Pacing and length

Let’s take a moment to go back to the ‘walk’ part of the soundwalk concept.

The average walking pace for an adult human in average physical shape is around 5 KM per hour. Of course there are many other factors at play, an urban stretch with a ton of traffic lights might slow the pace down while a downhill stretch in a nature preserve might be significantly faster. If your target audience is families with young children the pace will be slower than a group of trained people that have long distance walking as a hobby.

Of course you cannot predict everything. And as we saw before the geolocation function of Echoes is a big help in making sure the right audio is heard in the right place regardless. If you expect people to walk an hour you need an hour of audio content or accept a certain amount of silence, it’s as simple as that.

The Echoes platform provides you with a set of tools that can help in creating an experience that is interactive, and can also adapt to the walker / listener instead of having to guess pacing all the time.

Echoes can be any shape or size. Meaning that you can make Echoes that are dots or small circles on a map where the audience walks from point to point. Echoes can also be bigger areas, which turns them into zones insteads of points. Both forms have their uses depending on the approach you take with your soundwalk. Zones may seem the obvious choice if you want non-stop sound, assuming the audience is in one of your zones at all times. However points can for example also trigger an audio file which continues playing as you walk to the next point.

Please note that Echoes itself does not technically distinguish between zones and points, an Echo simply has a GPS position, a size and a shape. But in real world applications most Echoes could be classified as one of these two main forms.

A very basic thing to consider is also if your audience is listening while walking or while standing still. If you connected ten poems to ten different trees in a forest you might want people to stand still and listen once they have found one of these trees. On other walks you might want them to reach a certain point which triggers audio that accompanies them to the next point. Be aware that you might need to instruct people on what to do in this regard.

If you use an area based approach you can simply use Echoes’ built-in loop function to loop an audio file as long as an audience member is in the zone. Especially if your zones are directly adjacent this is an easy way to have non-stop sound.

If you don’t work with zones but have single points as Echoes you can make a long track that will have enough length to play until the walker is supposed to get to the next Echo. The voice groups functionality of Echoes could help you with the take-over in that case by allowing the new Echo to ‘bump’ the audio of the previous one once it is reached. Which allows you to err on the safe side of caution when determining the length of your audio track. Voice groups are essentially groups of sound cues for which you can set the maximum number that can play simultaneously.

If you need an audio file to completely play before anything else can replace it there is functionality for that such as setting the file to ‘play complete’ which will always play it to the end. This can be particularly useful when you need to make sure certain bits of text are heard for example. In case this leads to things playing on top of each other where they shouldn’t (because you have a very fast walker who reaches the next Echo before the previous one is finished) you can use the ‘cueing’ function to ensure that a new Echo is parked in the next spot in a playlist instead of starting the moment you reach it.

You can also make creative use of the fact that multiple Echoes can play at the same time, like we saw in the section on using music. It might be useful to realise that Echoes can also overlap in physical space. It’s possible to have for instance five circular Echoes which have the same centre but a different diameter. Meaning that you can stack layers of sound while the walkers move towards the shared middle of these circles.