Exploring Amsterdam with Microsoft Soundscape

Amsterdam, Breakfast, Museums, and Soundscape – the perfect weekend!

Hi, I’m Frazier from the Soundscape Team. One of my friends is going on a city break to Amsterdam next month and asked me for some tips of things to do there, as they know I’ve been before. Today, I am sharing how I did this using Soundscape’s latest feature, “Routes”. In this blog, I hope you will not only learn about this amazing new feature, but how much fun it was to revisit my trip and be able to share a few highlights with my friend. Soundscape will work anywhere in the world, so you can travel with it and have your familiar experience in your language of choice. 

My friend only has a weekend in Amsterdam and wants to pack in as much as possible. My plan was to create a walking itinerary for a day using a Route, and then also share some Markers of other places they might like to visit while they are there.

At the bottom of this blog, you’ll find links to all the Markers mentioned, so you can try them out for yourself!

What is a Soundscape Route?

Soundscape Routes are like a trail of Audio Beacons – a feature of Soundscape which plays a sound which always comes from the direction of the place it’s set on. (Read about Audio Beacons in our ‘Getting Fresh Air with Microsoft Soundscape’ blog). In fact: 

• A Soundscape Route is a sequence of Soundscape Markers joined together and finishing at a destination.
• When arriving at one of the Markers on the Route, instead of switching off, the Audio Beacon will automatically set on the next Marker.
• You can use Markers as intermediate waypoints along your Route to help you navigate to your end destination with greater ease.
• Routes can be shared, and each person is able to edit the Route based on their preferred style of guidance, some may want very frequent Markers, whereas others may prefer to only have Markers at key spots along the way.

The Soundscape ‘Route’ is a personal experience and can be tailored to individual preferences, whether you are creating it for yourself, or to share with someone else! 

I visited Amsterdam with my girlfriend between Christmas and New Year, it happened to be the time of year that they have their annual Light Festival with several light installations around the city. My first recommendation was to go while this was on!

My plan for the day was to grab a filling breakfast, go to a museum or two, walk around the city to appreciate the architecture, finishing with a boat tour to see the fabulous light installations, all while keeping well-fueled at some cafés and restaurants I had particularly enjoyed while I was there.

Starting the day off right

Beginning with breakfast, the first Marker I’m creating is for ‘Bakers and Roasters’. This is a great spot for a hearty breakfast to start the day! My friend is staying over on this side of the city, so launching the Route when he leaves his hotel should give him a nice simple walk to the café. Plus, it’s only a few minutes’ walk from Amsterdam’s Museum district so it fits in perfectly with the plan for the day.

Waypoint 2: Rijksmuseum

The first stop after breakfast is the Rijksmuseum, while it’s still early in the day. This is one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands! It is the national museum of the Netherlands and is dedicated to Dutch arts and history. The museum is in a huge, grand building, I’d make sure to allow plenty of time to walk around the grounds and take in the architecture!

In the museum, along with all the exhibits, you will also find the ‘Research Library’, the largest art history library in the Netherlands. This was one of my favourite parts of the museum – after walking around looking at all the art and historical artefacts, this picturesque, working library was somewhat unexpected!

There are several other museums in this area, such as the Van Gogh Museum, so if my friend would like to visit somewhere else then they can easily try a different museum without going far from the Route. In fact, the beauty of a Soundscape Route is that it doesn’t matter how far from the Route you might want to venture as the Audio Beacon will always be audible from wherever you may be. You can make a little detour and then just follow the sound of the Audio Beacon back to where you branched off! In this way, Soundscape gives you the freedom and flexibility to explore and discover a place on your own terms.

Jordaan

Next up on the day’s itinerary is the Anne Frank house museum. The museum is in the lovely neighbourhood or Jordaan and is about a 30-minute walk from the Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam is a very pedestrian friendly city due to the concentric nature of the waterways, all arcing around the city centre, you can get to virtually anywhere by walking along the canals, so I suggested to my friend that they walk between the two to really take in the city.

I placed a couple of intermediate Markers to help guide my friend between the Rijksmuseum and Jordaan, along with another in the centre of Jordaan to give them the opportunity to explore the neighbourhood some more and take in the sights of the tree lined canals and visiting the many independent shops in the area, and possibly grabbing a light lunch in one of the many tempting cafes. They can always skip this last Marker and go straight to the museum when they are ready if they prefer and come back another day when they have more time.

Fun fact: it is said that the houses have so many windows because the windows are lighter than walls, and this helped to stop the subsidence caused by soft ground that the city is built on.

Waypoint 6: Anne Frank House

The sixth waypoint is the Anne Frank House. This is the very house in which Anne Frank hid from Nazi persecution during the Second World War. I didn’t get to go here myself when I was in Amsterdam because I hadn’t booked a ticket and the queues were very long. So, when I created this Marker, I added an annotation to make sure to book your ticket in advance to avoid disappointment! I did also let them know this in the email I sent when I shared the Route, just in case they don’t look before they get there!

[Image caption:] The distance shown on this screen will always be to your current location. Here it is showing the distance from where I was creating the Markers, but once you are in Amsterdam, the distances will be more meaningful.

Dinner & boat tour 

The last activity of the day is a boat tour around some of the canal-side light installations of the Light Festival. Before this though, it’s time to get some dinner. The boat tours leave relatively early, but after all the walking I’m sure they will have worked up an appetite! I created the Route’s fifth Marker on ‘Jacketz’, a restaurant in central Amsterdam which serves jacket potatoes with all kinds of toppings! When I went, I had the pulled pork filling, topped with a lot of cheese which was delicious and incredibly filling. It’s a good hearty meal, but it will be quick enough to eat and make it to the boat tour on time.

From Jacketz, it’s just a five-minute walk to the boat tour. The tour takes in some of the best sights of the festival and will give a perspective that you only get from canal-level. On the tour, you also get a commentary explaining what each bit of art represents – some of them can be incredibly abstract! I even thought about creating my own Soundscape Markers along this canal tour to share with my friend just so that he could point out a few things that don’t get mentioned on the actual tour.

On the walk back from the boat tour to the hotel, it is worth checking out what other Light Festival installations are on the way – there are a number that aren’t visible from the canals, so even after the boat tour, there is still more exploring to be done.

Other Markers to explore

After I had created the day’s itinerary for my friend, I then created some more Markers just in case they had time on their other days to check out some more of my recommendations, plus a couple of interesting facts I had learnt while I was there!  

First up, the narrowest house in Amsterdam. Houses in Amsterdam used to be taxed based on the size of their façade, so it was cheaper to have a very narrow house, even if it went back a long way. This resulted in some tall and thin houses! I added this as a Marker for my friend to discover while they’re walking around!

I also added another couple of food spots – one unassuming café in a library that served a simple but incredibly tasty breakfast, and a burger restaurant which has a wide selection of burgers to try, they offer a trio of mini-burgers as a sampling platter to make the mouth water! It’s a great spot for a quick and tasty meal that isn’t ‘fast food’.

After this, I added another couple of museums. The Amsterdam Museum is a museum all about the history of Amsterdam. Whenever I visit a new place, I love to learn about the history of the area, so I thoroughly recommended this if they have time. Another museum is the Van Gogh Museum, which I didn’t get a chance to visit, but is very much on my list if I return. And for something slightly different, I also created a Marker for the Heineken factory tour. I have heard that this is a fun way to spend a few hours if the weather is bad!

Finally, I added some Markers for some interesting landmarks I’d seen while I was there.  The first of which is the Magere Brug, or ‘Skinny Bridge’ in English. It is a very pretty bridge built on the site of a bridge from the 1600s which is said to have been so narrow that pedestrians could only cross it in one direction at a time. The bridge is also illuminated at night, making it a lovely place to go for an evening walk.

The second of these landmarks is Dam square, the historical centre of Amsterdam which dates back to the 13^th century, when the Amstel River was dammed. At one end of the square is the Royal Palace, a magnificent building, and around the rest of the square there are several other tourist attractions.

Sharing the route

Creating these Markers and putting them together in to a route took me about 15 minutes, but it was great fun to revisit my trip from a few years ago. Once I was finished, I shared these with my friend. They have checked them out and added a few of their own, now they are ready to go and explore Amsterdam! Once they’ve been, we will get them to provide an update on how they found using Soundscape to explore a new city as a tourist using Soundscape Routes and Markers, so check back in the future for an update!

If you’ve got any stories about how you’ve used Soundscape Routes, or anything else to do with Soundscape, then we would love to hear them! Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at soundscape@microsoft.com.

Helpful tips

Creating a Route

1. To create a Route, select ‘Markers & Routes’ on the Soundscape home screen, the select the ‘Routes’ tab, followed by the ‘+’ button in the top right corner. Give your Route a name and description, then select ‘Add Waypoints’.
2. From here you can either add existing Markers, select new places from the Places Nearby option, add your current location, or search for somewhere else.
3. Once you have added all the places you’d like in your Route, select ‘done’. You can now reorder or remove waypoints if needed, if not, select the ‘done’ button again and your Route will be saved.  

Sharing a Route

1. To share a Route, select ‘Markers & Routes’ on the Soundscape home screen, the select the ‘Routes’ tab and select the Route that you would like to share. Select the ‘share’ button which will then give you a number of sharing options.
2. As the Route is shared as a file rather than a link, we recommend sharing it via email. Other platforms will work but may require extra steps.
3. When receiving a file, tap on it, and then select the ‘share’ icon. This will give the option of various apps you can ‘share’ the Route with, select Soundscape. Soundscape will open and you will be presented with the option to save the Route.  

Creating a Marker

1. To create a Marker, firstly find the place you would like to save as a Marker. You can do this by either selecting somewhere from the ‘Places Nearby’ list, selecting ‘current location’ on the home screen, or by searching using the search bar at the top of the home screen.
2. Once you are on the location details page for your chosen place, select the ‘Save as Marker’ button.
3. The name will be automatically filled, but you can change this, and you can also add an annotation which will be announced along with the name when the Marker is nearby.  

Repositioning a Marker

1. If you would like the change the location of a Marker you have created, select the ‘Markers and Routes’ button on the Soundscape home screen and then select the Marker you would like to reposition.
2. Select ‘Edit Marker’, followed by the ‘edit’ button on the map at the bottom of the screen. Note: with voiceover this is called the ‘Nudge Marker’ button.
3. If you aren’t using voiceover, then at this point you can drag the map until the Marker’s pin is in the correct location. Once you are happy with the location, select ‘done’ to close the map view, and then ‘done’ again to save the change to your Marker.
4. If you are using Voiceover, select ‘edit Marker’, followed by ‘nudge Marker’. You can then either nudge the Marker in the direction that your phone is pointing or use Voiceover actions to nudge the Marker in a specific direction or snap it to your current location.

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