SOMBRA is a crowd-sourced collection of
location-based multimedia narratives online.
This project is partly inspired by the 2017 Subtropics workshop led by Christoph Cox. In the workshop, Cox guided the attendees through a covered-eye soundwalk of Downtown Miami. It was then, that we first envisioned the potential contributions of this aural practice, in hopes of cultivating Miami's conceptual soundscape. Inspired by this audio walk format, combined with a social media strategy we hope SOMBRA will enable the sharing and listening of soundscapes online.
In this sense, we want to provide a tool for our community and visitors to share their perspectives of a given location that resonates with them. Each narrative will contain a sound recording and a passage where the participant can share their connection to a particular space. We will develop an online application to deepen a sense of belonging and the metromorphosis of our city through time. We want to provide a memento that would serve as a digital counterpart to traditional oral storytelling.
We hope to accomplish this through a diverse and searchable index of recordings which may enrich our auditive sensibilities by featuring pitches, timber, and the intensity of a sound with color gamuts.
SOMBRA is a synesthetic method to stimulate cognitive perception and to invite the experience of a place non-representationally; that is, not as a video, photograph or any other conventional imaging methods. When we are in the sombra, that is, in the shadow of an unseen place, we can coincide through the ears of another.
Eventually, this will evolve into a more robust VR experience as the technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous. For now, we can use Google Maps API to provide a VR experience of the place along with the rest of the multimedia.
