Category: Places

Exploring change: An audio walking tour through Prague’s Holešovice

Cities are forever changing and shifting, reflecting new trends in the global village. In most modern cities, the word ‘gentrification’ is either bandied about with a smile or spat out with vehemence, depending on whether you’re moving in or being pushed out. But however you see it, gentrification seems an unavoidable force of modern city living. Traditionally industrial or low-income areas segue into trendy up-and-coming locales, bringing an influx of developers and young residents, eager to find new spaces to fill with organic coffee shops and artisanal bakeries.

Holešovice, Prague, is a prime example of a neighbourhood in the infancy of such a transformation, slowly being reinvented piece by piece. Historically, this was an area of heavy industrial activity, with warehouses, low-cost housing and even a sewage treatment plant. Globalisation and the decentralisation of industry from the city have led to many factories falling into disuse, and a new breed of residents and businesses are moving in.

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Miranda Diboll relives the height of BritPop through her VoiceMap audio tour

Audio Producer, Geolocation Enthusiast and VoiceMap Storyteller, Miranda Diboll, provides some insight into her BritPop audio tour of Camden. For her, creating a VoiceMap was a way of reliving an exciting past with an “older pair of eyes”.

VoiceMap: Do you see potential for apps and other new technology to engage new audiences in music from the past?

Miranda: There’s a lot of interest in music from previous decades. Anyone who loves music will tend to look back at the influences of their favourite bands and listen to those influences. Britpop is a case in point — it was very much influenced by the 60s, Northern Soul and Mod. Some people wrongly labelled it as a mod revival which it wasn’t, it was much more diverse than that.

Now people are seeing Britpop as much more than just a music craze or some kind of revival. Twenty years have passed and the music stands the test of time. The 90s was an interesting decade, it was a time of hope and celebration of British culture. For young people at the time, like myself, it was the first time we could see the end of years of Tory government. The internet was just round the corner and so was a Labour government that promised us so much. We had so much hope for music and politics! It didn’t last.

So yes, I think people are keen to engage with the past and a VoiceMap tour is an incredibly immersive way to do that.

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8 London Walking Tour Apps to Bring Your Trip to Life

When I last visited London, I decided to take a guided tour. Strolling along the banks of the Thames, I came across the famous London Plane Trees. It was September, and they were stunning at that time of year: their bark was peeling off to reveal mottled, grey-green trunks. I stopped. Touched the bark; took out my camera. The tour guide smiled obsequiously: “Come along, plenty to see”. I put my camera away and was herded over to a curio shop. Plane Trees just don’t pay the same commission as mini-Big-Bens.

A great tour guide is irreplaceable, but sometimes you just need to stop and look at the trees. You need to get off the beaten track, and explore the hidden, lesser-known side of a city. Sometimes, you need a tour guide with a pause button.

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Welcome Guests with VoiceMap: A Pilot Program for Airbnb Hosts

VoiceMap is working on a set of new features for hotels, guest house owners, Airbnb hosts, and anybody else who has paying guests. We want to make it quick and easy to create a short, immersive audio tour that allows you to show your guests around the neighbourhood without actually being there.

Spier Wine Farm and Once in Cape Town have already created similar tours, but we’re working out how to simplify and speed up this process, to make it more accessible for small businesses. Our team in Cape Town is piloting the project, and because VoiceMap is perfect for Airbnb’s plugged-in, international guests, we’re looking for two Airbnb hosts in the City Bowl or the Atlantic Seaboard. If you have a listing in either place, please get in touch. You’ll find our contact details below.

You’ll need to come into our Woodstock office for a chat, where we’ll help you map out a route that takes in some interesting sights, shops, bars, and other things your neighbourhood has to offer. Then you’ll need to work with us to create and record a script. You’ll be left with an immersive GPS tour which your guests can download. None of this will cost you anything.

If you’re interested, please send an email to [email protected], and we’ll send along more details.

Get the perfect shot with self-guided photography tours of London

Location-aware audio has an endless list of applications, but self-guided photography tours often seem like they were made for the medium. Having your hands free when a professional photographer suggests you pause in that exact spot to best capture a vista, getting advice on which settings to adjust, and then being led to another seemingly secret – and oh so photogenic – spot takes location-aware audio tours to a whole new level.

London is the first city where we’ve seen real demand for self-guided photography tours, and so far five have been released on VoiceMap’s walking tour app by two London-based photographers.

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One Day in Rome: An Itinerary with Three Audio Tours

Introduction

Yes, Rome is eternal, but your stay isn’t. This leaves most visitors with a tricky choice: join a tour, and trade independence for a stuffy bus and the company of an underwhelming guide, or stay spontaneous but learn only as much as you can find in the pages of your guidebook, when you aren’t lost.

This itinerary is a third option, and the perfect middle ground. VoiceMap’s audio tours will lead you along Rome’s ancient roads, past world-famous landmarks, before sneaking you down hidden alleyways filled with secrets. Just install the app and download your tours using WiFi, then plug in your headphones and embark on your own personal adventure.

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Storytelling in Games vs. Location-Aware Fiction

Kate Gorman is a storyteller with a background in theatre, film, and writing novels. She’s passionate about sci-fi, virtual realities and, naturally, Star Trek. To her, getting her own holodeck – a virtual reality facility from the Star Trek Universe, often used for participating in interactive stories or recreating familiar environments – would be a dream come true. But sadly, we don’t live in the future yet and creating such a device would cost a lot of money, so instead she used what is available to her : location-aware, GPS storytelling. Making use of a real-world environment, she produced a four-episode audio walk series in Washington D.C. using VoiceMap’s storytelling platform, creating a sensory experience that is similar to what someone in a virtual, interactive reality might have.  

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Controversy: VoiceMap’s Podcast, Episode 1

Controversies — or potential controversies — exist all around us, all the time. But a single place can sometimes become a lightning rod for all of this pent up energy. Think of prostitution, for example. I think it’s safe to assume that the oldest profession has, well, professionals, just about everywhere. But by bringing prostitution out into the light, Bangkok’s red light districts have given us a focal point for all of the sex trade’s many complexities.

A red light district in Bangkok is one place we’re visiting today. We’re also stopping to look up at a statue of a long dead colonialist in Cape Town and considering what an inner city prison in Philadelphia says about the American dream. Continue reading Controversy: VoiceMap’s Podcast, Episode 1

Mickey Cohen’s Sunset Strip

Aric Allen’s Hollywood walking tour tells the story of the Sunset Strip‘s transformation from sprawling poinsettia fields and avocado groves to the world famous entertainment hotspot it is today.

It was gambling that built the Sunset Strip, Aric says, and in this short video, he zooms in on a central character, the Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, who ruled the Sunset Strip in the post-war era.

Aric also highlights the role that water may have played in the lifespans of both the man and the Strip itself.

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The Voice of Bo-Kaap

Shereen Habib was born in 1952 in a house at the top of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’s “Malay Quarter”. The predominantly Muslim neighbourhood’s population is mostly descended from convicts, political exiles and slaves from the former Dutch East Indies.

Shereen’s family has lived in Bo-Kaap for almost a century. During apartheid’s darkest days when most non-white people were banished to designated neighbourhoods and townships on the outskirts of the city, including Shereen and her husband, her parents remained in the house on the hill.

She returned to Bo-Kaap after a decade with her husband in a formerly “coloured” area. It was home, she says. “After so much anger and so much death and so much shooting down, with my children witnessing it all, we were traumatised. I wanted to get back to where I knew best – where there was love and laughter – and so I came back here. And that’s when I knew that this is where I wanted to start telling my story.”

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Audio Drama: The Ideal Medium for Fantasy

The latest weekly podcast by our friends Matthew and Robert at Yap Audio Production explores why audio is a particularly powerful medium for fantasy. One of the guests on the show is Domien De Groot – “the Tolkien of audio drama” – who shares the story of how his career began.

“Fantasy is really what got me in to doing audio drama in the first place. I discovered it because of the BBC dramatisations of the Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit. That’s when I fell in love with the medium. I thought ‘what is so wonderful about this is you can create this whole world, and you can see things, without actually having to film them, or create them.’

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Looking past the obvious in LA: Aric Allen on Hollywood

“Location-aware audio walk” doesn’t trip off the tongue, does it? It’s a phrase for a technical medium, with lots of moving parts, and sometimes VoiceMap’s storytellers get bogged down by all of our publishing tool’s many mechanics.

The result is a list of facts instead of stories, with the things that are physically most obvious at the forefront – the monuments, buildings, and landmarks that get mapped out right at the beginning of the process – instead of the stories that made the walk compelling in the first place.

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Our favourite stories about Cape Town, so far

Conventional audio tours tell a city’s story with only one or two voices, which doesn’t allow for diversity or individual perspectives. You can’t capture the essence of a place like Cape Town’s Bo-Kaap in the same way as the colonial Company’s Gardens or the Grand Parade, where Mandela addressed 200,000 ecstatic people after his release from prison. What brings these spaces to life, and connects you to them, is the personal opinions, anecdotes and sense of ownership reflected in the words, ‘I love’, ‘I remember’, and ‘I hope’.

The best travel experiences normally begin with a local showing you their city. It cuts through all the abstraction of being an outsider, making you a participant, with a point of reference that helps you identify with a place. You get to share somebody else’s feelings for their home – and that’s exactly what VoiceMap aims to do, with the help of our storytellers.

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Cape Town, tell us your stories

We’re launching VoiceMap in Cape Town throughout the month of September, and we’re looking for stories that make our map of Cape Town more complete. We’ve lined up significant media coverage from some of the city’s biggest broadcasters and publications, and Cape Town Tourism and Cape Town Partnership are lending a hand.

We’re always on the lookout for your stories, and anything is welcome, but we’re prioritising the following places and themes in particular:

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Company’s Garden Photo Essay

The Company’s Garden lies in the heart of Cape Town’s City Bowl, between Signal Hill and Table Mountain. In the 1700’s, when the Dutch East India Company dominated the spice trade between the East and Europe, Cape Town was the halfway point. It was a refreshment station, and the garden supplied fresh produce to the scurvy-ridden, weather-beaten sailors passing through after months at sea.

Today, the garden is another kind of refreshment station. In the summer, office workers spread themselves out on the sunny lawns during their lunch hour, absent-mindedly tossing crumbs to the pigeons. Toddlers shriek with delight as the resident squirrels edge towards the peanuts in their outstretched hands, and opportunistic seagulls scout for discarded snacks from the tops of old bronze statues. The garden is not just the city’s historical centre – it’s a democratic space at Cape Town’s heart, where people from all walks of life come to rest and rejuvenate.

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