Ancient Springs Proposal for a locative sonic artwork for Thorp Arch (relocatable to a number of UK locations) Phil Legard
Having alighted from the bus, you perceive a distant, disembodied voice calling you across from the fields. Following it, you reach a typically English country churchyard. Passing through the gate, you hear a chattering above you. The sound of birds? No -- these voices seem to come from stone throats: they are the whispers of the gargoyles, looking down, observing their new visitor. “Hurry,” implores the voice. “Walk around the church three times. You must set me free!”
Ancient Springs is an immersive audio-walk for mobile media, mixing experimental music, binaural recording and augmented reality. This work will be developed for mobile phones, experienced using headphones and the phone's inbuilt GPS tracking system. The walk has been developed for the area around Thorp Arch, West Yorkshire, but also has the potential to be displaced to a number of locations around the UK which have similar characteristics, chiefly a church and a vanished holy well. The proposed narrative for the sound and music entails the listener being led by a disembodied voice across a landscape a now vanished holy well (St. Helen's Well). Auditory manifestations of historical relics and memories will arise from the landscape as part of this journey. Having arrived at the well, they must then use their intuition to re-establish the site (- all proposed locations being plotted to a social media map).
Ancient Springs primarily uses sonic art to draw the listener/walker into a series of imaginative encounters with a semi-rural, semi-industrial landscape. The audio will be partially structured: at some points providing guidance and narrative, at others dissolving into non-linear soundscapes to allow the listener/walker time to reflect on and experience the environment.
The nine events, soundscapes or narrative loci of Ancient Springs, situated at Thorp Arch. About Phil Legard Phil Legard is a sonic artist and programmer with an interest in history and heritage. He is an associate lecturer with the school of Film, Music and Performing Arts at Leeds Metropolitan University. His academic work often relates to the use of music technology in interdisciplinary practice, collaborating with the research group Textiles and Music Interact on new approaches to notation, and with oral historian Simon Bradley on a platform for delivering locative oral history and sonic art on mobile devices. His creative work has, since 2001, focussed on the use of improvisation and field recordings as a method of opening up a conceptual dialogue with the 'genius loci'. This work has yielded a lengthy discography, but Phil is now interested in working with less fixed media and introducing narrative and dramaturgical elements into his work. Contact & Links Email: p.p.legard@leedsmet.ac.uk / phil@larkfall.co.uk Phone: 07402 815582 Academia profile: http://leedsmet.academia.edu/PhilLegard Personal blog: http://larkfall.wordpress.com/ Almias: rural psychogeography project, Almscliffe Crag, North Yorkshire (2010): http://almias.org.uk/ Demo of Almias, as a geolocative mobile app: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZBQ5_qyY6Y Holbeck Audio Walk (developed with Simon Bradley): http://www.holbeckaudiowalk.org/