Place names in music and poetry

There are many example of place names being used in songs and poems. One of the best-known examples of place names as the main theme is the song What Did Delaware, written by Irving Gordon and made popular by Perry Como. Many songs have used specific places for their sound or their meaning, such as 24 Hours from Tulsa, Birmingham Blues, Is This The Way To Amarillo, Wichita Lineman and so on, while Letter from America by The Proclaimers included several Scottish place names to suggest a story about depopulation and emigration.

Irish places name are important in poems by Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats, while American places name are important in the poetry of Carl Sandburg and others. Place names have the power to evoke feelings and meanings that are often based on personal experiences, but not always. For example, in Clear Waters Rising, Nicholas Crane wrote:

Village names on my maps sounded like a genealogy of sprites and goblins: the warring brothers Anger and Sinning; the six crooked cousins, Hub, Eck, Ed, Moos, Heft and Zain; mean Uncle Taxa; Wart and Gug who guarded the bog; soft-hearted Furt; and Funk who was always frightened. And wincing Rimsting.

Many literary works make extensive use of the evocative power of place names. The most notable examples are the books of J.R.R.Tolkien, who developed an entire world where place names in Middle Earth were a wonderful integration of the strange and the familiar, drawing words and sounds from English, Welsh and Finnish languages in particular.

Audiomaps represent a new genre in their use of music and the pedantic application of strict rules concerning eligibility of words and names for a specific work. One of the few musical equivalents is The Elements Song by Tom Lehrer. The way that Lehrer arranged the names of the elements makes them sound poetic, but it was the way he set them to a well-known piece of music that made it popular and successful. Even without music, the element names can have an intrinsic poetry, as Daniel Ratcliffe demonstrated on the Graham Norton Show in 2010.

The BBC radio Shipping Forecast has been widely admired owing to the comforting, rhythmic and poetic sound of the area names. Lisa Knapp created the beautiful Shipping Song to add further resonance to the names and illustrate how merging pedantic name poetry with music can generate haunting beauty.

Conveying meaning is difficult when very few words are permitted, though some audiomaps, such as Maps 1, 3 and 41, do attempt to tell a sort of story, but in the majority any specific meaning is limited to a few phrases. In most audiomaps it is the sounds and the rhythm that are important, along with the map images and other potential imagery. Any meaning is implicit rather than explicit and is usually limited to a few phrases.

Most poetry does not have a musical accompaniment, while the lyrical content of the majority of popular songs is not very interesting. Audiomaps offer a different approach to poetry, music and maps by jumbling them together to see what fits and what emerges.