Sound Trail

How much time is too much time?

To receive a message? For someone to arrive? For someone to leave?

Our app invites reflection on these questions. Today, with WhatsApp, Instagram, and other apps, we can communicate instantly and often expect a response within minutes. But it wasn’t always like this.

Our Concept

In our group, we come from different places, and every time we gathered during this quarantine period to work on our postgraduate assignments in the evening, we could hear the train in the background at Vanessa’s house. Two hours later, it would pass through Sumaré, where Paulo lives.

Inspired by this, we began to think about how long it would take to communicate or meet in person without technology. What do you understand by distance?

We recalled a time when things took longer to reach someone—a piece of news, a gift. Back then, the perception of distance through time felt more real. Today, distances are often bridged in mere minutes.

Our app aims to revive this memory, reconnect people in a different and rhythmic way, emphasizing distances but with a unique proposition.

Sound Trail

A platform where people can create their own sound stories.

An app for collaborative audiovisual narratives.

A chain to unite friends through images and sound.

How the App Works

• A group of friends is created using phone numbers, and the chain begins.
• One person is randomly chosen to start and discovers to whom they will send the first image.
• After capturing a photo or image, it is sent to the next friend, but not immediately. Instead, the time it takes depends on how long a car journey between them would be. This delay can take hours or even days.

How It Continues

• The flow continues randomly until the last person in the chain sends a photo back to the first.
• The photos and audio collected during the chain are converted into sounds, forming a unique piece of music that represents the journey of these messages, and is shared with all the friends in the chain.

Proof of Concept

To better illustrate how the app could work, we will build a proof of concept using photos taken by the app's creators.

We will consider that the music will have 2 measures of 4 beats for each photo, totaling 10 measures in this example. Each image was divided into 16 quadrants across two columns, and based on the average brightness of each quadrant, a musical interval will be determined. If the subsequent quadrant exceeds a certain threshold, the note will change. If it has a value similar to the previous one, the note will continue to play. The scale used is F#m, and the music will be constructed accordingly.

An instrument will play at three moments to mark the distance between the cities:

• When the journey reaches the first third of the total distance.
• When it reaches the halfway point.
• And when it reaches the final third.

Hear the concept