Artists, Designers and the City: Awareness of Sound Background

The Urban Design Group had their annual conference at CUBE gallery in Manchester
in November 2004

Artist Daniel Barrett (aka Nunatak) organised an event where conference delegates on guided architectural and urban design led tours of Manchester recorded sound with lofi dictaphones as a way of exploring the various sites. These recordings were given to 5 sound artists working locally including myself. That night these recordings were transformed into new sound works on the theme of exploring urban space and played back to the conference. Finally a day later the 5 artists completed an improvised performance at ARUP UK Gallery in Manchester

This became the first event for Awareness of Sound, Ross Dalziel and Daniel Barrett's research group to find dialogue and collaboration between sound based art practice and acoustics, architecture and design.

Ross' work at Universidad de Los Andes will add to this research substantially before the next AOS event, Carbon Sink Workshops in Berlin in May (to be confirmed).

Heres the audio from my processing of delegates sounds from the first Awareness of Sound event.

I placed the delegate recording within a recording of the ambience of an Urban Splash development in Manchester between a canal and distant railtrack at 6pm


http://www.cheapjack.org.uk/Back Splash.mp3