Creating Sounding Underground

Sounding Underground is an online interactive sonic environment that links sound excerpts from the metros of London, Paris and Mexico City, as selected by commuters, as meaningful moments of sound from their commuting routine. Designed as a navigation structure, the environment draws on identifiable architectonic spaces such as entrances and corridors, but also incorporates more abstract ‘spaces’ based on memorable sounds that passengers had in common. The creation of the environment focused on the perception of social, political and symbolic experiences, and was derived from an iterative ethnographic and artistic practice which involved self-reflection, interviews, recordings of and listening to the journeys, and commuters' selections of sounds. This article describes the process of creation through the abstraction of a physical space, as well as the responses the work has evoked in the users and the academic community. It exemplifies the transdisciplinary nature of practice-based research involving the creative use of digital technologies