Sound and The Urban Environment

This exhibition and symposium explored our auditory encounter with the urban environment and asked how we might plan for the soundscape of our futures cities, homes and dwellings.

It asked in what way can the soundscape and the practice of listening inform and make meaningful the experience of living within urban environments. Do we need to revisit our relationship to the sound of cities, if so what changes should be made? What is the role of the artist and other professionals in considering alternative approaches to listening as well as helping to celebrate, re-imagine and regenerate the spaces, buildings and institutions of the urban soundscape. The sound works presented in the exhibition brought together a diverse range of artists whose practices address ways in which we encounter, explore and navigate the sounds of our urban environments.

Danny Bright’s Ghosting Ruins explores the multiple sonic temporalities and auditory heritage of industrial ruins. Paul Garcia Stone’s Nunhead: From Dawn to Dusk charts the intersections of industrialization with the sounds of the natural world, where freight train whistles, fox calls and bird song coalesce. Ingrid Plum’s The Lightship is a response to the architecture of a decommissioned lightship in Kent. The up flow of air by Conall Gleeson and j Milo Taylor is a composition made from recordings of the flow of air through the scaffold structure of St Peter’s Church that is directly opposite the Onca Gallery.

The artists featured in this exhibition are Danny Bright Ghosting Ruin (UK) Christopher De Laurenti Mardi Gras (USA) Leona Jones On Edge (UK) Joseph Young 6 Families of Noise (UK) Paula Garcia Stone Nunhead: From Dusk to Dawn Melissa Deerson Dawn Chorus (Australia) bunú(Aidan Deery & Matilde Meireles) Correspondence; Transition 2 (Northern Ireland) Sindhu Thirumala Composition for Temple Speakers (India) Laura Cooper A Hunt (UK) Mari Ohno Floating Sounds and Speaking Clock (Japan) Kevin Logan De Zwaan (UK) Eduardo Abrantes Two in Transition (Portugal) Ingrid Plum Lightship (UK) Johannah Hallsten The Onlookers Doubt (Sweden) Linda O’Keefe Sarah’s Song, May’s Song (Ireland) Conall Gleeson/Jonathan Milo Taylor the up flow of air (Ireland /UK)