Our session with Salomé involved first thinking about our world as having a sonic design, and then looking at how we can think about the sound environments we design as spaces themselves.

Elison and I went to the Imperial War Museum in Elephant and Castle to record our sonic environment. We recorded lots of material and then came back and composed them into a 3 minute audio of the room.

As I was walking around the museum I was thinking about the sound these objects once contained: the death and destruction they once incurred. And, the difference between the violence then and the silence now – how have we removed the sound so completely from these objects which are so far from silent?
Recording a silent room here, then, feels impossible. Not only because of the human activity, the footsteps and chatter, but because those sounds are still happening, and can’t be removed by freezing an object in time in a colonial museum – where we see but don’t hear these weapons of destruction.

Composing a soundscape of a room containing only the sound of people in the museum, the echoes through its huge atrium, footsteps and voices became a prompt to think about how this space wasn’t really silent. Through listening to that silence and listening to that particular space, we discover echoes of things that aren’t included – and are therefore present by omission within a critical decolonial listening practice.

Hearing footsteps and voices echo around the cavernous space of a building likely built on colonialism prompted me consider what went into building a space like this. Through listening, we get to grips with the kind of space we are in and what it means to be there and to benefit from it.

Have a listen to an extract of the composed recording here: