The third evaluation May 2014 - April 2015

In December 2013, thanks to HLF funding, the app was published on iTunes, which opened access, at least to those with an iPhone and iTunes account. While the app size was too large to be published on the Android app store, a QR code could be used to download the app onto most modern Android phones. Changes to the app included the dots marking audio points on the walk disappearing when played so that the map detail, which provided historical context, would become easier to read. I hoped this would also be enjoyable for

those interested in ‘ticking off’ every marker as they could see the number of stories counting down.

There was, once again, extensive re-editing and remixing of clips, replacement of stories and shifting of location and size of the GPS zones that triggered them. This was in order to encourage movement between immersion levels and embodiment in landscape. Tracking of participants’ direction and how they responded to stories (for example skipping or pausing them) and interactive questions were removed. Tracking users in a published app they could access without being informed (as previous evaluators had been) is unethical. There was inconsistent 3G availability on some mobile networks (common in coastal areas), necessary to upload answers to the Internet and link to Twitter or email. Network difficulties made tracking results incomplete. Instead, observation of participants, especially in the first evaluation and discussion with them afterwards, caught information about direction and which stories engaged them more or less than others. When an aspect of the app didn’t work, such as the interactive questions, participants lost confidence in the experience, which disturbed immersion and tainted their opinion of the app. A ‘replay’ button was added (it had been requested), which helped those who had missed the beginning of a story.

My own voice became audible in the app with the addition of three narrative segments that I recorded binaurally. The first provided context and started the app. The second described a historical place along the new route. The last came right at the end and finished with a question to try to encourage the participant to think of the story they would leave and their role in the town. My voice, never introduced, addressed the listener-walker-participant as though it was an internal voice and provided information about the place not captured in the oral histories and outside the timeframe of Minnie’s Story.

The route, as mentioned was adapted. The last section, through Copperhouse, the noisy shopping area, was dropped (it was unpopular), which forced participants to double back along the tropical gardens by the Pool instead of completing a loop. This wasn’t ideal but the only safe route available. As S4 pointed out, it should have been made clearer that ‘it’s what people in Hayle do, they promenade along this’ to make retracing steps more

170 acceptable. This was an irritant to many especially as it came near the end of the walk when people were tired.

Figure 44: Participants evaluate the published app in the third evaluation. Photographs by the author.

From May 2014 to April 2015, 25 people (eight male, 17 female) agreed to semi-structured recorded interviews after evaluating the app. Two female teenagers emailed their

comments. From the group of 19 walking artists who evaluated the app (some of them makers of MP3 audio, filmed, photographed or performed walks),³⁸ eight returned additional comments about their connection to landscape after a six-month interval of reflection. All comments are anonymised and are referred to as subject 1, or S1. Six of all participants questioned evaluated the first edition of the published app; 19 (those from WAN, the Walking Artist Network) evaluated the second, which included small changes – code change to make the fades smoother and a second background soundscape loop to break-up the dominance of mood brought about by the musical loop. The new loop I created (unfortunately not heard in ‘listen at home’ mode) was a multitrack soundscape of field recordings – birds in the air, cave acoustics under the earth and tones from under the surface of the sea, for example – that was layered with overlapped fragments of stories.

Influenced by Glenn Gould’s (1932-82) counterpoint experiments with multiple voices played simultaneously in The Idea of North ([1967] 1992), the collage of voices attuned the participant to an unfamiliar way of listening while transmitting the ghostliness of the disembodied voice. The Merz audio collage reminds listeners of many unheard stories and voices and the intangible nature of memories, which were noticed by S19:

38 The mixture of walking artists, performers and academics included: Jess Allen, Bibi Calderaro, Philip Crang, Kris Darby, Katie Etheridge, Giulia Fiocca, Rachel Gomme, Dee Heddon, Claire Hind, Mark Hunter, Sacha Kagan, Alison Lloyd, Blake Morris, Misha Myers, Simon Persighetti, Clare Qualmann, Phil Smith, Cathy Turner and Moira Williams.

‘I quite liked the voices fading in and out – it was a bit like the past was there and it was gone – it didn’t give you that false sense of I’m really knowing this. It was still that thing that you couldn’t quite grasp, just given a glimpse of.’

The walker encounters (‘the voices came to me’ [S7]) 38 sound clips. The sound clips last from between 11 seconds to more than four minutes, containing one voice or multiple voices, some with sound effects or music. Images or series of images (GIFs) were shown.

The initial interview topic in the semi-structured interviews after the app walk was left to the evaluators. Many mentioned technology and its functionality first. The qualities unique to locative media, the appearance and disappearance of audio and being able to locate oneself on the map at all times received favourable comments:

‘The fact that I could walk and it could locate me and allow me to tap into the story of that site was really wonderful and I’ve not had that experience before so in that sense it was a really user-friendly application actually.’ (S6)

Various modes of address were still being evaluated in the published app. Traces of oral histories were still well liked. Minnie’s Story was pre-recorded and scripted to drive the walker towards the next episode. Minnie’s ‘black steps’ episode was often mentioned. The black steps are made from Hayle’s distinctive bricks created by scoria or slag, the waste product of making copper. The steps could be seen, touched and stood on, which resonated with participants while hearing the story. Perhaps the sensory connection led to the easy recall of that story and hints at the power of hearing about others’ experiences when standing in their footsteps. In someone else’s shoes one makes contact with layered time and memories of place. Mention of the ‘black steps’ raised the question as to whether some participants realised it was a scripted story rather than a real memory:

‘There is an extra power when you think that in this very spot these people stood and this was happening […] a bit uncanny […]. You’ve also got that distance from it as well – talking about the ICI and power station, all that stuff that’s not here anymore, so you’ve also got that slightly weird feeling of, my god, this was a really industrial landscape.’ (S19)

The ‘most immediate link to the present’ (S1) was through the voice of factual interviews.

Human effects on the immediate environment, such as water pollution, dune erosion and climate change, were described, and more recent oral histories, such as by a younger fisherman were included:

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‘I liked those more contemporary things [...] could definitely have had more of those factual things in.’ (S3)

‘Contemporary heritage of the fisherman that couldn’t wait to go out and see his basking sharks. There was something really nice about that in the mix with the history […] that resonated.’(S7)

These expert and factual inserts placed next to oral histories disrupted the experience for some. Whether these disruptions are appropriate to disturb immersion, or whether the disturbance is rooted in the mixture and number of modes within one experience that some participants struggle with (and led to a decrease of different modes after the first

evaluation), needs further reflection. What is interesting from the criticism below, in relation to earlier discussions of voice, is how the voice from an ‘expert’ was perceived and how well, or not, expert voices sat next to a memory, a first-person account.

‘The woman talking about the dredging and the Surfers Against Sewage [SAS]

they were fine but they were so different that it was jarring as well […] The other voices are sort of more intimate or something. They’re not talking at you, they’re just […] going inwards to give you the memory whereas the SAS guy he was just telling you some stuff.’ (S2)

Before testing the app I introduced Hayle to the Walking Artists Network (2007-) group in person during a ‘walkshop’. The preamble included the town’s contemporary themes such as the Asda supermarket build controversy that let to Hayle and the whole ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site (WHS) being placed on the danger list by UNESCO discussed earlier (Chapter 5 p. 124). The positioning of Asda was traced to

insensitivity in the way heritage had been treated in the town for almost two centuries. The threat of de-listing has now been temporarily lifted but has left some questions on what happens in the future and how Hayle’s history has been represented to win over the UNESCO delegation, panels representing Hayle’s history inside the Asda store, on show in fixed window displays and their decision to have a ‘community liaison’ staff member. A booking to take an oral history workshop coincided with the UNESCO delegation visit based in the room next door.

The Walking Artists Network preamble added another layer to the app experience but also exposed participants to the gap between the recent transformation of Hayle and how the app content that evoked the town’s history and parts of its present had not kept up with Hayle’s rapid change. Of course this raises issues on how apps stay relevant, material needs

to be added or altered which requires time, and changes to published apps can incur costs.

This reminds me of taking part in a guided walk in Tampa, Florida in 2014. A celebration blocked the street of the route so the guide quickly adapted his plan. With his knowledge he managed to illustrate features on the changed route spontaneously, a much quicker

adaptation than that required by some apps. My pre-app talk also initiated reflections on the difference between a recorded app experience and a live ‘guide’ by participants.

‘I was actually enamoured by being shown by a person who lives and breathes and knows the stories of Hayle. So I had this kind of dilemma all the way through about the lived experience and the live voice and the mediated voice.’ (S8)

‘[We experienced] your whole pre-narrative […] and then we’ve got these kind of sepia voices - where’s that voice going ‘oh they built that and that went wrong ‘ […] If you could find the voices that linked bits of it maybe that would bridge that gap from the sepia into the now.’ (S5)

The contentious Asda build came after the app had been made but to mention it could help connect the listener-walker-participant to the landscape. The first piece of audio in the app, the introduction, includes looking at the estuary from the gates of Hayle Heritage Centre.

The budget supermarket has now blocked this view.

Figure 45: Hayle’s history is depicted in an Asda window and in-store displays in an effort to prevent the de-listing of the whole Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site due to the store’s

position on a prominent historical site in Hayle. Photographs by the author.

Hayle inhabitants’ daily activities around the walkers mirrored those in the oral histories and therefore linked the past to the present, the storyworld to the physical world, for many participants:

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‘. . . bathing and having fun and being with their families, that was all happening around me.’ (S2)

For participants looking for physical reference points to match the voices, Hayle locals became part of the app experience, again merging the digital and physical worlds and keeping the participants grounded in place:

‘I had this kind of overlapping of the voice in my head and the people I met on the way.’ (S20)

Disembodied voices in the memories linked participants not only to place but also to the people around them in the physical world. Engagement with Hayle’s residents involved conversation and other acknowledgements. ‘I smiled at him because I thought he was the one telling me the story,’ said S20, a participant who passed an old man on the quay.

Experienced through others’ histories and the liveness of the mediated voice the app seemed to encourage participants to reach into and engage in the present. This went beyond smiling at an older person who could have been a speaker (recounted by a number of participants), as this academic-performer participant explains,

‘I sensed my own person-ness in doing this and also the other people who spoke and it made me more inclined to engage with other people that we randomly met, like the children who were catching crabs on the side of the quay. They were great and I think if I hadn’t had this kind of immersive sense of being part of a

performance – it felt they were actually choreographed into it – I would never have engaged with them.’ (S13)

Headphones both aided immersion, but also distanced some from the here and now. They made some walkers feel they ‘couldn’t properly say hello’ (S1). This academic-artist

participant felt they were a barrier to connecting to the people around them. The effect of removing headphones surprised this geographer participant:

‘I felt kind of lonely […] I felt like I’d had a companion with me and my companion had left me […] It was a much richer set of experiences that were going on while I was listening than when I just took them off and was walking.’ (S2)

As in all evaluations, immersion was frequently commented on using terms such as solitude that alludes to immersion. ‘There is something really nice about the solitude of it,’ said (S7), a performer academic. Once again, deep immersion is good but as sustained deep

immersion can inhibit connection with landscape this comment could indicate too much deep immersion and not enough embodiment. The combination of moments of deep

immersion and at times an isolated route made some women feel uncomfortable. Solnit ([2001] 2002: 232-246, Myers (2009: 48) and Heddon and Turner (2010; 2012) have written about discomfort experienced by female walkers. Headphones can compound that

discomfort as ambient live sound is intentionally distorted and reduced by audio played into headphones. Women spoke of listening to their surroundings when alone in an outlying location in order to detect danger. Headphones immediately made some feel more

vulnerable. After hearing about a reaction close to a panic attack, a male performer said to me:

‘The whole thing asks you to be hyper-sensitised so that’s what will kick in. If you make that invitation you’re going to get that response.’ (S15)

Walking while listening to an individual’s stories in headphones opened up the landscape and community to some participants rather than cut them off from it. An artist academic reflected on the experience six months after walking with the app:

‘I certainly think more warmly of Hayle because of using the app. I walked alone and the combination of solitude and the companionship of the voices made for a very intense, sensory experience of the place – the experience was intensified by the collaging of material.’ (S16)

The embodied sensory experience and app content forged a connection between the participant and landscape, as S2 explains:

‘I was also getting a connection to landscape by really looking deep into it […] I was trying to look at the pictures and compare them to what I was seeing. I felt connected to the landscape, I feel much more connected to the landscape than if I hadn’t done this.’

To encourage and enhance a more embodied exploration or sensing of place, strong stimulation of hearing through app audio content aimed to reduce the dominant sense of sight. Using the body to hear but also move, balance, experience different temperatures, weather and textured surfaces heightened senses. Sound – invisible, immaterial but

affective – creates atmosphere and animates the landscape that moves past the walker like frames of a film. Composer and sound artist David Prior compares the binary of passive listening and ‘active engagement’ during hearing (2010: 95) to the increasing scale of attention in the sight descriptive terms ‘seeing’, ‘looking’ and ‘watching’ (2010: 95).

Concentration or effort to understand (entendre means to listen and to understand in

176 French [Iddon 2010:7]) implies cognition during hearing. Active listening or hearing is

needed to catch and process a live layered mix while moving – fleeting traces of external sounds, recorded sound effects, recorded narrative and sometimes internal narrative.

However, the internal voice was silenced in a way that connected this participant to the landscape:

‘The experience of listening to the voices, it throws you out of yourself into the landscape because you’re trying, you’re listening to someone and not listening to yourself […] you don’t have that little white noise of your own narrative going on.’

(S2)

Unfamiliarity with listening during movement, the immersive quality of the work combined with the ‘newness’ of the locative media experience, were reasons given by respondents for the ‘the head down listening thing’ (S5) they did rather than looking around with senses open to connect with the landscape, a primary aim of the app. ‘I suspect I listened and didn’t look,’ (S6) said a female artist academic. An artist academic described why he enjoyed sitting down and listening to the tracks rather than walking:

‘I […] was able to listen to them properly rather than listen to the contradiction between them and the environment I was in, or trying not to be in two places at once […] but that’s possibly my dyspraxia […] having to really concentrate on what I’m hearing to be able to hear it properly.’ (S1)

The sensation of being in two places at once, physical and digital, is part of the locative media app experience – but, as the comment above indicates, this is disconcerting and difficult or uncomfortable to experience for some people. The contradiction between the embodied physical reality and the (sometimes embodied) digital stories was also hard to process. From a tourist’s perspective, a participant commented, Hayle looks ‘twee and peaceful,’ which made it

‘[A] bit weird thinking of it as a really industrial landscape because that’s not what you’re sensing.’ (S19)

There is a clash between the busy industrial or wartime Hayle in the app and the

transformation of Hayle through new buildings, some of which were built late in the app-making process.