I’ll let Charlie Mydlarz, the man behind the project explain how it works in the video below.

Introduction to Sound Around You from Martin Bryant on Vimeo.

I decided I’d take a walk around the village I grew up in, Thornton near Bradford, and record a set of short videos of places I particularly remember. The videos describe everything from dancing round the maypole at school on May Day to memories of the day the Last of the Summer Wine team dropped a mangle off the local viaduct. As I walked around the village I traced my route using Nokia Sports Tracker to allow me to create what was essentially a ‘guided tour’ of my memories of growing up.

Why did I do it? Well, our memories fade over time so I might as well capture them while I have a relatively fresh memory of my childhood. The video of the location of each memory adds a form of illustration that a simple photograph can’t quite capture. I can move the camera to point out different details and I feel it brings the memory ‘to life’.

You can view my Memory Map here. It’s supposed to be possible to embed it in a website but that didn’t work here when I tried.

Apart from serving as a multimedia diary for my own use, I’m hoping the ‘Memory Map’ idea will inspire others to try the same thing. I’m even considering creating an open-access memory map where people could post photos, videos, audio or text to create a huge multimedia canvass for the world’s memories. You could look at individuals’ memories or look at all the memories associated with a certain location. If you’re interested in helping get this off the ground, get in touch!

In the meantime, if you want to create your own Memory Map, how do you do it? Here’s how I created mine.

1. Preparation

The only preparation I did was to list the memories I wanted to cover and plot a route around the village in my head.

2. Recording the memories

Using my Nokia N82 phone I activated Nokia Sports Tracker (you can get it here) which I used to trace my route around the village. Once that was running I used the phone’s video camera to record a short introductory piece to camera before walking to my first location. I then made my way around the village recording a separate video at each location. When I’d finished I recorded a closing section thanking people for watching and then saved my route in Nokia Sports Tracker.

3. Uploading

From my phone I uploaded my route (or ‘Workout’ in the program’s nomenclature) to the Sports Tracker website. This showed a line representing the route I took around the village, superimposed onto a map of the area. Because I recorded the videos with my phone as well, the program knew where they were all taken and automatically added them to the map as well.

I wouldn’t recommend uploading the videos to Sports Tracker’s website though as it will take a long time (tying your phone’s data connection up and maybe costing a lot if you don’t use wifi) and, as I found, the videos don’t always play back properly on the Sports Tracker site. Instead, I copied the individual videos to my phone to my computer and uploaded them to Youtube.

4. Creating the Memory Map

Google Maps is by far the easiest way to create a customised map with rich media content. The first job was to take the details of my route from Sports Tracker and put it into Google Maps. I did this using the ‘Export KML’ option in Sports Tracker. This creates a tiny file containing my route that can be recognised by all sorts of mapping applications.

Logged into Google Maps, I went to the ‘My Maps’ section and created a new map. I then imported the KML file of my route and as if by magic the map displayed the journey I had taken. Unfortunately for some reason the final part of the route was missing so I had to add this manually using the ‘Draw a Line’ tool.

Then it was time to add the videos to the map. I put a placemarker at the location of the first video and selected the ‘Edit HMTL’ option for that marker. I then copied the embed code for the first video from its Youtube page into the text entry area. I repeated that for all the other videos and I was done – a Memory Map of my childhood memories!

Doing it yourself

To be honest I think I overcomplicated the process. You could do this yourself without any need for Nokia Sports Tracker. You could just record some videos of memories at the right locations, upload them to Youtube and then use the instructions from Section 4 above to add them to the map in the right places.

If you do create your own Memory Map, let me know and I’ll link to it in a follow-up post.