So my project is finally finished and has been showcased! The showcase evening was fantastic; the turnout was great and my piece got a good response from the audience. Like I have said before the showcase was on the Thursday 12th December and started at 7pm. On the Tuesday two friends and I took the surround sound system up to the gallery and set the speakers up. On the night, the piece sounded fantastic in the room and I’m really pleased with how the evening went.
As for the piece itself it is altogether 25 minutes long. I’m happy with this as my original target was 30 minutes. The piece is made up of three sections – Cathedral, Town and Evenings.
I felt it would make sense to include the Cathedral in my piece as it is a huge part of Lincoln. Ergo, Cathedral is all about the sounds and feel of the Cathedral. With the recordings I have, I tried to mimic these sounds to make an audience feel like they were there in the Cathedral. The section itself is quite eerie sounding but I feel this is a correct representation of the Cathedral as it is a huge open space filled with hundreds of sounds, sounds which can not always be explained as to where they have come from. Throughout Cathedral I experimented with the use of ambient drones and wrote a piece of ambient music for towards the end of the piece – its hard to explain but these are the sounds I imagined while listening to the Cathedral and feel they compliment the soundscape well. As Cathedral comes to an ends the sounds of Town slowly creep in. Town is a journey
through the busy city life of Lincoln – sounds included in Town are the trains, traffic and the people of course. I layered quite a few recordings for Town to emphasise the busyness and hectic rush of Lincoln. Towards the end of Town, the sounds of the public slowly fade out and the sound of traffic comes in – this is again to show the traffic rush that happens towards the end of the day. Town then falls silent with the sound of distant traffic. This is when the final piece, Evenings begins. Evenings begins with the sound of distant students coming into Lincoln for a night out. Again, I layered sounds of groups of students to show the impact of the student nightlife on the city, i.e. the loudness of students is something many complain about. The sound of students moving through the night plays out for 3 or so minutes and slowly draws to an end. The last 5 minutes of Evenings is the sound of the city centre and the sound of distant traffic – as nothing particularly exciting was happening sound wise I decided to write an experimental piece of ambient music for this section, to draw the audience into the final minutes of the piece.
My idea behind this project was to do a sound interpretation of 24 hours in Lincoln. I personally feel I was successful in doing so and am very pleased with the end project.
