Beginning on September 19th and continuing through October 31st, visitors and students on the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s (UMBC) campus will be able to explore its creative past by taking a walking tour, using a small handheld FM receiver to hear a compilation of unique archived recordings.
UMBC’s New Media Studio and the IRC Fellows program, in collaboration with Baltimore artist collective, URBANtells, will install “Tune to the Arts,” a live microRadio broadcast of recorded soundscapes. Placed throughout the UMBC campus, FM transmitters will broadcast sound excerpts that include aural expressions derived from various arts archives such as dance, music, theatre, literature, and visual arts, and from individuals in the UMBC community. Each transmission site has been carefully selected based on the meditative quality of its surroundings. At a central location, listeners will check out an FM receiver that has been tuned to 99.7; they will also be provided with a map to guide them as they orient themselves on the UMBC campus. As participants encounter a broadcast, they are then invited to write their reactions in chalk on the nearby sidewalk and/or on provided cards before returning to the checkout point where their comments will become part of the project’s archives.
A podcast of Tune is also available:
http://www.umbc.edu/oit/newmedia/rss/tune.xml
Open Podcast in iTunes
For more information on “Tune to the Arts,” visit http://www.umbc.edu/tune.