[URBAN NOTE] murmur
Apr. 29th, 2006 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonald56 Brunswick Avenue is a pleasant-looking three-story brick home, painted and presumably converted to apartments, located in a pleasant stretch of what I think of as the southern annex of The Annex neighbourhood. 56 Brunswick Avenue is one of a series of like homes built in the early 20th century. The street looks rather beautiful in the light of of a spring evening, with the well-tended front gardens lying beneath the gold-green of the young leaves on the trees which rise from either side of the street to meet in a central arch, the unmistakable silver-white spire of the CN Tower visible to the southeast on the other side of the Kensington Market proper, and the light slanted at just the right angle to catch the crystalline fragments trapped in the sidewalk's cement.
There is a sign in front of 56 Brunswick Avenue, cartilaginous structures in grey on a green-ear, painted on a rectangular sign mounted on a metal pole planted firmly in front of a bedraggled sapling. "murmur," it reads, below that showing the phone number 416.915.6877, and below that the six-digit code "243635." Dial the phone number, then, when the male voice asks, input the code. You will hear, as I did with my cell phone clutched to my ear, a man talk about how, when he lived in an apartment at 56 Brunswick Avenue with two non-sexual girlfriends in the mid-1990s, he was woken up very early in the morning by a screaming match that quickly became a bloody fight between a downstairs tenant, a married man, and a strange woman. She was a prostitute, it seems, and he accused her of stealing his wife's jewellery.
murmur is, as the website says, "an archival audio project that collects and curates stories set in specific Toronto locations, told by Torontonians themselves. At each of these locations, a [murmur] sign with a telephone number and location code marks where stories are available. By using a mobile phone, users are able to listen to the story of that place while engaging in the physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze." Affiliates of Toronto's program also operate in Vancouver and Montréal, allowing inhabitants of those other Canadian metropoles to add their own annotations to their cities. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talktooloose said after we heard the story together, standing in front of 56 Brunswick Avenue for the first time, the murmur project reminds listeners that every building along this street has at least one story. murmur reminds us of the three- or perhaps four-dimensionality of Toronto's urban space. All this, in the faintly science-fictional manner of transient electronic inscriptions readily accessible to anyone with a cell.
There is a sign in front of 56 Brunswick Avenue, cartilaginous structures in grey on a green-ear, painted on a rectangular sign mounted on a metal pole planted firmly in front of a bedraggled sapling. "murmur," it reads, below that showing the phone number 416.915.6877, and below that the six-digit code "243635." Dial the phone number, then, when the male voice asks, input the code. You will hear, as I did with my cell phone clutched to my ear, a man talk about how, when he lived in an apartment at 56 Brunswick Avenue with two non-sexual girlfriends in the mid-1990s, he was woken up very early in the morning by a screaming match that quickly became a bloody fight between a downstairs tenant, a married man, and a strange woman. She was a prostitute, it seems, and he accused her of stealing his wife's jewellery.
murmur is, as the website says, "an archival audio project that collects and curates stories set in specific Toronto locations, told by Torontonians themselves. At each of these locations, a [murmur] sign with a telephone number and location code marks where stories are available. By using a mobile phone, users are able to listen to the story of that place while engaging in the physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze." Affiliates of Toronto's program also operate in Vancouver and Montréal, allowing inhabitants of those other Canadian metropoles to add their own annotations to their cities. As
talktooloose said after we heard the story together, standing in front of 56 Brunswick Avenue for the first time, the murmur project reminds listeners that every building along this street has at least one story. murmur reminds us of the three- or perhaps four-dimensionality of Toronto's urban space. All this, in the faintly science-fictional manner of transient electronic inscriptions readily accessible to anyone with a cell.
