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. Kibriya Mehrban talked about her experience as part of the app’s core team. Now, Tom, founder of the app, follows up on Kibriya’s article.

My name is Tom. I’m the founder and co-director of OVERHEAR. We’re quite new to the walk · listen · create world, and you may have seen Kibriya’s recent post introducing our app and some of the walks available on our platform. I wanted to add to that with a bit more about one of the main issues with geo-location story apps and how we are working to address that challenge.

The main issue, of course, is that if you’re not where the recordings can be collected, you can’t really experience the magic of what happens when person, place, and creative audio meet. When you stand in a location, listen to audio produced from that perspective, and look out at what is being talked about, whether through story, poetry, or oral history, it connects you to that place and makes you present, there.

When you first log in to OVERHEAR, a golden pin is generated just for you within a short distance of where you open the app for the first time. The poem you hear when you walk there speaks about this “you-are-here-ness.”

We wanted to focus on that you-are-here-ness, or what Otto Scharmer calls “presencing,” a blend of “presence” and “sensing,” further defined in the Theory U framework as connecting to the deepest source of one’s self and will, and acting from the perspective of the “emerging whole.”

We’re not kidding ourselves. There isn’t a magic app feature that switches presencing on and suddenly has you gliding through the world in a blissful state. This sort of thing comes through practice. So at OVERHEAR, we’ve started thinking about the act of “being on location” as a practice we want to provide a container for.

It’s still early days, but we feel the walk · listen · create community is a fantastic place from which to start seeing how people use a few new features we are about to introduce to the general public, and to gather feedback.

Our app already has an in-app recording feature. This unlocks after you collect your first pin, that golden pin I mentioned, so you can record your own musings, poetry, or field notes, either privately, just for yourself, or publicly for others to find. On top of this, we also have two new features waiting in the wings.

Postbox (although I might rename it Phonebox)

This is your own personally set postbox location. It has to be at least 100 metres away from you, and you can place it in your favourite park, by a bench, or even on a remote island if you want a challenge. You can then invite friends to send a message to that location for you to go and collect. It could be a daily prayer or affirmation, something meaningful that makes the journey part of receiving the message.
It’s a small way of subverting the instant messaging culture we’re now all a part of.

We’ll know it’s a hit when we get our first marriage proposal through it, or sponsorship from the likes of Cupid himself.

If you’d like to try it out, you can request early access here. Make sure you’ve downloaded the app and made an account with the same email address so we can flick it on for you.

Wanders

This is the one I’m most excited about. I’ve been letting it brew for some time because I want to get it right, but the technical infrastructure has been implemented. The idea is that you start a Wander and, using the OpenStreetMap API, we pseudo-randomly, since code can never be truly random, select an accessible location within a walking distance set by the listener. A pin appears on the map with an instruction to get moving.

When you arrive, you hear a prompt, something that supports the practice of presencing, an invitation to participate in the you-are-here-ness of wherever you’ve ended up. Our colleague Adrian calls it a “serendipity engine.”

We think this helps solve the problem that our specifically commissioned poems in Birmingham create for someone who downloads the app in, say, Malaysia and doesn’t want to fork out the cash for the airfare to come this way, although you’re always welcome for a visit.

The challenge now is crafting prompts that truly hold the practice of being present. We want them to be moments of insight, mini pilgrimages, something that imbues place with a sense of connectedness and brings out the sacred in the most unlikely settings.

So here’s our call to action. Can you help us? Could you try out Wanders and share feedback, both on how it was to use and how it made you feel? Do you think you could write and record these kinds of prompts for random locations?

You can request early access to Wanders here. Again make sure you’ve downloaded the app and made an account with the same email address so we can flick it on for you.

If you’d like to get more involved, email us at hello@theoverhear.app. We’re a tight group of creatives working on a shoestring, as many good creatives do, so help with writing, recording, testing, or spreading the word would be hugely appreciate It!