It was interesting to hear more about Toronto Murmur project the past Thursday. I like the idea of using audio device to document people’s personal experiences about specific locations in Toronto, in which individual voices contribute to defining the identity of the city Toronto. The project is also unique in its way of distributing the audio stories through cell phones, so that people can listen to them while they are walking on the streets.
I notice how important “walking experience” is in the audio stories of this project. I have not listened to all the stories, but all the stories I have heard happened when people walked on the streets or when they were going somewhere on foot. One basic element that has made this project happen in Toronto is that people can easily walk to different locations. Toronto being a “walkable” city provides chances for people to stop by somewhere to experience local events as well as enable people from the project to have access to do interviews with individuals on the streets. One of the project creators Shawn Micallef also mentioned how car-based city experience in San Jose effect his process of doing this project in this city. In San Jose, he often needed to spend some time driving to specific locations to do his projects. Being in car to experience the city also hurries people’s gaze at the locations and limits individual engagement with the physical space of a city like San Jose.
I also enjoy hearing people from all walks of life talk about what the place used to be like or what they used to do around at a place at a certain time. The individual memories about the different locations of Toronto flow together into a stream of individual telling about the city against the ambient sounds at the recorded moments of the interviews on the streets. Telling and retelling stories from individuals about different locations in Toronto surpass the official historical facts about the city and give the growing and fluid identity of Toronto back to interactive moments of its people, streets, buildings, wires, events and all other elements in the city space. However, I feel that a few minutes of each audio story from different people are very limited in presenting a full sense of oral history. Even though many of the audio stories are very vivid and spontaneous in telling a small piece of personal memories about certain locations, it is hard to contextualize the stories and have an in-depth understanding of specific, personal and historical moments of the locations mentioned in individual stories from Murmur Project. I asked Shawn whether they had thought about giving a longer and detailed version of the audio stories or providing some personal historical photos to enrich the historical sense of the project. According to Shawn, the content of the audio story is designed for people, who can listen to it through cell phones. Shawn and his partner also have limited time and resources to edit audio stories into longer versions. Some of the people they interviewed did want to provide old photos. But at this point, they just could not do more than providing what they have presented now in the project.
Anyway, I am already amazed by how much Murmur team has achieved in creating such a project started from a two people crew and a few volunteers. The concept of telling city history through personal stories about locations seems more important than the audio stories being oral history itself. In this sense, Murmur is a more conceptual project rather than an oral history project.
