Author Archive: Gary Morris

Gary Morris

Gary is Head of Content at VoiceMap, where he leads a team of editors working with publishers to craft immersive audio tours. With experience editing more audio tours than perhaps anyone globally, he brings deep expertise to place-based storytelling. Gary's career began with sound engineering studies in New York City, followed by seven years at The Rumor Mill, where he worked on major advertising campaigns and Oscar-winning documentaries including The Cove and Man on Wire. His background encompasses freelance music composition, teaching music technology, and working as a Cape Town tour guide—giving him firsthand insight into what makes tours engaging. A prolific artist with over 60 musical works released through Bandcamp, Gary is one of VoiceMap's earliest employees. This blend of technical precision, creative vision, and storytelling expertise enables him to help publishers transform local knowledge into compelling audio experiences.

Why We Built a Recorder into the VoiceMap App

We recently released an integrated recorder directly into the VoiceMap app. It has an autocue that displays the script for each location automatically, scrolling at the speed you select. It also has professional-quality recording settings, immediate playback for quality checking, and a feature for instantly uploading audio to tour locations.

Self-guided tours are technically complex, especially when they have both audio and automatic GPS playback. Mapmaker, our publishing tool, is built to remove the trial and error that new producers typically experience at various steps in the process – from mapping to scripting and recording, and even through to distribution. This is why VoiceMap is the best, most comprehensive solution for creating self-guided audio tours, and our in-app audio recorder is no different. We didn’t just build it to add another feature. We solved a real problem for our publishers.

Upcoming Webinar: How a Berlin-based tour operator published 6 audio guides in 12 weeks

Join VoiceMap’s second webinar for a conversation with tour operator Jo Eckardt, who started A Friend in Berlin after she moved back to Germany from New York twenty years ago.

Jo taught German at NYU, and also worked for the UN, but Berlin is her favourite city, and while she showed everybody around herself in the early days, her company now has a team of guides offering tours in eleven languages. Jo is also a psychoanalyst, an author and – of course – a VoiceMap publisher.

The first of Jo’s tours was published in 2015. She didn’t publish another one until October 2022, then she published six of them in twelve weeks – and at last count, she was on eleven. Jo was inspired by how much easier it had become, and all the ways in which VoiceMap’s tools and processes had improved over the years. But she was also really clever about using the structure of a tour to her advantage.

Upcoming Webinar: Following Prince through Minneapolis with Frank Bures

Join VoiceMap’s first webinar for a conversation with Frank Bures, the author of four VoiceMap tours as well as The Geography of Madness, which Newsweek called one of the best travel books of the decade.

Sound design resources for audio tours

It’s not just a great story that makes a tour. Tasteful sound design and the right choice of music can go a long way to helping bring your tour to life and further immerse your listener in the journey you’re taking them on.

But knowing where to find the right royalty-free sound or track is not easy if you don’t know where to look. So we’ve put together a list of resources where you can find great sounding, useable and best of all, free material.

Once you have the sounds or music you want, you can email them over to your editor. Our audio editors will edit and mix in the sounds for you.

Continue reading Sound design resources for audio tours

Eleven of the best travel apps for your trip to Berlin

You might know Berlin as the birthplace of European street art. Or perhaps you’re more familiar with it being described as the startup capital of Europe. But the two actually go hand-in-hand because of something you wouldn’t normally call an asset: empty space.

At the end of the Cold War in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the two sides of the city were reunified at the same time as East and West Germany, the capital had a lot of vacant buildings. (It still does.) Rents were low, especially in the east, and artists, musicians and immigrants moved in, establishing new cultural hubs.

Then, in 1990, the East Side Gallery was established, opening up over a kilometre of the Berlin Wall to street artists. It was still mostly blank on one side because to reach it from East Berlin you had to cross the so-called “death strip”, which was patrolled by dogs and booby-trapped with over 55,000 landmines.

Startups like low rent too, of course, but they also make it easier for Berliners to take risks and fail – or to live on a low, startup salary. This has encouraged a generation of entrepreneurs and today a new company is founded in the capital every 20 minutes.

What does all of this have to do with travel apps? In a city where local startup Soundcloud has office space next door to Twitter on a campus that “straddles” the Berlin Wall, you’d expect technology to offer something better than a guide book. And it does. There are apps that help you find vegan restaurants and street art by Banksy. You can listen to daring escape stories using a dedicated Berlin Wall app, take an audio tour with us, using VoiceMap, or find a more adventurous way to get from A to B using Komoot. Continue reading Eleven of the best travel apps for your trip to Berlin

How to Record Your Voice Using Apps for iOS and Android

Not everyone is an audiophile, into the latest and greatest amplifiers and Hi-Fi’s, or a Sound Engineer with the know-how of the properties of noise, or even a techie nerd into all things gadgety. And that’s OK. I am all of the above and I’m here to (try and) help you!

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re wanting to record some audio on your phone, and get decent results. But, you’re not sure where to begin…

Well, most phones have some sort of recording app already, but it’s probably quite limited in functionality, and quality – and for the purposes of your recording, we want the best audio that is possible! No point in making a recording that has incomprehensible, unusable sound, right? Right!

Recording Great Audio on Android Devices

Creating a VoiceMap audio tour is easy, intuitive and a great way to tell your stories, but there are also a few new things to be learned. Recording the best possible quality audio for your tour will mean more people enjoying and sharing it. It’s your voice that will be giving directions and telling stories, so this tutorial will help you to create the best possible audio using your Android device.

Installing a Voice Recorder

1. Go to the Google Play store and download Smart Voice Recorder (free).

Continue reading Recording Great Audio on Android Devices