Tim Meacham

Soundmarks; Art in Romney Marsh, September 2013 (commissioned artist).

Installation connecting the interior of a medieval church with its exterior environment, through live sound, using ST350 field microphone and Feonic transducers

This installation originally installed a medieval church building, connects the interior of a building with its exterior environment through live sound using field microphones and transducers. This allows the innate acoustic properties of the structure itself to be utilised, effectively making the building into a speaker. 

The listener is immersed in the sound of the surrounding environment. The sound is non-localised making the source hard to locate. The fact that the sound is live is important as it reflects how we (and buildings) experience sound, as a constant ever changing, multi dimensional auditory space.

The idea explores auditory spatial connection and in part references and reverses the historic role of certain buildings as “soundmarks “ through the outward broadcasting of the sound of bells, whistles, siren etc... Soundmarks are the auditory equivalent of landmarks defining an acoustic territory and historically as an aid to social cohesion through imbuing a sense of place, order, time to local communities. The dockyard would have held many overlapping acoustic territories, at the same time containing sub-territories where a particular activity would produce localised sound connecting and orientating the listener through association.