I chose to examine the Vectors project, The Roaring Twenties, created by Emily Thompson and Scott Mahoy. It is an “interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City” during the 1920s. The creators of the project wanted to historicize the sounds of the urban landscape using almost 600 noise complaints, Fox Movietone newsreels, forms, photographs, and letters. Rather than creating an immersive 3-D model of New York City in the late 1920s where users can virtually explore the streets, they have decided to allow the users to create for themselves a virtual reality in the mind by listening to sounds captured in the motion pictures and reading and imagining the sounds documented in complaint forms and letters to help contextualize the soundscape of a thriving environment bustling with all kinds of city noise.
There are three different interfaces the users can explore: Sound, Space, and Time.
In the Sound interface, the user is shown a vintage illustrated layout with the title “City Noise Sources”. There are 8 categories: traffic, transportation, building operation, homes, streets, harbor & river, collection deliveries, and miscellaneous. And each category is broken down into subcategories, which the user can hover over to see documented noise complaints and/or videos. For example, under Transportation, if you hover over Trolley Cars, a list of noise complaints and videos pops up. If the user clicks on one of the noise complaints, an information box opens detailing the type of noise, the complainant, and the location of the noise. If there is a pen next to the noise complaint, the user also has the choice to see the actual document. The user can also watch and listen to noises under each category.
In the Space interface, there is a vintage map of New York City with four different types of data points: noise complaint, noise complaint with documents, complainant location, newsreels. These data points are all the same as from the Sound interface, but now the user can actually see the locations of the sounds and noise complaints. The type of noise pops up for each data point by hovering over it, and if you click on it, depending on the type of data point, an information box pops up just as in the Sound interface. The user can zoom in and zoom out.
In the Time interface, a very elaborate interactive timeline is presented with 7 different types of data points. Not only can the user explore different years by moving around the small box, there is a more detailed timeline underneath with the data points. The information is the same as the other two interfaces. The difference is that the user can see the data points in chronological order. It is interesting to see that there were more magazine and newspaper articles that documented noise and sounds before 1928. However, starting from around 1926, there is an increasing number of newsreels that documented the sounds, noise complaints, and noise abatement commissions.
The site was very easy and fun to navigate. It is user-friendly, and I particularly liked the idea of three different interfaces for different kinds of exploration. The creators of the project purposefully did not simulate a virtual reality of New York City in 1920s because the idea was to immerse the user into the act of listening and try to engage the user into using their own imagination to think about what it must have been like in a city during this decade. In this digital era, we are constantly consumed and distracted by “digital noise”, such as Facebook and Twitter updates, and we tend to block out noises from our physical surroundings. The creators hoped that the user would be able to understand the importance of being present in the physical space by contextualizing the sounds created from it. If they have created a virtual 1920s New York City, the user would have been distracted by the visuals by trying to navigate the virtual streets of the city, which would have defeated the purpose of the project. Overall, I think the site was put together very well, and it was also a great way of exploring the soundscape of New York City in the Roaring Twenties.