Next month, visitors to a German museum will be able to hear the sounds of Pittsburgh street corners recorded from cell phones as they watch a tiny, blue-lit puck zip around a 3-by-7-foot map of the city's East End.

		On the Internet For information on the MapHub project, visit www.maphub.org. Registered users will be able to use mobile phones to dial in to MapHub at 412-894-0018, give their locations, and record for the audible map. Sounds can be contributed through August.

The "audible map" is part of the MapHub project, which aims to bring people with common interests together around computer maps loaded with information that could range from the official and general -- bus schedules for the area -- to the personal and specific -- comments from residents about whether the buses run on time.

This particular map is considered an exercise to test the technology that makes it work.

The audible map now sits, supported on phone books, in a cubicle in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nathan Martin, an adjunct art professor and fellow at the university's interdisciplinary Studio for Creative Inquiry, is at work fine-turning the servomotors at the map's upper corners, which move the 1 1/2-inch diameter metal puck via wires running through pulleys.

While it jets around the map, a sheet of acrylic glass covered with a grid of city streets, the sound bites recorded by people with cell phones play: rap music, the sounds of traffic, a voice, dripping, something that sounds like cheek music. Computer guts housed in an orange case control the movement and sound.

When the map is completed and installed, the LED-lit disk will move to a particular location and blink, signaling the start of a blip of sound from that location.

"We were originally interested in how can we look at urban spaces. There are interesting stories in urban spaces, but there's no place to file those," said Martin, 27, who with caffeine and hours of free labor stretched $5,000 in grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Heinz Endowments for a year.

Imagine a pumped-up MapQuest linked to both conventional sources of information and the highly specific and personal comments of a blog and you'll get the idea, said Jeff Maki, 22, who is working on his master's degree in information systems management and helped design and build the audible map.

The "hubs" are to be organized and run by the groups of people who use them, Martin said. For example, the members of Bike PGH, one of the groups involved in the project, might create maps of bike routes, noting non-bike-friendly places, logging potholes, linking to conventional sources for weather and traffic, and including audio and video clips relating practical information or telling stories.

"Pittsburgh has a lot going on, a lot of stories, a lot of history that doesn't get published or written about," said Martin. "There is no way for people to contribute to it as living history, as something ongoing.

"We want to find ways for a population in an urban space to start to contribute to a living history, and figure out how do we make that useful? How do we combine it with other information that is available?"

There will be a workshop for the project at 8 p.m. March 4 at the Edge Studio, 5411 Penn Ave., East Liberty.

The audible map will go on display March 18 at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. There, it will be part of an exhibit of interactive technology called "Making Things Public -- Atmospheres of Democracy."