With AntVenture, David Merleau has created an interactive storytelling audio walking app, through which you experience a day-in-the-life of four different types of common ants.

This sound walk is one of the shortlisted pieces in the Sound Walk September Awards 2023, which comes after an earlier piece of David’s was a winner in the SWS Awards 2019. Here, David discusses AntVenture.

Not long after publishing my Forest Talk Radio app, my collaborator and locative-media-mentor Fred Adam and I started talking about how we could create a walking  app where the audio story that plays could somehow adapt to the environment of the user. This became an interesting and fun experiment that, at least for me, helped to stave off the boredom of COVID lockdowns. 

In the world of locative media and GPS triggered apps, we thought it would be innovative to make the shift from a “place-based” story-walk to a “pace based” experience, where the walker could interact in some way with the storyline.

Fred had been part of the Deep Time Walk app project that utilized a scrolling pace-based audio player created by Carlos Garcia that allowed the walker/story-listener to be anywhere in the world. So Fred and I had this simple ‘scrolling-audio’ concept in our back-pockets, but we had a long way to go before conceptualizing an interactive story. 
What exactly would this mean? Then, it happened.

About halfway through the pandemic I decided to give away some old books, and I found a blast from my past: a coverless and well worn Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book where the reader explored various parts of a cursed house. And, in our next video chat, Fred and I landed on the idea of a multi-branching storyline where the walker’s sensory perceptions of their environment could determine which story-path they will hear. Now all we needed was a story.

My work involves conjuring Orson Welles’ style audio comedy with subtle yet evocative sound design to reenact the intensity of dramatic scenes that occur regularly in nature but that are quite hidden from plain view. 

The pandemic steamrolled into its first summer, and when I wasn’t studying the various species of backyard ants in a makeshift outdoor lab, I was digging passionately into the history of myrmecology (the science of ants). I had no clear creative agenda guiding this pursuit, until one day I found my 3 year old giggling innocently as she absolutely terrorized an aphaenogaster by picking it up and shaking it in her hands. It was then that I imagined what this ant had been doing before this fateful moment that landed her in my child’s grip. 
Was there a way that I could create a story to capture the intensity of this chaotic event for this poor ant? Et voilà, the AntVenture project was born.
I am quite proud of what we have created, an interactive storytelling walking app with four main ant-characters and fourteen possible endings where the app-user’s sensory awareness of their environment determines the fate of these ants. As a locative work, the greatest challenge for me was to link the “sensory card” questions about the walker’s surroundings with the content of the narrative branch, a scriptwriting experiment, that if I’m honest, will take a few more of these sorts of projects to master! But for now, it is fair to say that there is at least a poetic link between the user’s experience and the storyline they will hear.  

As a work of audio fiction I think this is one of the best scenes I’ve ever written; the ant battle entry found along the Formica Story-Trail: 

As I write this I am realizing that this project didn’t simply ‘occur’ during the pandemic, I believe that it helped me to cope with the pandemic. It had kept me connected with my peers, and had given meaning to Monday mornings when all of the days could have simply blurred together into nothingness.
It allowed me the time to immerse myself in these wonderful and resourceful creatures. Sure it was challenging to record live musicians and voice actors in a professional studio during a lockdown, but like everyone else struggling through our global pandemic, we managed. Check out the website for pictures of all of the contributors to this project. I present to you AntVenture! Find it at antventure.ca or on your smartphone app store.

The winners and honourable mentions of the SWS Awards 2023 will be announced in January 2024.