TAMAN TUGU:
INTERFERENCE/RESISTANCE

‘Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance’ is an immersive, interactive musical work that has been mapped onto the pathways of the Taman Tugu jungle park in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  The music is created primarily from field recordings gathered within the park itself. The piece uses audio augmented reality (AAR) to blend the performed work with the ambiance of the location; the sounds of the jungle and the city that surrounds it. Taman Tugu is an unusual place – a large green space teeming with wildlife in the centre of a modern metropolis. This is a location frequented by locals wishing to escape the hustle and bustle of the city, and provides an opportunity for tourists to experience the Malaysian jungle without having to make the time-consuming journey to a national park elsewhere in the country. 

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‘Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance’ is performed through a GPS-enabled Smartphone and headphones. GPS technology allows for the mapping of a composition over a landscape so that the music is experienced within the context of a very specific geography. It is possible to achieve a fine alignment of sound with space that enables the structuring of a musical work around specific landmarks. In addition to hearing a musical piece that has been mapped on to the environment, the audience also hear the sounds of the surrounding ambiance in real time; a soundscape that has formed the basis for the musical composition itself. This work therefore combines the real and the virtual into an AAR experience.

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The piece is a location-specific meditation on the importance of green spaces in the urban environment. Through the use of GPS mapping and AAR, it encourages listeners to reflect on changes in ambiance as they move from the edges of the park, where the city is still clearly audible, to the centre of the park where the sounds of the jungle dominate. ‘Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance’ aims to engage an audience more deeply with this incredibly unusual urban ambiance, while also highlighting the importance of urban green spaces.
 

The work premiered on September 4, 2019 as part of the international Soundwalk Sunday festival. The first public presentation of the piece occurred at a fully-booked event at the park on December 1, 2019, and was covered on Malaysian national TV news channel Berita RTM. The first research output to be produced from TTIR was a short paper entitled ‘Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance: Addressing Urban Rewilding with a Musical Augmented Reality Experience’ which was presented at the ISEA conference at the CCCB in Barcelona in June 2022. This was followed by a book chapter in Ambiance, Tourism and the City in April 2023: ‘Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance: Using Augmented Reality and Placed Sound to Engage Audiences with an Urban Jungle Soundscape’.

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The piece can be experienced in the Echoes app, which can be downloaded for free from the App Store and Google Play Store.