Soundwalk locations:
Shapinsay (12 Oct), Stronsay (15 Oct), North Ronaldsay (18 Oct) and Sanday (26 Oct)
As part of the From Peat Spade to Tangle Trade industrial heritage project, we held a series of four free workshops exploring the sounds of industrial spaces in Orkney’s North Isles. To meet the wider project aims of celebrating, researching and investigating the places and the people of Orkney’s industrial heritage in the North Isles, artist Amy Beeston and archaeologist Ben Elliot were joined by 23 islanders in Shapinsay, Stronsay, Sanday and North Ronaldsay to walk, to listen and to discuss the present, past and future soundscapes of our islands.
All four workshops included the key elements of soundwalking, listening and discussion, but were tailored in advance for each specific island context by means of collaborative discussion and accompanied site visits with local heritage experts who were recruited as volunteers to the project. In each case, we hoped for the best-case scenario: a fine weather day allowing the group to remain outdoors for the whole session. However, it being the autumn storm season, we also made contingency plans for bad weather, and set up a streambox in advance. The streambox works similarly to a webcam, and broadcasts the soundscape (rather than the picture) of the surrounding environment, ensuring that the surrounding local sounds could be heard inside the workshop venue, should the weather prove too cold, wet or windy to be outdoors.
Our sessions began outside with walking segments interspersed with discussions about listening, the variability in our hearing acuity and our overarching tendency to name the sound sources present in the environment. We discussed sound categorisation strategies used in soundscape ecology research and learned to identify geophonic, biophonic, anthropophonic and technophonic sound sources. We used an assessment technique from the soundscape regulatory framework which asks a group of people to individually rate the surrounding auditory environment on a set of eight attributes: pleasant, annoying, eventful, uneventful, vibrant, chaotic, calm and monotonous. The varied responses in the group highlighted the subjective nature of sonic experience, and made for some very interesting debate about what we could and couldn’t hear, what sounds we felt belonged in or were missing from a place, and about the successes and failures of the assessment regimes themselves.
Each island context brought up new perspectives of our industrial heritage that are not often met in larger urban settings where the focus might have been on mills, forges and factories. In Shapinsay we first spoke about the changes in the sounds of farming through the generations, and about the ongoing electrification of vehicles used on the island. This discussion continued throughout the isles. In Stronsay we also discussed the sounds of the processes that would have been associated with the herring trade, and the sheer number of people living nearby one another. In Sanday we spoke of textile work, and noted too how the sounds of transport (particularly from the airfield) act as a central clock for the island. In North Ronaldsay, we discussed the sounds of the kelp and seaweed industries, and the changes in the nighttime soundscape due to the electrification of the island itself.
The soundwalks were well received across the four North Isles, and the format of the workshop proved to be an engaging experience where the islanders, as experts of their local soundscape, could share their knowledge and experience intergenerationally. Discussion was lively and informative, sharing memories of past industries, appreciating the present sonic environment, and imagining the future soundscapes of our islands.
Project Partners: The Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology (ORCA) and the North Isles Landscape Partnership Scheme (NILPS)
