bus that tells you, "on your right is..." 

The interior of the bus was, in any case, more present than the exterior. The bus rattled along and managed to make a racket of its own with windows vibrating in their frames, doors shaking together, the engine complaining like an asthmatic doing a marathon, and the occasional mobile phone soloing over the bus's tense rhythm section. When the bus pulled over to stop something special happened. On one of the seats on the side of the bus facing the exit door, a man cleared his throat and, with the door wide open and nobody standing between him and the exit, managed to spit clean out of the bus! I am not particularly impressed by spitting but I had to recognise this as quite a feat in precision, distance spitting. The Beijing Loop soundtrack that was playing as this happened definitely elevated this moment into something memorable, or else the spitting gave the music a special appeal.

At the risk of mixing my tours up, listening to this audio recording reminded me of A Folded Path, a concert / performance I saw a few weeks ago in Bristol. This basically worked by having three groups of audience members led through the city streets carrying speaker boxes which emitted different sounds. These were tailored to the routes that we followed and the guides, in the yellow high visibility jackets, kept the group on time so that the sound and space related as intended. This side of it worked well with some dynamic changes in the rhythm of the tour deliberately choreographed onto the streets of Bristol. What was less exciting for me was the choice of sounds which were used to achieve this: it was the sort of sound I might expect on a compilation CD called Ambient Chill Out Groove, or something of that ilk. As well as it not being my musical taste, it felt, more importantly, arbitrary and without any deep relation to the social spaces we were passing through. The same thing could have been done with a Bhangra, heavy metal or yodelling soundtrack, and it would not have been much more or less related to the space. It may be that I was expecting too much and already using the space as a trigger for the composer's imagination is sufficient. I do however hold this desire for something more so that the work succeeds or fails not only based upon you liking the music and admiring its novel form of presentation. 

To jump back to Loop Beijing then, I felt that the particular track I listened to had a similar arbitrary quality to it. I have, however, listened to a number of other tracks since then and they are quite varied with musicians considering this problem and people using the upload facility to play with the possibilities of this system in quite different ways. LOOP  Beijing has just been launched and right now only a small proportion of the city's vast bus network has been linked to recordings. I rather think this is likely to grow and people will find ways to use this platform that are difficult to predetermine. Who knows, maybe people will use it to tell stories, give directions, jam with the buses own soundtrack or even advertise their services or find dates with fellow passengers. I already had one idea of a soundtrack grounded in the social space of the bus: a periodic clearing of the throat and spitting. It's a pity I didn't get the guy on the bus with the projectile spit to make a recording for me, he was something special. But on second thoughts, maybe it's for the best I didn't, this is probably not not what you want to hear creaking through rush hour traffic in Guomao. I will in any case be following how this develops as it's a very nice concept, the infrastructure really works and the content is accumulating.

The Bath Ghost Walk

After quite some time taking and reviewing tours all over the place, I finally made it onto a ghost walk. I was expecting something very camp but chance had it that I ended up on a more reputable one with no jumping out from the behind the bushes or fake vampire teeth. We gathered outside The Garrick's Head and Christian, our guide, started off with a story about a ghost in the pub, which allegedly predicted the death of three actors who stayed there.

I listening to the ghost stories unfold and as I did so I was also asking myself, "What are the qualifications required to give a good ghost walk?" Blue badge guides learn history, geologists learn geology, and so on. I had to think about it and look at what Christian was doing and conclude that the main thing you had to learn is how to tell stories and how to look out of the ordinary. Storytelling is essential because with this sort of tour there is usually nothing to see: it goes with the territory. As for looking different, that lifts everything out of the mundane. Christian, our guide, was certainly friendly enough and able to hold the stories together but he also had an unusual character that made him difficult to quite locate. I don't think that is a bad thing at all but it is in contrast to those who, when they open their mouths, you see only to well who they are and where they are coming from. A ghost tour given by a loud mouthed painter decorator would just not cut it. 

We next had some grizzly story of lovers slain back in the glory days of Georgian Bath. Our guide got quite involved in the story and mimicked the sword thrusting into the body. People in the background clocked this was a ghost tour, made spooky gestures and said 'whhoooo!' from time to time. I imagine it doesn't matter how good a ghost tour guide you are, you will routinely face this sort of public reception on the street. Heritage tours don't face this mocking treatment, this lack of respect seems mostly reserved for ghost tours and it basically boils down to finding it funny to pop the spooky bubble. To be fair though, I noticed only five or six people doing this in the hour and a half but still, that's five or six more than I've seen on any other tour of Bath. 

We were reminded at the beginning of the tour of David Prowse the Bristol actor who played both Darth Vader and The Green Cross Code man, a figure used to popularise road safety in the UK in the 1970s. This was a light-hearted way to tell us to be careful when crossing the road and this was necessary as Bath streets are narrow and often busy with traffic. Having a good sense of optimal crossing points and waiting times is important for a guide as it can ensure the tour is safe and save 'dead time' if you'll excuse the pun. I think this ghost tour made a pretty good job of it but I also remember how the Bizarre Bath Tour actively used these moments of waiting at the lights for gags so that they were not experienced as time out. That won't work for all walks but I do now start to see patterns in the way the different tours cross the city and how these routes are routinely punctuated by traffic lights.

In some ways ghost stories are generic and are very similar from one city to another. When they are tied to local celebrities, however, or when they tell you something about the nature of the city or a building, they become something else, they even have the potential to become a subversive form of local knowledge. For example stories of fallen aristocrats becoming ghosts in Bath are more fitting than stories about fishermen ghosts or farmer ghosts, which you might expect to hear elsewhere. When the ghosts also use the familiar architecture in unfamiliar ways they add another dimension to the tour. Putting together a good ghost tour must then take some work and I could see that this Bath ghost tour had been complied with care so that there was variation and local interest in the supernatural tales. Here we got to hear about the famous Bath architect John Wood, who has cropped up on several other Bath tours, but never in connection with a ghost, namely The Bride of Death. 

Moving on to the Gravel Walk, we sat down and heard about the time the mayor of Miami took the ghost tour in Bath. It's not all tours that are willing to talk about different and unexpected things that have happened on the tour previously. I quite like these histories of the tours themselves as long as they are there to develop the existing theme, as this one was, rather than as entertaining asides that break the flow. Come to think of it though, a tour of tours is, in a way, made up only of asides with the content of the tours removed.

The tour did require participation but the demands were thankfully modest. One of us was beckoned forward to play the part of a story's protagonist. This was more a law and order story than a ghost story and the man on the left had to say what he'd do if he were in the shoes of a petty thief. He was given the name of this character but did not have to act at all. This was done to make us understand his position, I suspect, and the rest of us were later asked to play the jury which prompted some jokes about Daily Mail readers wanting to hang him high.

We listening to a story of duelling in the park while darkness fell, prompting the lamp. It could have been because we were removed from the street or it could have been because of the story but, one way or another, I became acutely aware of the background sounds: seagulls raising hell, passers by walking up the Gravel Walk, a window closing for the night. Good sound is essential to building suspense in horror movies and ghost walks can similarly benefit from this sort of attention. There was another point on the walk when our guide used the natural acoustic of the circular space but only to reference it not to try and scare us. My sense was that this tour went some way to exploiting the potential of sound in a way that other tours have not. I think there is a more that could be done but I was happy to be made aware of the sounds around me at all as most tours seem to regard them as an obstacle to be overcome. I remember taking a sound walk with Sound Fjord Gallery in North London a little while ago which was devoted to listening to environmental sound. That was fascinating and I now see how it could inform tours more generally. 

We came to the Royal Crescent and at this point it struck me how we were visiting more or less the same sites as the heritage tours, only we were describing them very differently. The Bath ghosts all seemed to haunt elegant places: there were no 'budget ghosts' stuck in the Iceland lamenting their minimum wage former existence or the dodgy chicken kiev that did them in. Maybe the city's upright citizens really wouldn't be seen dead in those places.

I have often wondered whether tour groups change the phenomenon they are describing through their presence and we got a resounding yes to that question. An elderly lady who still lives on the Circus is haunted, reportedly, by a poltergeist. The story of this ghost was once included in the ghost walk and the guide indicated which building was afflicted. We were told that one evening this resulted in some people who had been on the tour knocking on her door wanting to see the ghost for themselves. Naturally, she would have none of it and made a complaint to the tour's operator. Consequently, the group is now just told it is one of the buildings but not which one.  

The tour concluded where we started. A real Daily Mail reader was sitting waiting for the theatre show to come out. I find that newspaper is a scary read, in its own way, and I'd rather take the Bath ghost walk to calm my nerves than read another story about 'Al Qaeda on the NHS.' The tour not only includes hauntings but covers other dark material and does so in a welcoming and rather local way making it an integral part of the Bath tourist options and not the bogey man that I had imaged it might be. For a first ghost tour I think I landed lucky and got a decent one but part of me is secretly now longing for a truly awful one, the spiritual soulmate of the Hammer House of Horror. There's time enough and tours enough to find that one too.

The Sound Map Tour: an immersive audio tour of Brick Lane

The Sound Map Tour is an audio tour of Brick Lane and the surrounding streets. Like the Walk The Line Tour, it is also one that can be downloaded for free from the Internet, this time from the Sound Map Website. They have produced four London sound walks and these have been made on a commercial basis. Probably due to this Brick Lane walk being slightly out of date, you no longer have to pay for it. 

The tour starts opposite the Beigel Shop at the top of Brick Lane and is introduced and led by author Tarquin Hall, who stakes his local credentials by saying he once lived in a flat looking over the Beigel Bake. The tour begins with some words of warning, which basically amount to keep your eyes open and if anything goes wrong, take off the headphones and pause the recording.

Unlike the Walk The Line tour, this tour has been properly researched, a polished script written, it has been well recorded and a specially commissioned sound track added. There are even three interviews, such as one with the proprietor of the beigel shop. I couldn't say if the grey haired man standing behind the counter was or was not the man I was listening to, but the recording said he was with a man in his 70s so it is quite possible that I was hearing him speaking while simultaneously watching him at work. This uncertainty, not knowing if it was or was not him, added a pleasant ambiguity.  

The tour made its way down Brick Lane and I could not but notice Broadgate Tower in the background, itself the site of a number of tours that I've been researching, and which I will try to cover. Perhaps the most tangential of them is it being a stopping point on a Skyfalll film location tour. This most recent of Bond films had to work to a tighter budget than anticipated and the tower had to stand in for a Shanghai office block, as it was too expensive to film in China. You can see the building featuring heavily in the out takes video starting at 18 seconds. There are a number of different tours that will take you there as part of a Bond themed tour.

I was perfectly comfortable taking the tour without a map, even though there was one provided as a safety net. It was possible because the narrator had a system for getting people to the right place, holding them there while he was talking and then setting them off in the right direction to the next stop. It basically involved him saying walk to the next junction and stop at the corner. Some music would play or he'd continue his story and he'd check in to make sure you were on course. Once that story was complete, you'd go the next track and you'd get your instructions on where to walk next. The sound was, therefore, pretty much constant and this made the tour far more immersive than the other audio tours I have taken, where you are switching between recordings and map. This was much more like being inside a movie, in no small part also due to the sound design which added music and footsteps to the recording. There was just enough time to make it from one point to the next, though it might be a struggle to do this on a market day as you'd have to fight your way through the crowds. The one thing I had to keep fiddling with was the volume; sometimes there would be traffic backed up and I needed it loud to cut through the car engines, other times the street fell quiet and the soundtrack felt abrasive.

The tour took me to The Vibe Bar and the narrator talked about the changing occupants and usage of Truman's Brewery. The general idea was that change was a feature of the area and nothing new in itself. Every now and again, when something bad happened, the narrator would introduce it with, "Sadly, ...." which became a bit of a running theme not only about changes for the worse but also unfortunate historical events such as a racist nail bomb attack. 

I arrived at one of the more fashionable shopping and eating areas and sailed straight through.  

Continuing on the blue plaque theme from previous tours, I spotted a further two on this tour. One is that of Anna Maria Garthwaite, who got a bona fide English Heritage plaque, and the other is Gizmo (a dog) who gets his own more homemade plaque outside the Golden Heart. I noticed that there is a website that attempts to record all the plaques and monuments in London. This would be the perfect resource for constructing a plaque tour. Standing outside the pub, the narrator  told me about the celebrity regulars, interviewed the landlady and encouraged me to pop in for a pint. I was however in a bit of a hurry so didn't take up the offer.

I passed the Ten Bells and got a short history of the pub's connection to Jack the Ripper and heard  how the pub was for over 10 years named The Jack The Ripper as you can see on the right. Not a pub popular with the ladies, I suspect, back then. He talked about how the Ripper tours have been a local attraction and source of revenue for some years.

The tour took me into Taj Stores, a sizeable Bangladeshi supermarket, where the story of the Bangladeshi community began. Listening to an audio-tour out in the street is one thing but inside a store it becomes more curious as you are being told information about the people whose space you are standing in and who are right in front of you. What's more, they don't know that you are listening to someone telling you about them; you could be listening to Lady Gaga for all they know. This information gap can made me feel ever so slightly self-conscious, as if I were spying on them. 

The immigration theme continued down the road with the traces of the Jewish immigrants being highlighted. The remaining traces were relatively few in number. To compensate for that, klezmer music played while the history of Jews in the area was recounted. This music returned at least once again later in the tour and became a theme to announce "jewish section of the narrative" in the same way that there was an Indian sounding theme that returned when you were in the general bounce-down-Brick-Lane-moments of the tour. In this respect the music was there to always support the narrative, both thematically and rhythmically. This was an carefully composed audio tour and not a work of audio art that made you ask questions about the status of the different elements.

Somewhat inevitably, the tour again took in the mosque. The story was again that of tolerance and change in the area. I heard, once again, how the building had been transformed from a Christian to a Jewish to a Muslim place of worship. Having heard this a few too many times due to the professional distortion of being a reviewer of local tours, I was more interested in the Renault.

While the narrator talks and you make your way from one point to another, you do of course see things which are not directly part of the script. In fact the majority of the things I saw were not mentioned as he was busy telling a story not listing the objects I could see when walking down the road. Come to think of it, that might make for a rather unusual sort of tour: no story just a recitation of what is there... or was to be seen, when the recording was made. This is much in the mode of George Perec's Species of Spaces where, for example, he suggests, "force yourself to see more flatly" (page 51). I'm not quite sure how I'd describe these artery thickening sweets, but I certainly saw many trays of them as I made my way down Brick Lane. 

Cafe Naz was another point of interest. I stopped and listened to an interview with the owner about his thriving restaurant whilst looking at the building site which is what remains of Cafe Naz. With a walking tour this dislocation does not happen as the guide can change his story to suit reality but with an audio tour, whose narrative is fixed in time, this must be quite common. The narrator talked about the process of change and so this was, to an extent not as jarring as it might otherwise be. It does strike me, however, that this must be a major drawback for most audio tours: their limited life span.  

I then came to the end of Brick Lane and heard about the main local bank that is used to transfer money back to Bangladesh, particularly to the Syhlet region, where the majority of the Bangladeshis who have settled in the area were said to have first come from. I also heard how this has created not just a pocket of Syhlet in London but also a reciprocal pocket of London in Syhlet as people have taken back things they have learned to like here, such as marmite. 

The tour concluded on Whitechapel High Street, close to Aldgate East tube. My overall impression was rather positive: it was intelligent and skilfully put together. This form of immersive audio tour has the effect of taking you properly into the tour, but this in turn can have the effect of removing you somewhat from the place. It was not so long a tour, about an hour in length, so it did not feel like an imposition but rather it gave a condensed impression of the Brick Lane and its life, both past and present. The contrast between this and The Walk The Line Tour is great and goes to show what can be done with a bit of effort.