Audioclopedia: Listening to the World / An Ecology of Listening

We are the co-creators of Audioclopedia, a participatory platform that invites users to listen to territories through their sounds and voices, to explore the memory of places, and to collectively build a sensitive cartography of the sonic world.

The project was born from artistic and ethnographic research on the popular songs of southern Tunisia, which carry a spatial and communal memory. This exploration of the Chott Ejrid region (between Kebili, Tozeur, and Gafsa) led to the idea of a living digital tool, capable of linking sounds to their spaces of origin, preserving fragile voices, and giving an audience to the diversity of territories.

Today, Audioclopedia is opening up to other regions, inviting everyone to share a fragment of the world through a sound, an image, or an atmosphere.

Our Approach

We believe that every sound, every song, every narrative is a trace of space and memory.

Audioclopedia seeks to examine the relationship between orality and lived space, and to understand how voices take root in territories and how spaces shape the forms of orality. This is why we ask that the deposited oralities be linked to the mentioned region: they will enrich a spatial ethno-musicological study, where each sound is geolocated, contextualized, and put into relation with its environment.

Who are we?

• Afef Omri: Visual artist, architect, and researcher.
• Mehdi Guermazi: Music producer and web enthusiast.

Our Objective

The objective is twofold: to preserve and activate a fragile sonic heritage, often absent from institutional archives, while experimenting with new forms of digital writing of the territory. By transforming cartography into a tool for sensitivity rather than measurement, the project proposes an ecology of listening as a practice of resistance and transmission.