Use geolocated sound, voice, and music to create engaging experiences for your visitors. When outdoors, SonicMaps uses location services (e.g. GPS) to automatically deliver audio-visual content to your audience as they walk, much like a personal tour guide. At home, everyone can still interact with your project using our virtual listener mode, either from the SonicMaps Player App or your own embedded map.
At the core of the SonicMaps platform is our easy-to-use online Editor, offering a multi-layer approach to storytelling and soundscape composition where you can mix and overlap multiple layers of sound on a map. You can effortlessly blend background music with specific voice recordings at key locations or create smooth audio transitions as users journey through your map. This approach ensures a seamless, more natural experience for your visitors who can enjoy your guided tour or soundwalk with their own smartphone and headphones without the hassle of scanning QR codes or manually activating audio file from a list. (less)
When running on an iPad or tablet, the SonicMaps Editor can use your real location to play sounds as you build and test your project. This is useful to predict positioning errors caused by GPS signal reflections on surrounding buildings so you can adjust your sound areas accordingly.
* Requires a Wifi + Cellular iPad model with built-in GPS
The SonicMaps Editor implements a text-to-speech service with 14 natural sounding voices in multiple languages to quickly generate high quality audio content for your geolocative projects.
* English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish
The ducking effect works by automatically lowering the volume of one audio source (e.g. background music) when another audio source is present (e.g. voice-over). Use it to ensure that your spoken content can be heard clearly over background music, sound effects, or other audio elements.
We use Vimeo's fantastic API to support video content in SonicMaps so you can combine audio and video zones in the same project. Creating a video zone is as simple as adding your Vimeo video ID.
Featured projects by SonicMaps creators and artists:
When GPS tracking is not required, embedding an interactive sound map in your own blog or website is an excellent way to exhibit your project in context. Try the example below, a beautiful soundscape composition by Pete Stollery and Suk-Jun Kim:
* Embedding codes for your locative audio projects can be obtained from the SonicMaps Editor.