‘what we have done’ a new soundwalk created as part of ‘Everything Must Go’, currently on at the Soho Theatre, London. Available until 4th July

[UPDATE] this walk will be available again soon

MY WORLD IS EMPTY WITHOUT YOU
(A SLIGHT RETURN 2009)

“..the show made me notice the beauty and cinematic elegance of everyday life itself” – SuitYourself Magazine

it was always going to be about making something that would be invisible.
at first i imagined i was trying to create cinema without using cameras or screens, in the end i think i might have made an opera without a stage or libretto.

a soundtrack controlled by satellite positioning, a mixture of trained and untrained performers, wireless transmitters held together with tape, the british weather . . . it was always going to be a risky project.

this simple restaging of the world took a lot more work than i imagined, but i’ve had the luxury of working with a group of incredible artists.
i hope they don’t mind that in the end we have something that’s almost impossible to see . . .

SOUNDTRACK BY DUNCAN SPEAKMAN SARAH ANDERSON SAM HALMARAK

DEVISED AND PERFORMED WITH TOM WAINRIGHT MARTHA KING SYLVIA RIMAT ALEX BRADLEY EMMA BUSH SITA CALVERT-ENNALS

COMMISSIONED BY MAYFEST AND ARNOLFINI LIVE

SUPPORTED BY PERVASIVE MEDIA STUDIO BUILT WITH MSCAPE

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION DEB HEARNE

GRATITUDE TO (AND INSPIRATION FROM) CLARE REDDINGTON HELEN COLE TOM MELAMED BEN CLAYTON KATE YEDIGAROFF MATTHEW AUSTIN JO CUTHBERT SIMON GAMESEMILIE GRENIER GENEVIEVE BROWN CARO WINTER JOLYON GREENAWAY VANESSA BELLAAR SPRUIJT BETTINA SCHEIBE PAUL CLARKE ROD DICKINSON PHOEBE DAVIES ROTOZAZA WIM WENDERS ALL THE SUBTLE MOBS

FOR JANICE

‘my world..’ this years version is under development for launch this May. info at http://mayfestbristol.co.uk

You can now download the soundtrack from last years show here. Best listened to while drifting through a city. a description of the last version also here

Developed at the Pervasive Media Studio, commissioned by Mayfest, supported by Arnolfini

A short musical ’soundtrack for walking’ commissioned by Meeting House Gallery. A film without pictures for the streets of Illminster, inspired by the walking guides from the Illminster Forum, each MP3 player came with an attached set of walking instructions

‘100 meters..’ allows the listener to hear further than they can see.
Like an aural telescope, recordings made by the artist on journeys between the four venues involved in ”the animal gaze’ are played as if your range of hearing was constantly expanding, letting the audience build a sonic picture of routes through Plymouth.

Drawing on the listening practices of both animal predators and prey, ‘100 meters…’ frames these sounds with text inspired by the legacy of journeys in blues songs.

Commissioned by Groundworks South West as part of ‘Animal Gaze’.
the walks can be downloaded from here, each is designed to be listened to outside the venue in the filename.

A series of micro-sound walks in the Redfern area of Sydney.
These mixtures of music, sound design and spoken word are recreations of moments in the lives of local residents.

Tracing the layered communities of the indigenous, colonial and immigrant residents of the area, the audio work was accompanied by a handmade folded guide containing additional writing and visual guides to the routes.
Commissioned by Performance Space.
The entire pack of pieces and map for printing can be downloaded from here

a new soundwalk commission by Artmusic for their Palace Intrusions project ( http://palaceintrusions.org.uk/ ).
This is a circular walk and as such can be started from anywhere on the perimeter of the Bishops Palace in Wells, Somerset. The audio was created by collating and processing recordings of 50 walks I made around the perimeter.

The audiofile for the walk can be downloaded from the Palace Intrusions website or you can borrow an MP3 layer from Wells Museum.

A mixture of performance and locative media on Bristol’s streets.
What happens when everyone in the city is listening to the same song?

Wearing headphones, you begin to travel across the city, the soundtrack in your ears turning the world around into your personal cinema. Suddenly a stranger stops you and puts a hand on your shoulder. Their lips don’t move but in your ears you can somehow hear their voice. It feels like telepathy as they begin to speak the words to the song that’s playing in their head…
You continue to move across the city, sometimes guided, sometimes alone; as events unfold in front of you it becomes harder to tell which are staged and which are real.

WHAT: generative locative mediascape (mscape)
WHERE: everywhere
WHEN: ongoing

Click To Play

‘always something somewhere else’ is a GPS based soundwalk that builds itself as you experience it. To create it I worked with Hewlett Packard in Bristol and their new mscape software ( http://www.mscapers.com ).

In the work the listener is asked to locate various substances that form the contemporary urban environment (glass, stone, concrete etc.). As they mark the location of each one they begin to hear interwoven stories connecting them to remote locations around the world, soundtracked with a generative music score. The narratives are progressed and concluded as the listener returns to the locations they chose. The piece is reflective and sometimes melancholy, it touches on issues of climate change and global awareness, but ultimately encourages the listener to treasure the moments around them…

WHAT: online noise forecasts created with Birgit Binder
WHERE: Fierce Festival, Birmingham
WHEN: May 2007
LINK:http://noiseforecast.com

[this image was posted remotely using flickr]

WHAT: live performance walk with realtime sound processing
WHERE: touring – Tramway, Greenroom, Junction, Arnolfini
WHEN: Nov 2006 – Apr 2007

“what happens when your ears are full of the city, and you can’t hear the sounds you make..”

Click To Play

’sounds from above the ground’ is my current touring performance work , commissioned by Arnolfini as part of Breathing Space.
The walk mixes text, performance and live sound to create a site-responsive work that explore the relationship between sound and memory.

With a small group you follow a lone walker through the city streets, his internal monologue transmitted to your headphones. As you walk, listening to him dig into collective memory, the noise of the city is remixed live around you into glistening fragments and new layers.

In the performance the audience are given stereo wireless receivers and follow me through the city streets. I have a microphone on my chest and my backpack contains a laptop computer and stereo UHF audio transmitter. As we walk the audience listens through my ears as I plant memories and marks in the city, while the laptop processes and remixes the surrounding ambience.

UPDATE : This walk is now also available as a GPS aware soundwalk on the mScape platform. Please visit http://www.mscapers.com for more info.

‘feelings are always local’ recently launched at The Brewhouse in Taunton as part of the anti-static festival. A downloadble MP3 is available by right-clicking here. If you want to do the walk it starts from outside the cafe entrance to The Brewhouse theatre in Taunton, and heads across th car park into town. You can download the file on to your own MP3 player or pick one up from The Brewhouse bar. (please note that parts of the walk are inaccessible after 6pm)

play audio of walk by clicking icon below

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Audience feedback …(click image to play flash movie)

click to load flash version

what: pre-recorded soundwalk
where: West Town Farm, Ide
when: September 2007

Collaboration with Hannah Standen for ‘9days of Art’ at Organic Arts
A soundwalk through the disused railway cutting on the farm land.

created as part of textFestival 2006 as part of a residency with Organic Arts. ‘10 walks’ explored the soundworld of a small farm in Devon as it changed in response to the crisis in UK agriculture.

Click the icon below to hear an extract from the walk -

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If you would like to visit West Town Farm and take the walk yourself you can download it for your MP3 player by right-clicking here. Please contact www.organicarts.org.uk to arrange your visit. They will be able to provide you with an personal stereo for the walk if you do not have one.

WHAT: pre-recorded soundwalk
WHERE: E:VENT,London, UK
WHEN: ongoing
As part of node.london, I presented a retrospective of soundwalks at E:VENT as part of theirThreshold locative media exhibition.

Hear an extract of the walk here -

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Faced with the issues of presenting site-specific sound works in a gallery context I created a new soundwalk for the venue. The walk brought fragments of my other walks together and linked them to the E:VENT building through their relative co-ordinates. When the listener reached the roof the walk became an aural telescope, as they looked out across London towards the city they heard an editied sequence of location recordings I made on a walk from the Swiss RE building back to the gallery. The narrator was collecting sounds that didn’t have the energy to travel to the listener, and delivering the recordings as a gift.

If you would like to make this walk please download the full file below onto an MP3 player and contact Colm Lally at E:VENT to enquire about visiting to the space.

right click here to download the file (ctrl-click on a Mac)

This is the first of my ‘realtime’ walks and continued to explore the relationship between sound and memory. In this walk you overhear a dialogue between a couple trying to trace their shared memories of the site, while the narrator begins to implicate you in their debate.

“..just for a moment I slipped into the city of my memories, with my internal cohort drifting about me, my inner citadel of friends and absent friends and friends to come. Their ghostly promises brush against me. I am in tears.”
– review in RealTimeArts, Apr/May 06

Rather than pre-recording the soundtrack as in my other soundwalks, the audience member is given a backpack containing a laptop with custom sound processing software and a hidden microphone. The voices of the performers and narrator are recorded, but all other sound is sourced live from the surrounding location. At the start of the piece you hear the world around them as it exists (but slightly amplified). As you walk and the narrative progresses the ambient sound is processed and reshaped. This ‘live remix’ is not arbitary, but follows and reflects the thematic shifts of the text.
’sounds..’ was first shown at the InBetweenTime Festival, and is part of the Breathing Space commission I have received from Arnolfini Live.

WHAT: pre-recorded soundwalk / location aware soundwalk (GPS)
WHERE: Watchet, UK
WHEN: ongoing

[ UPDATE - this walk had been made available for the mScape locative media software, visit http://www.mscapers.com to find out more ]
A mixture of location sound, processed recordings,music and narration heard on MP3 players guided listeners on a 20 min walk around the town. The narrators text was sourced from interviews with local residents, archived news stories and ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’.
click below to hear an extract from ‘dirty weather’

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if you would like to take the walk yourself you can download the full piece below and play it on your own MP3 player or burn it to CD for use in a portable CD player. Watchet is on the north coast of Somerset near Minehead, more information about the town and its location can be found by clicking here. Once you are in Watchet the walk starts outside the front of the library on the esplenade.

download full walk (24mb)

a take art commission – presented as part of ‘Tide and Time’
supported by ArtLife and West Somerset District Council

While aboard the MS Stubnitz as it passed through international waters between Rotterdam and Newcastle, Duncan Speakman and Sneha Solanki created an independent state whose borders were mapped on aural terrain, the hertzian spaces created by mobile phone transmissions, radio waves and acoustic sound.

When audience members applied for a passport, we recorded the invisible transmissions and electromagnetc fields around them. In a realtime performance these were processed and mixed with field recordings from the ship. The resulting soundscape were stored individually as one-off magnetic tapes that can be owned, traded, given away or destroyed by the audience, creating an individual unique audio passport for each new citizen, and encouraged a micro-climate of exchange and communication.

click below to hear an extract from one of the passports -

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This was a commission from amino as part of the navigate live festival in conjunction with the Baltic and MS Stubnitz.