A map of every shop bell on the high street
Thirty-one doors, thirty-one sounds. An idea for a map you listen to instead of look at.
Idea, unbuilt: walk the high street with a recorder and open every shop door once. Record the bell, the buzzer, the electronic bing-bong, the door that just sticks and groans. Thirty-one doors on the stretch from the station to the roundabout, by my count.
Then make a map where each shop is just a dot, and pressing the dot plays the door. No names, no photos. You would learn the street by ear: the chemist’s two-note chime, the barber’s old brass bell on a spring, the betting shop that plays nothing at all.
It would go out of date fast, which is part of the appeal. Shops change hands, bells get replaced, someone finally fixes the sticking door. A map of a sound that only lasted a year.
Questions to answer before I do it:
- Is it weird to walk in and straight back out thirty-one times? (Yes.)
- Should I buy something in each one to make up for it? (Probably. That is a lot of chewing gum.)
- Does the map need the street at all, or just the sounds in walking order?
Filed under later. Or under experiments, if it gets that far.