Works commissioned for Sampling Sounds of Coventry's Future

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Sarah Farmer - Godivari Lost and Found

'An object is found. Wood, strings, a curved hollow acoustically resonant chamber. Some kind of sound making device is likely, due to its structure. We will analyse and decode data stored within it with Multi Dimensional Fourier Analysis technology to establish it’s identity'.

What information could an object store? If an object kept an echo of every sound it played or passed through, what might that sound like? If it kept a record of every person that touched it, a ‘ghost’, what story would that tell? This work is an exploration of sound, music and culture in Coventry and the possibilities and failings of data storage, from the perspective of a found violin. 

Natsu - Sampling the Future Sound of Coventry

An audio-visual installation consisting of three short films with soundtracks, each focussing on one aspect of Coventry: Transport & Industry, People & Communities and Buildings & Environment.

The pieces are designed to be played alongside each other to create a sense of interaction. Soundtracks will be generated from samples/field recordings collected from around Coventry with a theme to explore and predict the future sounds of the City. The project will utilise a variety of vintage and modern equipment and methods, including sampling, tape loops, found sounds, field recordings, processing and a range of electronic instruments and effects.

Where will the sounds of the future take us?

Adele Reed - Small Folk Found Sounds

We want to think, in a literal way, about the future sounds of the city through the ears of the next generation, as well as begin to consider the ways in which our young folk interpret and experience their aural worlds. Within the project we’d love to encourage an active listening in young children, broadening their horizons of the expansive world of sound and their sensory awarenesses and attention in general. The project is intended to be fun and very playful, we’d encourage performance, considerations of the surreality and 'weirdness' of the world, role-play, and nonsense! Whilst also trying to gently highlight to children the changes and conditions of the world around them and the importance of noticing, challenging and reflecting in their own very unique and inspiring ways.

Jitey Samra and Tarla Patel - North Side of the City

North side of the city focuses on the sound and stories of Stoney Stanton road in Coventry. Contemporary Visual Artist Tarla Patel works with Jitey Samra, oral histories curator and activist of South Asian voices to create a soundscape and moving image of a city space that has been overlooked and forgotten. Tarla has grown up on Stoney Stanton Road and Jitey has close connections to the road too. The road has been a part of the fabric of Coventry, a main through fare for pre-war munitions factories, sea cadets, as well as post war migration from the former colonies. The stories of how this road has played a role in both Tarla and Jitey’ lives as second generation British South Asians and Coventrians, with change and time, will feature in the project. This project will use sound and spoken memory to provide an understanding of place based cultures, amongst the digital noise of our twenty-first century lives, with echoes of the past. Juxtaposed to Stoney Stanton Road is Jitey’s contemporary home at High Cross on the Fosse Way Watling Street (A5) the centre of Roman England, where the past and present collide to give change to an ever-evolving future soundscape and visual narrative.

Iain Emsley - Unheard City

As we walk around cities, devices and networks are making themselves known at frequencies that humans cannot hear. These devices allow us to connect to networks, such as WiFi; to be connected to networks, such as wearables or smart homes; or might be present but refuse us knowledge about them. What type of device or connection might be heard? Who develops them? Using a mobile app developed for the project to capture samples of these signals, this project explores these digital futures that are being constructed around us and to begin hearing them through sonifications.

Laura Nyahuye - Echoing Sound, Breadcrumbs of Memory

How can we track the transmission of cultural memory in diverse migrant communities in Coventry through sound and the poetic word spoken aloud? What does it sound like as cultural memory is handed over from generation to generation in migrant communities? If we imagine memory as a breadcrumb trail that extends the trajectories of migration reaching back into the past and is left for future generations to retrace, listening produces a layering of aural footprints as one generation plants their feet in the steps of previous ones and points to the journeys of future generations. This work will take the form of a live spoken-word performance, followed by a public conversation about sound and cultural memory.