Non-linearity vs linear experiences

An important decision to make when designing a soundwalk is whether it’s going to be linear or non-linear. In a linear work you want and expect the audience to experience it in a fixed order. Like a film in the cinema where you can not just decide to play it backwards, start in the middle or skip a scene. A non-linear work follows the opposite strategy: the audience is free to choose their own order of taking it all (or a part) in. You can compare this to a lot of contemporary computer games which instead of the old school concept of ‘levels’ have whole worlds to explore but leave it up to the player where they want to go first.

Linear might seem the simplest form but it does come with some challenges of its own. If it’s linear, first of all you need people to go in the right direction, since from the first point you can either move to the second or to the last. It’s completely dependent on the setting of your walk if this is a potential issue, but it is something to be aware of. If a mistake in direction is easily made you want to think about how to solve this, either through instructions or by laying the Echoes out in such a way that only one direction is obvious. A common route for a soundwalk can be to in the end return to the place where you began. But if you lay it out like that you should realise that it’s extra important to have the direction clear since from that start and end point the second and the second-last points might be equally close.

With non-linear you leave the order of the experience up to the walkers. Depending on the content of your walk this might or might not be an issue. Like an instrumental jazz album that might be played in shuffle mode without anyone noticing, compared to an audiobook where having the chapters on shuffle might have all sorts of very obviously confusing results. If you are working non-linear with very narrative content it’s always a good idea to go through the different possible orders on paper and try to imagine as well as possible what the consequences are.

Echoes also has functionality to do basic logical function programming. An example being for instance that a certain Echo can only be triggered on the condition that a certain other Echo has been triggered before. This can be an extra way to make sure that people experience your walk, or part of it, in the correct order if that is what you are aiming for. The scenario mentioned above where the end point of your walk is also the point where it began can benefit from conditional logic, where for example the last audio track can only be triggered once the others have been triggered before and not by accident right after the start.

You can also use this conditional logic for more varied scenarios. Imagine a walk where you offer people a fundamental choice in the beginning, as a ‘blue pill or red pill’ moment. If you make a blue zone and a red zone for these walkers to pass into after their initial choice you can use conditional logic to ‘remember’ their choice later on. They can for example hit the same spot later on in the walk, but you can associate one audio track that is only played for people that triggered the red zone Echo before and another one that is only played for people that triggered the blue zone Echo before.

Like zones and points linear and nonlinear are categories we described to make it easier to explain about different approaches. But there is no technical difference between the two, and there is no dropdown menu where you set your walk to linear or nonlinear. Meaning that nothing will stop you from using a mixture of the two. For example with shared start, halfway and end points, but different choices to make in between. Like this perhaps people experience parts in different orders, or maybe not everyone plays every Echo, making the experience different for different walkers like in a red pill / blue pill scenario. There are a ton of possibilities once you start mixing forms and imagining what you can build with tools like conditional logic.

In the section on dramaturgy we mentioned having a test audience member to check if what you are trying to say with your work lines up with what people conclude from it. On a very practical level testing with other people is also a good idea. In event production it’s often said that you need to take into account that audience members are capable of doing almost anything, also the things you might not expect. So even when working with something you consider a clear linear route it’s important to check if people will actually follow it, and not cause strange things to happen by doing unexpected things. And in a non-linear scenario it’s quite obvious that you can gain a lot of insight from a try-out to see what people do and what choices they make.