City Cane Sound Map is an interactive Nocturne art installation that explores movement, memory, access, and place in Halifax. The project pairs used cane tips with QR codes linked to short videos and sound clips from locations around the city. Through everyday urban soundscapes, the exhibit invites visitors to experience Halifax through listening, touch, and mobility, while highlighting the often-invisible work of navigating public spaces as someone who is blind or partially sighted.
City Cane Sound Map is an interactive art exhibit that collects everyday sounds from across Halifax and pairs them with used cane tips. Each cane tip becomes both an object and a marker of movement: a small, worn record of sidewalks, crossings, curbs, bus stops, waterfront paths, building entrances, and public spaces. Visitors encounter physical cane tips in the gallery and scan a QR code connected to each one. The QR code opens a short video or audio-visual clip that transports the viewer to a specific part of the city through sound, image, texture, and place. The project asks audiences to consider how a city is experienced through listening, touch, orientation, repetition, and access. It highlights the often-invisible traces of mobility and invites viewers to experience familiar urban locations from another sensory perspective. The cane tip is a small object with a large story. Over time, it gathers evidence of travel: scraped rubber, worn edges, repeated contact with pavement, and the rhythm of daily navigation. This visible wear represents more than distance travelled; it speaks to the physical, mental, and emotional labour of navigating a city that is not always designed with low vision or blindness in mind. Each mark points to the effort, concentration, resilience, and fatigue that can be part of moving through inaccessible or unpredictable environments. By pairing each used cane tip with a sound recording from the city, the exhibit turns mobility equipment into a map of lived experience, highlighting both the challenges and enriching elements of living with low vision or blindness. The result is part archive, part soundwalk, and part public conversation about the dynamic nature of accessibility, independence, and belonging. The QR code format keeps the gallery installation visually simple while allowing each object to hold a deeper digital layer. Visitors can choose their own route through the exhibit, scanning cane tips in any order and building a personal sound map of the city.
