Journeyer's Guidebook

Building on research on locative narrative experience, informed by cognitive research in auditory perception and the development of a series of locative narrative smartphone apps, Journeyer’s Guidebook is a locative narrative that interrogates the comparative situated experience of fictional places. Beginning inside Brighton’s Jubilee Library, the participant requests a copy of Journeyer’s Guidebook from the information counter, unique books that are prepared for the DRHA 2016 conference and the Brighton Digital Festival.

Opening the book, the reader is asked put on headphones, to find a seat in library and to launch the app on their own smartphone. A voice begins by asking the reader to turn to a page with an illustration that depicts people walking towards a garden and issues an invitation to journey into this place. A guided imaginary experience begins, accompanied by binaural audio that surrounds the participant with the sounds of the fictional place, the events and people and that are encountered on route. After journeying through the illustration imaginatively, the participant is asked to return the book and venture outside the library where the illustrated garden is experienced as 12-minute circular walk to the Pavilion Gardens. The spatial sound of the fictional place augments the ambient sounds occurring in the location. The people the participant meets, the actions of smelling flowers, taking note of particular vantage points and actively listening, prompt an experientially different situated version of the imaginative journey. The app uses Bluetooth and GPS and location services built into participant’s own smartphone to determine their position during the narrative. Binaural sound recordings are triggered in response to the participant’s position and are mixed dynamically within the app to create seamless soundscapes as they journey through the story.