Only Expansion will be shown at Next Level festival in Dortmund from the 15th - 17th of November 2024

https://www.next-level.digital/festival/

more info on Only Expansion here

Only Expansion is presented at the Wales Millennium centre as part of LLAIS, Cardiffs’ international arts festival.

https://www.wmc.org.uk/en/llais/2024/only-expansion

I participated in the Experimental Audio Camp at Real World studios in Box. Focused on working with Dolby Atmos I collaborated with Joseph Smith to create a spatial composition. The Dolby Atmos master file can be downloaded here -

https://www.watershed.co.uk/studio/news/2023/06/06/experimental-audio-camp-three-days-residence-real-world-studios

Sound design and composition for Further Than the Furthest Thing in collaboration with Sarah Anderson. Written by Zinnie Harris and directed by Sita-Calvert Ennals.

http://minack.com/past-shows/further-furthest-thing

Sound design and composition created for What Remains of Us. Written by David Lane and directed by Sita-Calvert Ennals.

“The musical score causes fissures in time; it jarringly skips ahead, stretches back decades, and the future hurries to arrive.” - The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/mar/09/what-remains-of-us-review-korean-family

Only Expansion won the Immersive Art and XR Competition at the BFI London Film Festival in 2021 Info on festival and judges report here - https://www.bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival/news/competition-winners-2021

More info on project here - https://duncanspeakman.net/projects/oe/

A collection of music, sound and spoken word created in collaboration with Tineke De Meyer. Available at http://dspk.bandcamp.com/album/the-house-was-alright

“By withholding answers, Speakman and De Meyer prompt us to speak, even as language is breaking down.” http://acloserlisten.com top ten experimental releases of 2020

2019 | Only Expansion wins Special Jury Award for Immersive Non-fiction at IDFA
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Jury Statement ¶

There were two projects that really stood out for the three of us, even though they are worlds apart. They each manage to take you on a journey and confront you; both with the outside world as well as within yourself. They are layered, open, poetic, engaging, and meaningful. Both connect to important current issues in creativity and technology as well as our timeframe and society. As the jury, we therefore fully underwrite both prizes given.

A set of provocations, experiments and reflections for designing immersive experiences. Created as part of the South West Creative Technology Network Immersion Fellowships.

Digital copy available to download here

Invited by British Council Japan for residency in Ise City. Alongside Season Butler, Matthew Rosier, Grace Boyle, Jane and Louise Wilson, Nicole Vivien Watson.

Paper presentation at DRHA 2019 Sep 10th, Waterman’s London.

Only Expansion: Composing Temporal Structures For Augmented Audio Experiences In The Anthropocene ¶

This paper will present the practice based research outcomes of the augmented audio artwork ‘Only Expansion’, focusing on the temporal composition of experiences in physical environments. It offers an account of how augmented reality experiences in public space (and other uncontrolled environments) can offer new critical approaches to contemporary ecological thinking. The artwork under examination uses custom mobile technology to create an urban audio walk that both remixes the immediate sound environment of the audience and combines it with field recordings from remote locations. In the experience participants wear headphones that also contain binaural microphones, the signal from these microphones is fed through DSP software in bespoke handheld devices before being fed back to the headphones. In this way the voices of passing pedestrians might become a resonant choir, or a bus engine may form a rhythmic counterpoint. The field recordings from are sourced from a series of international locations all undergoing major environmental shifts, so the sound of the wind in the city where the audience experiences the piece may become merged with wind recordings from the Tunisian Sahara. Through the combination of field recordings with processed and raw microphone signals, an interface is created between the listeners presence, the immediate space and remote locations. The work offers a site responsive rather than site specific experience, and the absence of cardinal guidance forces the audience to navigate the urban space through direct physical and sensory engagement. Drawing on over a decade of the author’s international practice in the creation of locative audio walks, the paper considers new compositional structures for works using augmented audio technologies, focusing on the layering of different temporalities within urban environments. The effect that is produced when the audiences’ lived experience of walking through the work are layered with the timescales represented within the field recordings speaks to Timothy Morton’s proposition that we are currently living with the uncanny sense of existing on two timescales simultaneously (2013). Our everyday human actions feeding into processes that extend far beyond are lifetimes. This experience is considered within the context of Anja Kanngieser’s proposal that “sound can help to differentiate the sweeping universality—and hence the seeming unchangeability—that the Anthropocene poses” and that “sound renders apparent that the world is not for humans. The world is rather with humans.” (2015). By physically situating the audience within the layered temporality of the work, and as an active contributor to the soundscape, this inquiry offers new approaches to augmented audio as a way of inhabiting, communicating and knowing an entangled world. It begins not with distant stories being collected and delivered, but at the site of the audience experience, and expands outwards from there through the transversality of sound.

A set of provocations, experiments and reflections for designing immersive experiences. Created as part of the South West Creative Technology Network Immersion Fellowships.

Digital copy available to download here

• This work will be presented at Next Festival, Dortmund 15th-17th Nov 2024 - https://www.next-level.digital/festival/

Winner - London Film Festival Best Immersive and XR Award.
Winner - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam - Special Jury Award for Immersive Non-fiction

“Arresting, poised, beautiful, dark, innovative” - Seth Honor, Kaleider

As sea levels rise and wildfires burn, Only Expansion remixes the sound of the city around you to experience sonically how your own life might change in the future. A beautifully made guidebook prompts you to explore the city, choosing your own route, while headphones with customised electronics capture and manipulate the sounds around you. Field recordings of climate collapse blend into your surroundings, you begin to hear your city as if it was under water or beaten by dry desert winds. A visceral and poetic reflection on what it means to live on a planet in crisis, Only Expansion connects the here to the elsewhere, letting you experience our tangled ecology through sound.

An alternate version of Give Me Back My Broken Night (2010)

It is a provocation for audiences to imagine the future of their city.

Designed specifically for areas under construction or redevelopment, the audience are led by performers through vacant lots and buildings to share what is planned for the area, and what the utopian and dystopian alternatives might be. Before the audiences’s eyes, a glowing vision of the future appears in augmented reality, the collective imagining of those present.

Paper for Journal of Media Theory

DOVEY, Jon; SPEAKMAN, Duncan. Anthropocene Elegy and GeoSpatial Presence. Media Theory, [S.l.], v. 2, n. 1, p. 32-56, july 2018. ISSN 2557-826X. Available at: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/35

Abstract

Drawing from our collaboration on an AHRC funded research project, this essay will look at the production and reception of an artwork and offer an account of the tension in the work between the “authored” time line, the user’s temporal experience and the impact of mediated time on that experience. The artwork itself utilises a combination of pre-recorded audio, geo-locative technology and printed material to create an urban walking experience. The route is not pre-determined, but is created uniquely each time by a participating audience member in response to thematic and reflective provocations. Locations they are invited to choose while walking become part of their internal memory map of the city, while the GPS co-ordinates are stored by a mobile device. In the second half of the experience, the walker retraces their steps, layering their own experiential memory within media triggered by the stored locations. The audio and written material in the piece was collected from regions around the world at risk of disappearing. These include emptying Latvian villages, the sinking wetlands of Louisiana and the rising edge of the Tunisian Sahara. A particular affect of critical awareness of planetary presence is produced as an event at the interface of the

• The new edition of this project is now available to purchase - information available here

Selected for The Digital Dozen: Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards 2017 by Columbia University

“Ideas about maps, memory and environmental change unite the disparate locations of Speakman’s text, as do the reader’s physical movements between smartphone GPS markers. It would be easy for a work such as this to become gimmicky, or weighed down by technical finickiness, but Speakman manages to use the grammar of Google maps as a structural constraint, presenting the reader with a narrative territory both fixed to the world and intangibly layered across it”-Times Literary Supplement

Created in collaboration with Tineke De Meyer

Created in collaboration with Sarah Anderson, guest vocals by Akai Hirume.

Audio walk and choreography for two participants travelling through centre of Saitama. Created for Saitama Triennale 2016.

“Songs For a Thousand Duets is an experiential sound installation, in which two people walk around the city listening to the sound, music, and voices on their headphones. Based on research in the city of Omiya, Duncan Speakman and Sarah Anderson created music and sound sources that are linked to the landscapes of the city. Speakman describes the work as “a musical composition and choreography for a city called Omiya.” The sounds heard from headphones intercepting the external world are music, poetic text, and simple instructions for walking the city. The music is lyrical and melancholic. A certain scene within a landscape is cut away from its context, making the line between reality and fiction ambiguous. At the end of the scene, there is a sequence when the listeners are instructed to make certain hand gestures in turns while the other watches. This can be described a choreography made for the two participants, while at the same time, the pair walking from East to West starting at Omiya Station are like street performers. Based on this experience, when the participants look at the city around them while keeping the “observer” perspective, they will feel as if the “normal, everyday people” walking by are characters in a story. Given the framework of walking the city while listening to sounds, participants are forced to look carefully at what is happening in an ordinary scene. Moreover, depending on the relationship with their partner, the weather and the time of the day, and other physical factors, the appearance of the city around them will change significantly, and so will their emotions. Speakman and Anderson’s deliberately woven sequence of sounds is a device that swiftly transforms the city into a dissimilated place.” - Mariko Mori, curator Saitama Triennale 2016.

A short series of augmented video works created for La Monnaie / De Munt Opera, Brussels. Watching video in situ at sites around the venue, singers appears from inside the building and begin singing arias, in your ears the sound of the city fades away until you can only hear the singers voice echoing around the empty streets. The sound of their singing defining and highlighting the architecture of the city.

A music composition for a shifting landscape, combined with a documentary mixture of found sounds and stories from the landscape you pass while travelling on the tram. Controlled by GPS positioning, the sounds and voices resonate with the locations they are heard in, marking out a timeline of the history and reconstruction of the area.

Created for the Young Tram in Guangzhou, presented as the launch of the UK-China Year Of Cultural Exchange in the South China region.

Created and performed in collaboration with Sarah Anderson, Jessica Macdonald and Alice Tatton-Brown.

“it’s the clock on the wall of the observation deck, the one that we tied to home, and it’s the moment when i look at it, and it’s so far ahead of what i know, it’s so far ahead of me”

An intimate sci-fi opera that explores the real and fictional possibilities of terraforming. Like a film without images, fusing transmitted voices, visceral electronics and live strings, it asks what would happen if we could start all over again?

Sound design for ‘Bildraum’ by Atelier Bildraum

Winner of Total Theatre Award for Physical/Visual Performance 2016

All photos - https://www.atelierbildraum.com/

Created in collaboration with Sarah Anderson and Tineke De Meyer

Created in collaboration with Sarah Anderson and Tom Abba

“Book becomes story. Documents from the book unfold, like devotional pictures in a bible: ghosts from the past. I move between the living and the dead. I hover between image and reality . . . Someone has thought this up, someone has made this, just for you” – Pieter Van Bogaert

Collaboration with Emilie Grenier on contribution to the publication 34 Bristols.

the category is

Created in collaboration wit Sarah Anderson, Ágata Pinho, Cristiana Rocha, Filipa Fonseca Sphiza, Raquel Rua, Teresa Santos.

Sarah Anderson A combination of live performers and a 30 channel sound system creating a cinematic narrative for the Serralves Villa in Porto.

Created in collaboration wit Sarah Anderson and Emilie Grenier

“Whether we were experiencing the performance or being the performers became blurred … a smile remained on my face long after the music had stopped. This carefully choreographed meander of the streets made for a bewitching evening, the haunting music a brand new city soundtrack” – Bristol Culture

Sound design and development of ‘Shifts’ by Sita Calvert-Ennals

An alternate version of Billennium Square (after Ballard) (2018)

It is a provocation to audiences to imagine the future of their city.

Designed specifically for areas under construction or redevelopment, the audience are led by performers through vacant lots and buildings to share what is planned for the area, and what the utopian and dystopian alternatives might be. Before the audiences’s eyes, a glowing vision of the future appears, the collective imagining of those present.

Created in collaboration with Sarah Anderson

‘A deliberate slap in the face to the flashmob phenomena . . . it reshapes the cultural landscape.’ – Paul Currion

As If It Were The Last Time was the first subtlemob ever created. It was about celebrating the present, about home, belonging and loss. A snapshot of the world around you, a chance to savour the moment, and make new connections with the people and the place surrounding you. This is no requiem, this a celebratory slow dance, a chance to present in the world, and to see it with fresh eyes.

Audiences guided through the city by a performer who remixes the sound of the city in realtime and transmits it to their headphones.

Originally commission by Breathing Space, Arnolfini Bristol.

Presented at Mountain Standard Time Festival, Calgary https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/project/sounds-from-above-the-ground

Tramway, Glasgow

GreenRoom, Manchester

ROAM Festival of Walking, Loughborough

A series of audio walks around Redfern in Sydney(Aus). Each walk an intimate portrait of a resident created through interview, narrative and musical score.

Originally commissioned by Performance Space.

Created in collaboration with Sneha Solanki

An independent state was declared while sailing in international waters. The territorial claim was of the electromagnetic and acoustic spectrum. People wishing to register citizenship were interviewed while the electro and acoustic waves around them were remixed alongside their voice. This peformative process was recorded on to analog cassette in realtime creating a unique passport and sound work.

Originally commissioned by Amino for Navigate Live at the Baltic, Gateshead.

A trilogy of installations created as part of the Clark Digital Arts Award at the Watershed, Bristol.

Document: Conversations picked up by microphones hidden in the public cafe were fed through voice recognition software and instantly printed out by a dot matrix printer located in the same cafe.

Dialogue: Text messages submitted by audience were combined with each other using random algorithms and then vocalised by three computers using speech synthesis.

Interactive documentary installation commissioned by PVA Labs, Bridport. Interview material with residents of Dorset are played back alternately by each computer, the conversations focus on the history and future of local dialects. Audiences can move pebbles in water tanks to manipulate the sonic characteristics of the recordings and typographic animations.

AV installation in a flight simulator. Treating temporality and frequency of audio as a spatial environment that can be navigated. Created in collaboration with Alex Bradley, Andy Gracie,Jessica Marlowe and Matt Mawford. Originally commissioned by InBetweenTime in 2000.

Presented at: Arnolfini, Bristol; ISEA 2002, Nagoya; CityLab, Mexico City.