The Portland 'Soundtrail': an audio walk of 'The town that built Sydney' for smartphone and web

Designed using the "Sound Trails" App, this is an immersive sound-rich journey into the past lives and history of the former industrial town of Portland, NSW, for decades known as 'The town that built Sydney'. The work was commissioned by the Portland Business Association with support from 'The Foundations, Portland' in the Central West of NSW (https://thefoundations.com.au/), with the goal to create a permanent in situ 'Sound Trail'. The work is produced using the Sound Trails custom App which operates for mobile phone listening while walking on site. This multi-dimensional work is accessed by GPS which works with the App. Audio and images are also available online via the Soundtrails website for an even larger public, to be linked to The Foundations, Portland organization's own website. This performative audio experience is available to the wider public and Portland community as a permanent locative audio media storytelling work which has been purpose built for mobile listening, to be accessed via App and website.

The Soundtrail is part of an array of initiatives for the town and visitors planned over the next ten years and forms part of the transformation underway for the town and its industrial heritage precinct. The Foundations organization is engaging with innovative cultural industries, part of the repurposing of the heritage buildings which formerly constituted the Portland cement works (and quarries feeding it) founded in 1902.

This is a creative new media, historical, regional-urban and 'locative' research work which is also highly interdisciplinary. It involves extensive historical archival research, oral history interviews with former or current town residents and workers, and creative application to research and interviews to produce an original and sophisticated Soundtrail aimed at a wide public. The commissioning organization has also facilitated strong community participation for this Soundtrail. The design is augmented by a substantial audio archive created for the town from the oral history interviews and research conducted by the authors. The work serves to animate the past for the public and community using these diverse resources and immersive sound compositions and storytelling. Walkers interact and will be transformed by the experience of place as the site is newly revealed through this historical 'sounding'.

The work might also be considered an 'augmented reality' experience, created for and via the Sound Trails app. To create the work's multilevelled address, although primarily comprised of multiple 'sound fields', the authors also gathered and employ historical and community members' personal photos plus other web and text for both smart phone and online.

The Portland SoundTrail was commissioned and developed over late 2021 and 2022 with close consultation with the organization, The Foundations, Portland, NSW. The co-creators worked on site and in the town over many months in order to meet community members, interview them, locate archives, and recover other research data, as well as design the actual walk on site in response to the story content and themes identified and explored by the team. The GPS triggered App allows visitors to then experience these rich montages or audio fields (produced in Macquarie University studios) as the visitor explores the site via the set trail, ideally wearing headphones.

Material worked into the sound design for the audio fields includes commissioned music, sound effects, actuality, audio interviews, scripted narration, and other archival material such as sections of the diaries of a prominent but not well known today Portland resident, Mary Ryan (first woman on the original Australian Housing Commission, a Post War reconstruction initiative of then Federal Minister Ben Chifley in 1943-1944, before he became Australia's prime minister). While these journals are held in the Jessie Street Library in Sydney as important records of women's contributions to Australian society and early Australian feminism, they have never before been available like this to the public, and through voiced performance they come to life for the listener. Permission for these to be used was obtained from the family with Mary Ryan's son also featuring as interviewee.

Madsen has performed multiple authorial roles for this work: as co-director, co-writer and co-designer of the Portland Soundtrail. Working with Hamish Sewell, as co-creator, she has produced the final audio design and sound montages/fields in collaboration with him; together they have authored and produced voice narration, montages of voices, other sounds and located and edited core archival texts, directing professional performers to voice the text. With Sewell, she has conducted extensive historical research both on location and drawing on authoritative archival and other repositories, all of which expertly and creatively informs the overall jointly produced major creative work: first published on the Soundtrails App, Dec 23, 2022.