mailout sound education 24


FEATURE Soundlines


Jackie Calderwood and Jane Harwood explore the Mendip Hills with sound


“When I got on the hilltop there was very long grass, I was excited.


It was very wet, muddy and cold


but still was fun. My walk was


amazing, fantastic and I felt free.


I felt the music


was elegant, scary and calm.


The place and


music made me feel excited,


amazed and freedom.”


Strata Collective are a Somerset based group of experienced artists who seek to find new ways of telling stories, connecting people with the living landscape, uncovering shared and personal journeys through familiar places. We use G.P.S. (satellite tracking) with mobile technology to bring media arts together with the outdoor experience.


Soundlines encourages new ways of seeing through investigative, interactive responses to the historic landscape of Sand Point – a stunning finger of the Mendip Hills which divides the Severn Estuary from the Bristol Channel, with spectacular views out to sea and across to the Welsh hills.


Strata sought to use outdoor and cross curricular learning to broker a relationship between students and their environment, in a dynamic process of engagement with their local landscape. Primary children from years 5 and 6 have worked with creative media diploma students (Year 10) from two secondary schools, the young docs crew from Bristol’s young film-making network, eShed, and 10 artists brought in by Strata. Through a series of introductory sessions, specialist workshops and field trips, students have been engaged in developing their own


creative response to the layered landscape of Sand Point whilst also learning and sharing skills in video, animation, music and mediascape.


Soundlines culminated in a celebratory community event in April, launching films, portable mediascape and the website which aims to collate the learning experience through interactive walk-traces, compositions, animations and student feedback.


Strata Collective grew from a collaboration between pervasive media, music and the historical narrative of landscape.


Previous projects offered a choice of site-specific music to the mediascape user. From this, the Strata musicians began to consider how mediascape could operate with music as the main content, with sounds mapped to topography, leaving the user ‘free to explore’.


The evocative power of music is not an unfamiliar concept – we are often bombarded by soundtracks and theme tunes which can add (or distract) from visual image. Most people could name a piece of music ‘inspired’ by a certain landscape or its associated mythology.


What interests Strata Collective is the union of site-specific music and ambulant technology. We work with the detail, the peculiarities that define a place. Just as oral or cultural narratives of any given location are not linear recounts of historic time- lines, site-specific music does not need to be rhythm bound.


A Soundline walk is as unpredictable as the weather – it can be altered as much by GPS drift, or unexpected marginal zones where sounds overlap, as it is by the whim of the walker.


Sound generating mediascape works well with pieces of fluid, layered music, that behave much as a walker would – stopping, retracing, responding to topography, imagining stories. Rather than working with the existing sounds of the landscape – as in other forms of soundwalk practice – we encourage interpretation and creative expression in the generation of participatory, improvisational musical content. The artist has great scope for matching the intent of sound to the atmosphere of setting.


The walking of a place in all weathers, plus the investigation of narrative and history, is a fascinating precursor to the creation of site- specific work.


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