what3sounds

Pick two places and hear the trip between them, through whichever vocabulary you choose.

PlacesHear one place JourneysPlay a trip

1The trip

AStart

BEnd

A place name, an address, or lat, lng. You can also click the map to hear a spot and pin it, or drag the pins.

Route options

This is a recorded route, so it keeps the grid and the stops it was travelled with. Enter a start and an end to plan a trip instead.

Grid

Hexagons (H3) Pentagons (A5)

Route

Hex walk Follow roads

Song length

Short Medium Long

Or play where you are: the song follows you as you move.

The screen is kept awake while this runs; if the phone locks anyway, the music stops. This page doesn’t send your location anywhere, though the map loads the tiles for wherever you are.

2The vocabulary

Codebook

Open another by address

Web address of a codebook’s manifest

Codebooks can live on their contributors’ own sites. This page fetches one when asked and plays it; it doesn’t keep a copy.

3The sound

Style

Time signature Tempo quarter notes / min

Each stop plays

All 3 items 1 item

Rhythm

Strum pattern

Band

Guitar

Drums Drum style

Bass

Follows the strum, on each chord’s bass note.

Mix

Guitar Bass Drums

Grown out of what3chords by David O’Sullivan, Luke Bergmann, Jim Thatcher and Nick Lally. Each vocabulary is credited to its own contributors above.

No map here. This browser can’t draw it: the map needs graphics acceleration (WebGL), which is switched off or unavailable.

Everything else works. Enter a start and an end, and the trip plays, shares and downloads as usual.

To see the map, turn on hardware acceleration in the browser’s settings, or try another browser or device.

Pick a start and an end to write a song.

Follow

Tuning up…

What is this?

what3sounds gives every place on Earth an address, and lets many people say what that address sounds like.

It grew out of what3chords, a satire of what3words. what3words has one word list, owned by one company, and presents it as the place’s address. what3chords copied that move with one table of guitar chords, so the chords came across as the place’s chords, when they are really the guitar’s chords applied to the place. The table hides who chose it.

Here the two things are pulled apart. The address is shared: a point falls in a grid cell, and the cell becomes one large number. The number means nothing by itself. A codebook is a vocabulary that someone has contributed, and it reads the number as a few of its own sounds. At a given cell size the same spot always has the same number. It sounds one way through one codebook and another way through the next. Only the address belongs to the place. Each sound belongs to the people who wrote the codebook, and the page says who they are.

Codebooks are not assigned by territory. Any vocabulary can be heard anywhere, so it is for its contributors, not this page, to decide whether that is acceptable for their material, and on what terms.

What is here now

One codebook is the guitar chord table of the original what3chords. The others are demonstrations written for this page so that there is something to hear: they are nobody’s tradition, and say so. Real codebooks need contributors. How to contribute one.

What this does not do

A web page cannot enforce anything. A codebook’s terms and Local Contexts labels are shown, and the page behaves as they ask (it will hide the download button, or leave a codebook off its list), but anyone can copy what a web page loads. Material that should be restricted should not go into an open web page at all.

And the address layer is still anonymous: a global grid, applied everywhere from outside. You can change which grid, hexagons or pentagons, but not who drew it. Plural codebooks fix half of the view-from-nowhere problem. They make the other half easier to see.

Further reading

Jim Thatcher, “Address.Error.503”, in How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables (Meatspace Press, 2019), free to read.
Thatcher, O’Sullivan and Mahmoudi, “Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession” (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016).
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” (Feminist Studies, 1988), for the view from nowhere.
Local Contexts, for the labels communities use to say how their material should be treated.

Preview: the text on this page was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, working from the authors’ design note. The authors have not yet reviewed it.

Share this route?

How journeys work

A trip is a string of places

Enter a start and an end. The route between them is a chain of grid cells, sized so the trip has a sensible number of stops and never finer than the vocabulary in use can tell apart. Each stop sounds the way its place does through that vocabulary.

Hex walk (or pentagon walk) is greedy local routing: at every cell, step to the neighbour nearest the destination. It runs entirely in your browser and cheerfully crosses oceans.
Follow roads asks the public OSRM demo server for a driving route and collects the cells along it. If the server is down, no road connects the two places, or a pin is far from any road, you get the walk instead.

Playing it

Press play (or the space bar). Tempo applies to every vocabulary. The guitar codebook brings its own band: a style, strum patterns, drums and bass. Other vocabularies sound the way their contributors set them up. Select any stop in the strip along the bottom to jump there.

The share button copies a link that opens this trip through this vocabulary, at the version you heard. The download button saves the song as a WAV file, where the vocabulary’s terms allow it.

On an iPhone, flip the ring/silent switch to ring if you hear nothing.

Going live

Go live follows your location instead of a planned route. The cell you are in sounds round and round until you cross into the next. Cells are about 50 m across on foot and larger when you travel faster, or as fine as the vocabulary can tell apart if that is coarser.

The page keeps the screen awake while a session runs, because a web page cannot keep playing once the phone locks. When you end the session the route becomes an ordinary trip you can replay, and a recording can be downloaded where the vocabulary allows. Neither is kept once you close the page.

This page does not send your location anywhere. Two things to know: the map loads its tiles for wherever you are from CARTO, as any online map does, and a link to the route is only made if you press share and agree.

Credits

Place search by Nominatim and Photon, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, basemap © CARTO. Built with MapLibre GL JS, h3-js, a5-js and Tone.js. Each vocabulary’s makers are named beside it; the samples the guitar codebook’s band plays are credited in the project’s README.