Walking Lines

Drawing by walking. Walking Lines records your route by GPS as you walk and turns that trajectory into a line — the walk is the drawing.

Origin

Walking Lines is inspired by Walking Score, a participatory walking project created and run by the Are.na team, where every route becomes a score. With gratitude to those who inspired this application.

How to use Walking Lines

1. Open the app outdoors and allow access to your location. Title, walker name and place are optional. The place will be public and you choose it: a city, a town, a neighbourhood or a more specific reference that does not reveal an address. Once there is a route, the ⌖ button next to that field fills it in with the name of the locality derived from the walk; typing it by hand is still the main path.
2. Choose how you want to draw. If you enable no option, Walking Lines will draw a plain line following your route.
3. Press Start and walk. Each new position accepted by the GPS adds a point to the drawing; on screen you can see the line, the distance, the time and the number of points.
4. You can turn on Paint and change its options while walking. Changes apply to the following points, so a single route can combine different gestures. If you turn on Soundscape, you will also need to allow microphone access when starting.
5. Press Stop when you finish, or to pause. Then you can Save the route, Discard it or Continue. Saving sends it to the notebook and tries to publish it automatically; with no connection it appears as local and you can use the Upload button later.

It is worth waiting a moment for the phone to find an accurate position before setting off. If the signal is lost —on the underground or inside a building, for instance— the recording keeps the points already obtained and tries to recover the GPS automatically.

Islands and white space

Stop is also a pause. Pressing Continue resumes recording as a new island: the line does not join the previous stretch again, only the gap remains. Whatever you walk during the pause is not drawn, adds no distance and does not count as time —the stored duration is time walked, not time elapsed.

That gap is not an absence: it is material. The separation between two islands keeps the real distance and direction between them, and the drawing’s framing takes them in to scale. The pause is therefore a compositional tool: it opens white areas and decides how far apart each stroke sits within the canvas. A route can be made of several loose strokes separated by the space that genuinely separates them.

While a pause is open the GPS stays on, discarding its readings. This is deliberate: the next island then starts where you press Continue rather than where the receiver finishes waking up, which is what would corrupt the edge of the white space. In exchange, a pause drains battery until you save or discard.

The walk and the line

The line comes from the positions the phone records while you walk. It is not a drawing made with a finger, nor a route corrected on a map: curves, pauses, detours and variations in the signal are part of the result.

Walking Lines discards positions that are too imprecise and jumps incompatible with walking. These corrections stop an extreme GPS error from falsifying the route or the distance. The drawn view is fitted inside the canvas, but the browser’s private copy keeps the original accepted coordinates and times.

The line and Paint

Without turning on Paint, the walk produces a continuous black line of fixed thickness. It is the most direct representation of the route.

Turning on Paint reveals two tools that can be swapped before starting or during recording:

• Line keeps the route as a stroke. The Disorder slider progressively separates the line from a smooth representation and generates a reproducible scrawl around each segment. At 0% it adds no disorder. The Thickness slider changes the width of the following segments, from a thread to a very broad stroke; its travel is exponential, so the thin half — where most drawing happens — keeps real control. On devices that allow it, both sliders mark a tap at every detent: Thickness taps each time the stroke doubles, so it can be modulated while walking without looking at the screen.
• Stain is no longer a tool alternative to the stroke but a layer switched on and off while walking, coexisting with the line. It turns the real uncertainty of the GPS into a hatched band: the ground where you might have been, hatched at a fixed angle that does not follow the walk — which is why it reads as area rather than stroke — and closed by its outline. Where the route crosses itself, the hatching overlaps and darkens on its own. Width governs how broad the band is and Opacity how much ink it leaves, without modifying the recorded coordinates. With the line’s Thickness at 0 the band stands alone, with no stroke.
• Roughness changes the matter of all the ink, not the shape of the route. As it increases, edges become more porous, the deposit varies slightly and a faint diffusion appears around the line, the GPS stain and the sound shapes, like pigment absorbed by uneven paper. At 0% it preserves exactly the previous clean finish. The chosen value applies to the following points, so a transition can also be painted during the walk.
• Relief is a switch, not a slider: while it is on, the terrain’s elevation enters the drawing. In Line it leaves a transverse mark every 10 m of elevation change, on the side that tells whether you were climbing or descending, so flat ground marks nothing and a slope marks a comb. In Stain it tightens the cloud uphill and loosens it downhill: effort thickens the ink. It applies to the following points, so it can be switched on for a climb and off at the top. The GPS’s absolute altitude is not used — it drifts too much — only elevation change relative to the walk itself; where the vertical signal is not good enough, relief simply does not appear.
• Soundscape works at a larger scale than the route and behaves as a separate visual layer: choosing Line or Stain, changing Disorder or varying the size of the GPS stain does not determine the sound shapes. Voice and other steady sounds link shapes across short pauses; when silence returns, so does the empty paper. Not every sound produces the same stain: low frequencies tend towards rounded bodies, mid bands towards polygons, highs towards triangles or wedges, attacks towards strokes of varying width, and broad noise —like wind— towards large, pale washes. Speaking directly into the microphone, or making another nearby sound with clear energy in the mid bands, adds one or two small, darker wedges: a foreground presence that is not absorbed by the ambient stain. These families are not closed moulds: roundness, angularity, elongation, irregularity and connection shift gradually with the spectrum, so small real differences produce related but not identical variations. Volume mainly affects scale and opacity, while continuity holds the shapes together. Sensitivity decides how much sound stands out from the surroundings and enters the drawing. Gesture lets you paint: at 50% it keeps the automatic reading; moving it towards Stroke favours lines and attacks, and towards Stain favours bodies and connections. Matter decides how much ink the detected sound leaves. Changes to gesture and matter apply to the following points and stay visible along the route.

To look for a dense sound mass, try as a starting point Gesture between 80 and 100% towards Stain, Matter between 85 and 100% and Sensitivity between 100 and 150%; if the surroundings are quiet, you can raise the sensitivity further. A continuous sound or a sustained background favours accumulation. This is guidance, not a preset: the result always depends on the real sound and the real route.

You can switch from line to stain and turn the soundscape on and off several times within a single walk. The sliders and tools only change the appearance: they do not alter the calculated distance or the private route. When starting with sound, the app uses the first three seconds to calibrate the surroundings.

Drawings are published whole up to a maximum of 2 MB. On especially dense walks, Walking Lines measures the SVG periodically and shows a warning before reaching that limit so you can stop and save the route in time. It never simplifies the drawing automatically.

The notebook

Each saved route appears as a card with its drawing and two lines of context: place and date; stroke type, distance and duration. Earlier routes, which have no place, simply show the date.

Press the drawing to enlarge it inside Walking Lines. The viewer first shows the
complete drawing —including stains that fall outside the original frame— and lets
you zoom in, zoom out and move to the previous or next route without opening
Are.na or leaving the app.

The notebook has an address of its own. Consulting it from another device, you will see the public drawings, but not their coordinates, and you cannot rebuild their GPX. Each card offers a flat PNG download of the drawing; it contains no geographic or sound data. The public app does not allow importing, exporting structured data or deleting shared routes. Those operations are reserved for a future private administration; editorial withdrawal is currently handled from Are.na.

When a route is published, its SVG is fixed as the notebook’s visual reference. Later changes to the drawing engine do not reinterpret that historical result: it will keep looking as it was published.

Routes marked local have not been shared yet and remain only in that browser until you press Upload, clear the site data or lose that local storage.

Privacy

Walking Lines requests location only when you press Start. Stopping ends the recording of points, but if the route can be continued it keeps the GPS open for as long as the pause lasts —discarding every reading, neither drawing nor storing it— so that the next island begins where you decide. It stops observing location on Save, on Discard, and when the route is too short to continue. The microphone is optional: it is only requested if you have turned on Soundscape. Audio is analysed in real time inside the device, is not recorded, is not played back and is not shared. Stopping halts the microphone and closes the analysis.

While recording, the draft is kept in the browser’s local storage so that a screen interruption does not immediately erase the walk. If you press Discard, that draft is deleted. If you press Save, the complete route is kept locally and its graphic representation is submitted to the shared notebook.

Geographic coordinates, point-by-point times, GPS accuracy and normalised sound descriptors stay on the device that made the recording. Publishing sends only the SVG and editorial metadata: title, walker, the general place you typed, date, distance, duration, stroke type and whether a sound layer exists. No samples, recordings or spectral data are sent. The server filters that data again before storing it.

The only exception is the ⌖ button in the Place field, and only when you press it: a point of the route is then sent to a geocoding service (Nominatim, from OpenStreetMap) to obtain the name of the locality. That point is the midpoint of the walk, not the start or the end, and it is rounded to three decimals —about 110 metres— before leaving the device. The query goes through the Walking Lines server, so your IP address never reaches the geocoder, and no record of the queried coordinates is kept. The button writes the name of the locality; a second tap adds the neighbourhood if there is one. The result is editable text: you can change or delete it, and it is only published if you save the walk. If you do not press the button, no coordinate is sent.