Austinites Invited to Help Map Austin’s Diverse Music Cultures through Interactive Documentary Project
AUSTIN, Texas — Dec. 3, 2012 — Austinites are invited to help document and map diverse local music cultures on the Austin Music Map, a web-based, interactive, community documentary project that lets users “play” the city.
The map, www.austinmusicmap.com, is a collaboration between Localore producer-in-residence Delaney Hall, KUT’s Texas Music Matters, Zeega and the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
From conjunto at East Austin’s Moose Lodge, to gospel at Deliverance Temple in North Central Austin, to a marching band floating on Barton Creek, the Austin Music Map goes beyond the usual suspects on the Austin music scene in search of the not-so-well-known places where music is being made.
“Austin is full of amazing music and a lot of it happens where you’d least expect, including on front porches, under bridges and at train stations,” said Hall who is directing the Austin Music Map. “There is no single genre or neighborhood that defines the Austin music scene. We’re looking to the community to help us shine a light on some of those under-the-radar venues.”
For the past six months, Hall, the Texas Music Matters staff and KUT’s multimedia team have been building the digital map in collaboration with Zeega, an interactive storytelling production team, and Public School, an Austin design firm. They’ve populated it with some of Austin’s unique musical locales. Videos and interviews featuring the Drum Band at the Juneteenth Parade, the Baby Blue Studio on East 12thSt., and various street performances around town are examples of the in-depth stories represented on the map. (A full list of stories is here.)
Now, the Austin Music Map is ready to welcome content from community members, who are encouraged to upload photos, videos and sound from their favorite out-of-the-way local haunts and upload them to the digital map through Flickr, Soundcloud and YouTube using the hashtag #AustinMusicMap.
Details on how to contribute to the map are available at http://www.austinmusicmap.com/#participate.
“The Austin Music Map is helping KUT extend beyond our core audience to cover and connect with the community on a deeper level,” said Hawk Mendenhall, KUT’s associate general manager and director of broadcast and content. “It’s an exciting new way for us to share the real Austin Music Experience with the world.”
The map is searchable by venue, neighborhood, music genre or band name. Media “pinned” to the Austin Music Map will be tagged and sorted according to musical genre, such as polka, blues, conjunto, electronica, folk or hip hop; or neighborhood, such as Cherrywood, South Congress or Clarksville. Geotagged content will also offer users a sense of Austin’s sonic geography and its neighborhoods that are home to alternative venues where musical subcultures gather.
Austin’s music culture is constantly evolving and many venues that once thrived — such as the Split Rail on South Lamar, which hosted weekly polka dances, and TC’s Lounge, one of Austin’s most beloved juke joints — have disappeared or changed over the years. The Austin Music Map will serve to document some of the city’s music venues for future generations.
About the Austin Music Map
The Austin Music Map is part of Localore—a national initiative of AIR designed to bring new journalistic and technical ingenuity to extending public media service to more Americans. From Chinese restaurants in Boston, to shuttered factories in Dayton, to Bay Area startups, the 10 Localore production teams are working with their public station incubators to uncover ground-up stories of America in transition. Learn more, and follow the work underway in the field at AIRmediaworks.org. Localore is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Wyncote Foundation, the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
AIR is a creative brain trust made up of more than 900 media makers from across the U.S. and 20 countries who are re-imagining and reinventing public media and journalism for the 21st century. Its programs are designed to identify, cultivate and deploy gifted talent for the benefit of citizens across the U.S.
About Zeega
Zeega is a non-profit inventing new forms of interactive storytelling through its award-winning multimedia publishing platform and a growing series of innovative documentary projects that span the globe and uncover new perspective on human experience.. The Zeega team is an expanding mix of media-makers, artists, and creative technologists. Zeega creates projects across multiple platforms, connects digital media to physical spaces, and develops open-source tools to enable anyone to experiment with the web as a creative medium.
About KUT 90.5 and KUTX 98.9
For more than 50 years, KUT 90.5, listener-supported public radio from Austin, Texas, has striven to be the most trusted radio source for news and music in Central Texas. A founding member of NPR, KUT established a news department in 2002. Since then, KUT’s news team has won more than 100 state, national and international awards for journalistic excellence. In January 2013, KUT’s unique blend of handpicked and uniquely Austin music programming will move to KUTX 98.9, the Austin Music Experience.
Twitter: @AustinMusicMap, @airmedia, #Localore
Austin Music Map fact sheet
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Contacts: Erin Geisler, KUT, (512) 475-8071; or Jessica Clark, AIR, (773) 991-6249
