A project based on the sounds of Dublin.

In Dublin I recorded a series of what R Murray Schafer would call 'keynote sounds':

even though keynote sounds may not always be heard consciously, the fact that they are ubiquitously there suggests the possibility of a deep and pervasive influence on our behaviour and moods. The keynote sounds of a given place are important becasue they help to outline the character of men living among them.

R Murray Schafer, 'The Soundscape', Destiny Books, 1994, page 9

In Dublin, these sounds include the constant ringing of tram bells, the screech of their metal wheels on metal rails as they round corners, and the ticking and beeping of pedestrian crossings in the city centre.

The few sounds I had recorded were then altered digitally. For example, by lowering the pitch, the ticking of the traffic lights can easily become the rattle of machine guns. The tram bells, with their pitches lowered, become church bells; raised, they might be the bicycle bells of the Volunteers assembling for the 1916 Easter Rising.

I was staying near St Stephen's Green, on which there were several exhibits commemorating the events which took place on or around the Green in 1917, and I was also following up a personal interest in the intelligence operations of Micheal Collins. This made it all the more poignant that these everyday sounds were playing within a few hundred yards of some of his clandestine operations offices.

The image below, from the Garda museum in Dublin, pointedly juxtaposes two men who knew each other and worked alongside each other. But Det Sgt Barton, who was loyal to the British rule, was killed in November 1919 on the express orders of Collins. (see 'The Squad', by T Ryle Dwyer, Mercier Press, Cork, 2005, pages 66 - 68.) Det Con Neligan was one of Collins's main agents inside the Police, and may have provided the information that led to Barton's death. The murder took place a few hundred yards away from Colins's operations office. So the violence and anger of the era was a constant theme.

I turned my sounds into a short composition.Apologies if this takes a few seconds to load.

I was also experimenting with granular sound, using the Maximilian framework and following up the ideas of Curtis Roads' book on Microsound. This gives the sounds a degree of immateriality, which went well with my feelings about the past and the present in Dublin. Memories, like granular sounds, are not dense or solid, though they may sometimes seem so.