'Hebden Water' & 'A Year in the Garden': a multi-component audio project
- Submitting institution
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Leeds Beckett University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 47
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- National Trust’s Gibson Mill, Yorkshire; Axis Art Centre, Crewe
- Brief description of type
- Sound and photography installation
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is a practice-as-research multi-component output combining two publicly-exhibited soundscapes and a journal article that draws upon my field-based recording-practice. The soundscapes are A Year in the Garden and Hebden Water, of which the latter was produced for a collaborative installation with the land artist Trudi Entwistle.
Resulting from five-years of field-work, the portfolio is concerned with how sound might be used to bring people and the natural world closer together in order to raise awareness of and increase sympathy for UK wildlife. The work investigated which natural-world sounds might be recorded during times when we listen the least, during the cold, dark months, when the weather deteriorates and people retreat indoors, becoming further removed from our local natural world. By concentrating on sounds found on the fringes, where people and wildlife co-exist, Ratcliff offered listeners unfamiliar sounds from familiar places, connecting humans to wildlife through audio. This work also became an investigation into the location, species, weather, equipment, field-craft knowledge, and skills required to record specific wildlife sounds whilst in close-proximity to urban environments. In contrast to many natural-world recordings, Ratcliff’s soundscapes forefront place-sounds, not just images, diverging from the soundtrack-tropes of voice-overs and orchestral-music in wildlife documentaries.
The soundscapes were experienced by over 1500 visitors to the National Trust’s Gibson Mill, Yorkshire and Axis Art Centre, Crewe. Audiences reported being astonished by the array of local wildlife of which they were previously unaware, praising the clarity of the recordings and commenting that in the future they would listen more-intently to their own environments and local wildlife.
In the accompanying journal article, Ratcliff proposes a theoretic framework for urban-wildlife sound-recording, arguing for extensive durational place-based explorations, field-craft adaptations, location and species knowledge, and precision noise-removal and editing to produce composed-soundscapes from these challenging recording locations.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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