Echoes:
reimagining industrial heritage sites through music-making and soundscaping in the UK and Norway
Echoes is a practice-led research project exploring music-making in reconverted industrial heritage sites as ways to create a dialogue between past and present.
The study of music in historical sites has been mostly focused on utilising musical repertoire which is contemporary to the original sites to better understand the human experience in that time and place. Our project aims at understanding how improvised music and digital soundscapes negotiate their position within a social, historical and cultural landscape through their behaviour in space.
Live music together with the use of recorded voices from the past and digitally created soundscapes will allow audiences to interact with self in two different time dimensions, past and present. We will observe which levels of reciprocity and various modes of encountering might exist between the music and sound and the places or spaces in which it is encountered.
We will develop a series of live music performances and sound installations in two reconverted industrial sites in two European cities that share a common post-war industrial past – Stavanger and Coventry – which will allow us to examine how music and sound can change audience perception of reconverted industrial spaces, their social and cultural meaning, and inform their interaction with these historical sites.
The music will be provided by local musicians and spoken word artists and the soundscape installations, incorporating recordings of voices from local habitants remembering the industrial past of their respective city, will use using sound triggered motion sensors which interact with the movement of audiences inside the space.
Concepts such as musical mythscapes (Bennett 2002) and musical topophilia (Bolderman 2020) show us how music triggers the imagination and informs our perception of place, often mystifying it and associating it with specific music genres, artists or performances.
Our project aims at understanding how contemporary music negotiates its position within a social, historical, and cultural landscape through its behaviour in space.
Echoes is an ethnography of place through music-making. As an “echo is nothing if not historical (…) a reflection of time passed” (Smith 2015:55), this project will also allow researchers to investigate the historical, economical and sociological aspects that inform each site and, importantly, the ways in which they have been used and perceived by both artists and audiences.
Echoes will integrate local musicians and spoken word artists into the creative process of the project, as ways to promote the dialogue between local talent and their respective industrial heritage and cultural landscape, over the three years of duration of the project.
At an initial stage, residents will be invited for workshops/focus groups on their memories and relationship with the sites. These will be an integral part of the process of music, spoken word and sound creation.
The curational team from each site will also have a crucial role in the design and delivery of the activities as they will be an important part in reinterpreting the sites that they curate. This will also be an opportunity for each site to reflect upon their curational practices and public engagement strategies.
Throughout the duration of the project, there will also be moments for exchanging experiences between both sites, which will promote networking and international collaboration, but crucially might encourage future partnerships both at creative and curatorial levels.