Recently, we integrated the OVERHEAR API into our Museum of Walking, making it easy for creators using OVERHEAR to include their work into our archives. Here’s Kibriya Mehrban talking about her experience as part of the app’s core team.

OVERHEAR a free app that hosts a large variety of audio, from poetry to oral histories to museum treasure hunts, while every track is connected to a geolocated pin or a QR Code you can only find in specific places. Users must travel to the pins to collect and listen to the audio. Maybe it’s a poem about a tree in your local park, or a story from someone talking about the record shops that used to line the High Street. Either way, our aim is to help you see the world around you in a new light.

I first came across OVERHEAR while I was interning for a poetry festival in Birmingham. I was given the brief to write a blog post to introduce a collaboration, in which we had festival poets write new pieces and pin them around the city centre. And, the more I thought about it, the better the idea sounded. I love my city and I love poetry, and the idea of imbuing one with the other felt like a sort of magic I was excited to be a part of.

OVERHEAR’s founder, Tom, enjoyed my writing enough that he hired me freelance to interview the poets involved in OVERHEAR’s next project with Wolverhampton Literature Festival. I spent some days traipsing around the town chatting to poets and writing up the conversations we had about their pieces and the process by which they’d been written, a dream job for an aspiring poet. As time went on I took on a little more work for OVERHEAR: emails, social media, and then, in 2020, everything changed.

The pandemic had shut down any events OVERHEAR might have run projects with, and people were being told to stay inside wherever possible, which was a slight problem for an app which relied on users making their way to pins in order to listen to audio. Tom had reached an turning point with the company, and after immersing himself in theories of growth and organisation in lockdown, he decided that radical action was needed to keep the app changing and expanding.

I was a little sceptical at first, as anyone would be after being sent a 28-page pdf via WhatsApp, but Tom explained that he wanted to devolve his power as CEO and see where the organisation could go if his wasn’t the only hand on the tiller. I quickly suggested that he also reach out to Adrian B. Earle, a fellow poet, audio guy and tech nerd, and before long, the three of us were meeting regularly to talk about the app’s future, its ethos, and all its potential.

OVERHEAR had begun many years ago as a means to make music feel local again, in an age where global-streaming services and listener habits were making that less and less common. Locality remained a core principle even as the content has changed as Tom, with the app, got more involved in literature events. We wanted to find new ways to connect people to the places around them, maybe see their familiar haunts in new ways.

All of us were frustrated with how the story of the world we lived in was being told. The rise of nationalism and anti-immigration narratives as well as the constant shrinking of public spaces and services were leaving more and more people feeling disconnected and disenfranchised. The more we talked, the more we recognised the potential power of OVERHEAR to overlay counter-narratives onto the world… literally!
I’d always loved poetry for its ability to come at a subject from a strange angle, take it apart and rebuild it in a different configuration in the mind. It seemed natural to combine it with the hyperlocality of our app, to create little windows into alternative viewpoints all around the city.

For us, it links to an insistence on seeing the invisible or ignored stories of the world that is also reflected in plenty of the projects highlighted on walk · listen · create, like Richard White drawing attention to the buried histories of slavery and wealth that are everywhere once you know where to look, or Babak Fakhamzadeh’s Sins Beneath the Equator, putting the public in direct contact with the stories of occupation and colonisation.
There’s a touch of the augmented reality to our platform that we hope can really reveal something about the world to our listeners.

The opportunity to put these ideas into practice came about when the pulling down of statue in Bristol started a national conversation about public art, colonialism and how we choose to remember or forget our histories. We pulled together an online workshop over Zoom in which we got a mix of people together to talk about the statues we walked past every day, how they fit into the story of our lives and what we could do to take back ownership of public art. It was our way of rewriting the plaques to reflect our thoughts and feelings on the statues, without any need for permission from any powers that be. The thoughtful poems that participants composed in that session are still pinned to various pieces of public art in Birmingham and beyond.

Since then we’ve developed and expanded what OVERHEAR can do. We’ve added installations to community green spaces, so they’re always full of the sounds of the people they’re made for. We’ve run oral history workshops to platform the stories of working class and immigrant communities in the places that have been important to them over the years. We’re currently working with staff and patients at Midland Metropolitan University Hospital to catalogue the years of healthcare history that the new hospital stands on and which might otherwise disappear with the old building.

Our most exciting recent development is that we’ve taken the app’s ethos to its natural conclusion by adding in-app recording and text responses. That means users can upload their own audio to the map (publicly or privately) as well as reply to existing content. We want OVERHEAR to be a platform where people can be in conversation with each other and with the spaces they move through, where people and communities who are otherwise unheard have a chance to make their mark on the map.

The OVERHEAR app is available to download for free on the Play Store and the App Store, and you can keep your eyes peeled for more of the app’s projects popping up, here on walk · listen · create.