All sat frozen and watched the screen.

Code is used when secrets are sent.

Three for a dime, the young peddler cried.

They told wild tales to frighten him.

The core material for this project began with a selection from the Harvard Sentences, and then other materials including phrases from the Modified Rhyme Test, and panphones were added. This collage was then read aloud to an Android tablet and converted to a new text using Google speech to text software. The new text was read to the tablet and a second conversion was performed. That resulting text was then edited and had punctuation added.

For this iteration of the project, as a piece for radio, the source materials were reedited and rerecorded with contributions from a number of different voices. These were then layered and combined into a three-part sequence, where the sections are in a ratio of 4:5:2. Repeated beats and rhythms were used as a base, including a reference to the song Tom’s Diner, used in testing lossiness in the development of the MP3 file format. Questions of signal and noise, of message sent and message received, of the relationship of different voices to who and what is heard run through the text. It calls out to the listener, there is a message here. Can you hear? Can you tell what it is?

Thanks for their vocal contributions to:

Dante Lorenzo

Veronica Fazzio Welf

Sue Coulson

Shelley Hodgson

Thanks to Lucinda Guy and Chris Booth at Soundart Radio for inviting me to work on this.

MARK LEAHY is a writer and artist. From Ireland, he now lives in Devon. He works with textual practices and performance, using constraints and structuring rules, to cross or question category and genre divisions. Recent projects include ‘9×9: a set of poems under constraint’ (ArtsandCultureExeter, 2020), ‘Breath Pieces’ (Glasgow, June 2018); ‘telling time’ (Jamboree, Dartington, June 2018); ’threaded insert’ (Plymouth Art Weekender 2017; Cardiff, May 2018). Poems have appeared in Tentacular, Stride, Freaklung, Curly Mind, Other Room Anthology 8; Swatches was published by Acts of Language (2009), and Subject to Gesture by Dock Road Press (2017). Critical publications include essays in C21 Literature, Open Letter, Performance Research Journal and Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. He teaches part-time at University of Plymouth and Falmouth University, and works with a number of regional arts organisations. markleahy.net.

Ayn Rand’s highly dubious novel ‘The Fountainhead’ has become a source of morbid fascination for us since entering lockdown – forming the basis for a research pathology driven at least in part by an urge to inoculate against certain worlds that could (re)emerge post-Covid. Firmly embedded within the (arguably impoverished) neo-liberal literary canon, ‘The Fountainhead’ is nonetheless something of an embarrassment for many of those who actually live by its values. Even for many of its proponents, the novel is just ‘too much’: Rand does not hold back from not only depicting but outright embracing a brutal vision of sociality governed by self-interest and extreme egotism. The question we ask ourselves is, how can anyone like this? The popularity of the novel seems unabated despite its unbearably didactic tone, flatlining dialogue and overstated rhetoric. In order to at least move towards resolving this deadlock, in our radio broadcast we will be ripping this text to shreds – via absurd electronically affected characterisation, O.T.T sonic scenography and unreliable narration blurring the line between where the (awful) text ends and our possibly unqualified dismantling of it begins. The whole enterprise – if providing no concrete answers regarding where to go from here, might at least provide some indication of what to avoid.

Anna Danielewicz

Anna Danielewicz (b. Koszalin, 1991) is an artist and writer based in Glasgow.Coming from a background in performance, her practice is now rooted mostly in writing and the workshop format. Her most recent projects include Lip, Belly, Foot at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop and Voun Town at the Edinburgh Art Festival. Anna is a member of the programming committee of Market Gallery. She is currently working on a prose fiction project to do with the language of teenagers, and the problem of translation.

Max Syedtollan

Max Syedtollan (b. London, 1994) is an artist-composer based in Glasgow. In 2019 he was selected as one of Sound and Music’s ‘New Voices’ and exhibited work in the Venice Biennale, as well as releasing his second album of DIY chamber music on Glasgow label GLARC (supported by the Arts Council). His pieces have been broadcast on BBC Radios 4 and 6, and performed at institutions such as Cafe Oto and Snape Maltings. In 2020 he is working on a new moving image piece exploring the overlap between history and fiction.

It was autumn 2019.   Britain on the eve of political upheaval, is split over the impending separation from Europe.  Against this shifting background I wound my way on foot down the long valley to the Tamar river that separates Devon and Cornwall, and flows into those vast waters of the Sound.  Two bridges placed side by side span the river at this point.  I intended to cross the water via the pedestrian walkway on the road bridge. But I had to be quick.  Ironically it was about to close that day for long term engineering works.  Vertigo 282 is the soundtrack of my passage across, the narrative constantly shifting, slipping from action to inaction, from reality to fantasy, silence to noisiness, and like life it is on-going (until someone switches it off).

Sue Coulson is a visual fine artist using sound as part of her practice. 

As radio programmes can time travel, this show comes from Radiocamp, Bodensee, in the year 3019.
The inclusive, intergalactic nature of the camp is expressed through the many languages, human and otherwise, that tell this story.

Created by Haya Al Sawaf, Henning Luetje, Lara Possler, Lars Schmitz, Lerato Phiri, Loic Rodrigues, Luca Piparo, Luuk, Max, Reyhan Mutlu, Silke Bauer, Susanne Bayer at Radiocamp. Produced by Lucinda Guy at Soundart Radio.

Plugholes is a radio drama by sisters Catherine and Lucinda Guy. They have been collaborating all their lives, making up silly plays and songs.
A woman embarks on a journey down the plughole with her bath water, becoming a pirate when she reaches the sea. As she is tossed around on the storms of capitalism, parenthood, environmental activism, and animal exploitation, the needle of her moral compass spins.

Credits:
Written, recorded and mixed by Catherine and Lucinda Guy, january 2019
at The Worm/Klangendum Studio, Rotterdam.
Produced by Lukas Simonis

with;
Lady – Catherine Guy.
Seahorse – Lucinda Guy.
Narrator – Nienke Terpsma.
Committee member – Rob Hamelijnck.

Additional music and roles by RE#SISTER:
Zeynep Aslan.
Marte Boomsma.
Mariëtte Groot.
Inge Hoonte.
Tamara van Suylekom.
Melanie Rieback.

If we could hear the voice of nature, what would it say? And could humans use technology to strengthen their connection with nature?

Starting with the music and letting this guide the story, the Assisi Machine is a thrilling murder mystery which puts electronic sound technology at the heart of the action.

The show features three drone music sound collages which help move the plot along.

Parts of the play are written in dramatic verse, a favourite form of Shakespeare and Goethe, which is almost unknown in recent times.

Script and poetry by Kerry Priest

Sound design by Tin Moth

Actors:

Dr Farley – Antonia Eastwood

2nd Academic & Dr Hamilton – Tom Eastwood

Seagull & Raven– Tom Eastwood

Reporter – Linsey Fryatt

Blackbird – Linsey Fryatt

Contact:
kerrypriest.com
@kes_priest

This piece is a sound meditation on impact of water; how sounds of water affect humans, and how human sound effect the aquatic ecosystem.

Using interviews, field recordings and archive footage (including from GM’s ‘Futurama’ exhibit of the New York World Fair of 1939), Bodies of Water looks at how we evolve and progress, and whether the tide of development we’ve been sold is actually taking us toward a destination we want to arrive at.

Produced and mixed by Laura Irving (Laurairving.co.uk). Mastered by Jean Paul DuBock

Broadcasting as spell casting – sending out our intentions into the atmosphere, allowing them to fall where they need to, affect who they may, and communicate our deeper desires, even when wrapped in other text, and encoded into radio waves or digital data.

At Radio V&A  – an evening event at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, February 2016 – we invited people to think about their true messages, whilst reading and recording other texts. These texts, together with sine waves selected to stimulate change in the world, form sonic sigils, carriers for our plans and desires.

Thanks to all the contributors who attended our workshop, and to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The curiosity overcomes you.

An audio exploration into learning the ancient skill of flint knapping.

Led by our ears & intuition we listen into the echoes of a shared material past.

“What we’ve learn’t and what we’ve found,

What we know and what we are,

And where we’re from

….you can hear what it’s made of.”

Alice Armstrong & Ben Fielding.