Thursday 1st November the group’s concrete soundscapes were played from the Ellen Terry Building in Coventry onto Jordan Well. The crisp November evening collaborated with us to draw in small groups of listeners who were intrigued, baffled or interested in the sounds, even those passers by who did not stop and listen paused in their journey to establish where the odd noises were coming from. I noticed that while most people who did stop only started for 2-3 minutes (about the length of one piece) a number of others stayed for 30-40 minutes even though they did not know anyone studying on the programme. I was asked by one of these individuals if it was a live performance and how the sounds were made. Wandering around the area I was able to hear the echos of the pieces drifting several streets away.

One passer by asked me if it was “Art”, when I asked them what they thought they commented that they didn’t understand it, I thought that this was interesting; what was there to understand? For those of us who can hear, we hear sounds all day everyday, most of the time these sounds are expected so we don’t listen. By placing unexpected sounds back into the environment passers by were encouraged to listen.

I was disappointed hearing my own piece in this environment, it had lost much of the presence and layering that I had been trying to develop during the production and mixing. I had mixed it in a controlled environment and all of my testing had been in enclosed spaces. I had used a similar process to sound for film, but this was an unconventional environment to exhibit the work. Following my conventional instincts, what has worked before, led me down the wrong path. The process to create work should reflect that work and not be uncritically tied to prior experience.