Listening Retreat

In partnership with Richard Povall at Aune Head Arts I am planning a four day 'listening retreat' on Dartmoor, provisionally fron 15-18 May 2008. The aim of the course will be to allow participants to explore in depth the soundscape of Dartmoor. More details to follow. If you'd like to register interest please let me know.

Creative use of sound course – Islington, 22 November 2007

Thanks to all who attended this course at Islington Ecology Centre, and for the positive feedback. As always it was good to meet people working in environmental education who want to explore the use of sound in their work. Thanks also to Becca Laurence from Sonic Arts Network for providing introduction and context from an arts perspective.

The next Environment Trainers Network hosted training day will be at the Create Centre in Bristol on 18 April 2008.

Listening to Regents Park with the RSPB

Catriona Corfield - education officer for the RSPB's Wild in the Parks project in London - who attended one of my Creative Use of Sound courses in Birmingham has just published the results of a sound based project in Regents Park. She linked up with the British Library sound archive wildlife archivist and their local City Learning Centre oversummer to produce little photo stories with children from a local estate. Click here to view the results.

Photo stories can be created with free piece of software from Microsoft called, appropriately enough, Photostory 3, which can be downloaded here. It's simplicity itself to use, but you do need Windows Media Player 10 or above to run it.

Water’s Edge, Plymouth Soundwalks

For this years Sonic Arts Network annual Expo I ran a series of overnight soundwalks in Plymouth City Centre.

All walks started from Smeaton's Tower on the Hoe, the first at 6:07pm the last at 4pm. Attendance's varied, with the most popular being the one straight after the Evan Parker concert attended by over thirty people. The least popular was, not suprisingly, the 4am one, with just me and Sonic Arts director Phil sitting on a bench listening to the fishing boats go out and having a very odd conversation with a young chap who was a tad `tired and emotional'.



Best listening? Probably having the group of thirty people sitting in silence, in darkness, in an ampitheatre next to the sea in the old Tinside Lido complex listening to the sound of waves and distant ships. Or the rippling of sails on racing yachts in the early evening.

Walk your ears

In May I worked with artist Martin Prothero on a project called Walk Your Ears run by Dartmoor based contemporary arts organisation Aune Head Arts. The results have just been published online here.

Creative Use of Sound in Environmental Education – Islington, 27 September 2007

On 27 September I'm running a course called Creative Use of Sound in Environmental Education for the Environment Trainers Network. For course agenda and notes please visit this web page.

This will be the third of these I've done, the previous two being in Plymouth and Birmingham. The course is based around my work with Sonic Arts Network and the wonderful Sonic Postcards Project and aims to give countryside staff an introduction to listening, recording and creatively processing sounds collected from their local area.

Responses to the courses have been very positive and only the day I received a link from a participant to a set of videos done by children in Regents park using some of the techniques I'd shared on the Birmingham course, particularly the use of Photostory 3 to simply put sound and photo's together in Windows.