Facebook, Beckenham Place Park FB Page July 9th, 2017: “This summer, as part of The Mansion’s community engagement projects, Daniel, James, and Elena have been collecting recordings and stories of the park with help from a group of volunteers. These are woven together in a sound walk app that takes us on a tour of places in the park rich with the memories and personal histories of local people.�
In early 2017 composers James Wilkie and Daniel Ross were invited to create a project as a community outreach for Lewisham.
This document explains the process and thoughts behind the creation that ensued.
*salutations to all scanners
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This project was devised for the locals of Beckenham Place Park, to share their memories tied to the park as it undergoes change. The project provides a space for the community to share their story.
In November 2016 the management of Beckenham Place Park was taken over by the Copeland Estate. The decision was taken to close the park’s historic golf course and to introduce artist studios into the mansion. An endowment from the Heritage Lottery Fund was granted to rejuvenate the space so that it might increase London’s interaction with the park.
Communities are built upon sharing stories and experiences in a particular place. The tradition of a community passing on its stories is recognized as “Oral History” - which in short, is storytelling in its purest form. As time was spent at the park having conversations with locals, a personal story would be divulged by a local as the aims of the outreach project were explained to them. The stories were unique and heartfelt: each one carried with it a particular corner of the park and an experience making it beautiful through the story shared.
From this notion, a direction for the project took form:
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e; s chang e g d le f loss: acknow o s t e a m e r m rogra he th reach p fests t t i u n o a n m o up nge Calling ny cha a h t i tw ize tha n g o c e also r should There was significant local outrage at the closing of the golf course and with it the community’s ties to the park. It became necessary to understand the nature of these ties to preserve them and avoid the sense of community becoming a faded memory.
Capturing these stories in a unique way to share them would preserve the community that surrounded the park well enough. However, this project would go further; it would be used to help the community grow through hearing the stories where they took place in the park, to manifest the sense of community that belongs between this park and the locals for the listener to experience.
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This would be our aim: to capture the local stories by recording the community sharing them, and finding a way of embedding these recordings across the park. These circumstances would offer the opportunity for the listener to empathise with the community and the park. It was decided that smartphone technology would enable the project to accomplish both the playing of the recordings and the ability to embed these across the actual park for the listener:
Using smartphone technology would mean accessing a wide audience base since the majority of the London population owns one; using smartphones would also allow the recordings to be triggered by location data technology hosted on these devices. As such, using a phone app came as a solution in which to host the project: A freely available app in which bespoke sounds could be uploaded and triggered at specific coordinates?
Surely, there’s already an app for that?
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At the time of this project there was not an app that was available or nearly customisable enough at the time to accommodate the project’s needs. The app needed to be:
Designed to Beckenham Place Park’s image and mission
A reliable method to trigger sounds on location at Beckenham Place Park
True to the project’s purpose, and free to the public
Experiments were conducted to uncover the best method of embedding the recorded audio pieces into the phone app. iBeacons as triggers were considered, weatherproof players and streaming services. Ultimately the major factors that would influence our decision were the poor phone and data reception in the park and the weather. The solution pointed to GPS location triggering as the heart of the app’s functionality as it would require neither technology to be embedded in the park nor cellular data.
An app with these specifications did not exist. We decided to make our own app
Daniel coded a bespoke app to present the soundwalk. It began with the evaluation of similar apps and, in particular, the user interface elements: the way an app opened, instructions to guide an immersive experience, splash screens, trigger operations, etc. It quickly became apparent that as well as robust code, the app required unique and beautiful design. Through a Goldsmiths internship scheme Elena was introduced to the project. Elena undertook the task to visually represent the park through drawings that would become the basis for posters, journals, invitations, and the app itself. Elena’s wonderful drawings captured the beauty and openness of the park and its community.
A person using the soundwalk app should find themselves encouraged to interact with the park during and after the experience of this app. Through this app, the community is revealed in the flow of moments between walking through the space and listening to the stories. The intimate act of careful listening in situ allows one to feel a personal connection with the storytellers and the park.
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Should the project be about the community, then the process should incorporate their participation as much as possible. It was decided that it would be the local community itself that would conduct the storytelling recordings:
Just as the tapping of one specific surface against another produces a distinct series of sounds, the same can be said each time a person tells their story to another. The manner and details of a story will be unique depending on the nature of the person it is told to - different further still to someone who is from the same community. the grain of e th y a ncounter. shing aw e li o e p th f id o o auty ld av g the be thod wou in e v r m e s is e r th Using oice. P ’s own v y it n u m com
To do this, the local volunteers needed to learn techniques to document these interactions: This project defines the artists’ roles as facilitators to the park’s community. Training in skills such as contextualizing the interviews as much as a level of aptitude with audio technology to record the stories would be needed for the community to document its own stories. This method would keep the project as much about the community itself as possible.
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Two workshops were produced on consecutive weekends at the Park’s Mansion. The first workshop would train local volunteers to use audio recording devices through field recording at the Park to capture the stories; fundamental interview techniques were also taught. The second workshop was set up to invite storytellers to come to the park to be recorded by the volunteers.
Many participants had not used recording devices before. Participants noted an enhancement of attention through field recording: they began to hear further detail at greater distances. Microphones caused the volunteers to listen to the park space differently, with new ears.
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Participants from the previous workshop were invited to bring along people with stories of the park, share of their own, and to exchange stories with one another to be recorded for the project. A call was also put out to the general public to take part. The turnout was remarkable. Participants included John (age 15) who contributed significantly to the success of the interviews.
The outcome of these workshops was far greater than expected. Where the workshops were originally seen as a good opportunity for data and material gathering, the participants made it an occasion for the community to shine through: Many participants made new friends through these workshops. The experience empowered the community by revealing its numerous members to itself across the day - some who had long left the area returned for the occasion to share their stories of the park with others. The workshops opened dialogues with newcomers as they walked or sat at the cafe, they were interviewed. The participants left with a feeling of accomplishment and a reconfirmation that their story mattered, that all these years the park has meant just as much to others as it still does to them. The community they have felt a part of actually exists - it does.
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Through the recorded stories it became clear that locals did not so much want to talk about the park as much as they wanted to mediate their own lives through it. Places about the park would trigger memories of childhood, feelings of loss, a big day out golfing, or a connection to nature.
Our volunteers recorded thirty different interviews on the day of the storytelling workshop. Many of these ran over half an hour: This was a tremendous amount of data to parse through and much of it valuable. With this mountain of interviews and stories, a direction for this material was required. Through repeated listening, patterns emerged from the stories. There were certain themes that would recur at the heart of each person’s story.
The composer's’ responsibility was to facilitate the telling of as many stories as possible by threading them together through themes. Each theme demanded its own particular arrangement to retain the listener’s clear interest and comprehension.
The stories were edited, classified, and reconnected through common themes and sounds to become the following audio pieces found on the walk: Park Life - The sounds of the park Wildlife & Nature - Anecdotes on Nature and its sounds were tied together in this piece Golf - A collage of stories from the times of the golf course Mysterious Hand Carving - A piece about one of the many park mysteries Estonia Day - A defunct occurrence brought back to life through storytelling. Loss - Many people expressed the park’s touchstone to loved ones gone Childhood - Times spent as children at the park by storytellers War - The park during the wars. Italian prisoner of war camp, a machine gun
To express a sense of community, it made sense to layer similar impressions and feelings found across various interviews rather than to give place to one interview for one piece, in one place this felt too singular an experience compared to what was shared and witnessed at the workshop days.
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If the tangible is often the artifact of a story, perhaps the artifact’s form needs to change to become a better suited instrument for the survival of a community - ephemeral form can be good, and sound’s nature is such: unlike the tangible, it cannot be weathered and worn away with time. It can take its form as it journeys across the tangible and even our thoughts, revealing what time has done to change them. And don’t these monuments go out of style so fast?
Sound draws across the grain of every surface it encounters (and ourselves) to utterly contextualize by virtue of the reflections we hold in the space and time: Thinking about community as a larger organism of the single mind, how would we diagnose the loss of a story, of memories, of habits and people upon a single person: the diagnosis would be unfavourable. Sound, even in the form of music has been shown to work towards improving the condition of memory loss. So, it is perhaps long time that we turn our attention to what sound can do on a larger scale for communities, for our well-being and larger human systems, to invite others to take part in it to make the most of the living moment.
With the Beckenham Park Soundwalk App, you are holding a pocket monument to the moments and lives of a true community. They are still living and willing to share. This project has been the community’s invitation to you, to enjoy the park as they have done for so long, to make your own stories and sounds.
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