Recomposing the City: A Survey of
Recent Sound Art in Belfast
Gascia Ouzounian
a b s t r a c t
This article introduces
examples of recent sound
art in Belfast, a city that has
undergone radical transforma-
tion over the past decade and
is home to a burgeoning com-
munity of sound artists. The text
investigates the ways in which
sonic art can redraw boundaries
in a city historically marked by
myriad political, socioeconomic,
religious and sectarian divisions.
The article focuses on sound
works that reimagine a “post-
conflict” Belfast. These include
site-specific sound installations
in urban and public spaces,
soundwalks, sculptures, locative
and online works, and experi-
mental sonic performances that
draw upon traditional Irish song
and music.
and Quiet Music Night, all of which
have operated out of the homes of
artists and curators. Numerous fes-
tivals, including the Belfast Festival
at Queen’s, Cathedral Quarter Arts
Festival and Sonorities Festival of
Contemporary Music likewise pro-
vide national and international
forums for contemporary perfor-
mance and art.
The presence of sound art within
this scene has become increasingly
prominent, owing in part to the
establishment of the Sonic Arts Re-
search Centre at Queen’s University
Belfast in 2005, Quale, along with
the University of Ulster, is a prin-
cipal site for research and creation in sonic arts in Belfast.
There is also a growing understanding of the relevance of
sonic arts within the wider arts community in the region. In
2010, the Turner Prize, the most prestigious award given to
British artists, was awarded to a sound artist for the first time
in the award’s history. Susan Philipsz, a Glasgow-born artist,
was recognized for such works as Lowlands (2010), a sound in-
stallation that featured a layered, multichannel version of the
artist singing a 16th-century Scottish lament. The decision to
award the prize to a sound artist was predictably controversial.
One detractor wrote, “Never before in the 26-year history of
the Turner Prize has it been won by an artist who had nothing
to show for her £25,000 prize money but sounds fabricated
by her own voice” [2]. A BBC article quoted a conservative
Fig. 1. Pedro rebelo, rui chaves, Matilde Meireles, aonghus
McEvoy and Max stein, Belfast Sound Map, interactive website, 2012.
screenshot of Belfast Sound Map showing Kevin Mccullagh’s record-
ing “beechmount rPG avenue.” (© rebelo, chaves, Meireles,
McEvoy, stein)
In the global arena, Belfast is most frequently rec-
ognized as the epicenter of the Troubles, the name given to
the decades-long armed conflict in which local communities
were pitted against one another, with divisions formed along
a combination of political, religious, socioeconomic and geo-
graphical lines. Loyalist or unionist communities, who are pre-
dominantly Protestant, maintain allegiance with the United
Kingdom and typically identify as British. Republican or na-
tionalist communities, who are predominantly Roman Catho-
lic, seek the reunification of Northern Ireland with Ireland
and typically identify as Irish. It is possible for a contemporary
citizen of Northern Ireland to hold two passports—British and
Irish—even as the country remains constitutionally part of the
United Kingdom.
The violence that characterized the Troubles has profoundly
diminished since the signing of the Good Friday agreement,
IL 1998 treaty that established Northern Ireland’s current
governmental structure and signaled a sustained truce. Ancora,
there remain signs of sectarian divide within Belfast, Quale
is otherwise described as a “post-conflict” city. As recently as
Dicembre 2012, tensions flared as conservative and radical
elements within the Loyalist community protested a deci-
sion by the local city council to fly the British flag at Belfast
City Hall only on designated days instead of the entire year.
As some of these protests became violent, counterprotesters
staged a 1,000-person “peace rally” at City Hall. Organized
by local artist Paul Currie, this gathering invited demonstra-
tors to make any kind of noise for a few minutes, suggest-
ing, “The peaceful silent majority needs to be heard too” [1].
The chaotic soundscape that ensued—a boisterous melange
of hand-clapping, shouts, hollers, horn blowing, drumming
and laughter—served as a stark contrast to the sounds most
frequently associated with public gatherings in Belfast: IL
fife-and-drum tunes of Protestant marching bands that wind
their way through the city during marching season each year,
regarded by some as a demonstration of cultural pride, e da
others as a triumphalist and threatening gesture.
Within this larger context of a steady but imperfect peace,
Belfast has also been home to a virtual cultural Renaissance
over the last decade. For a city whose population falls under
650,000, there are a remarkable number of art institutions
and initiatives. These include established institutions such as
Crescent Arts Centre, Waterfront Hall and Ulster Museum;
alternative and artist-run spaces such as Black Box Belfast,
Catalyst Arts, Platform Arts and PS2; contemporary art galler-
ies such as Golden Thread Gallery and Fenderesky Gallery;
and grassroots initiatives such as Delawab, Household Belfast
Gascia Ouzounian (educator), School of Creative Arts, Music Building, Queen’s University
Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. E-mail:
See the References and Notes section for links to supplemental files associated with this
article.
© 2013 ISAST
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 23, pag. 47–54, 2013 47
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art group that announced, “the award
should not go to a ‘singer.’ . . . ‘It’s just
someone singing in an empty room. It’s
not art. It’s music’” [3]. Conversely, sup-
porters embraced the decision as a boon
for sound art, with one prominent critic
characterizing the win as “a shot in the
arm for sound art” [4]. The same critic
explained, “you can even study courses
in sound art at a handful of art colleges
around the country. So the momentum’s
already there. The high-profile win for
Susan Philipsz might just build this up to
the tipping point needed for sound art
to really take off” [5]. Whether positive
or negative, the decision brought signifi-
cant attention to sound art in the region,
and served as an educational moment.
One reporter introduced Philipsz’s work
by explaining it was “[art] so intangible
it can’t even be seen” [6].
This article introduces recent sound
art works created in and for Belfast, giving
special attention to works that reimagine
the city, offering alternatives to the domi-
nant images of a “post-conflict” Belfast.
I am especially interested in discovering
the ways in which sound—a medium
characterized by impermanence and in-
visibility—can bypass or even bridge the
normal barriers, whether physical, social,
political or cultural, that exist in this city.
Fig. 2. Fionnuala Fagan and Isobel anderson, Sailortown multimedia installation, 2012.
Detail showing the listening station for Isobel anderson’s song “the Ghost of sailortown.”
(Photo © Fionnuala Fagan)
Fig. 3. Detail of Sailortown showing the listening station for Isobel anderson’s song “Mary’s
song.” (Photo © Fionnuala Fagan)
Many of the artists whose works are men-
tioned here are under 35, a sign that the
nascent scene will continue to develop.
Some were born and raised in Belfast,
while others have relocated here in order
to pursue education and work opportu-
nities. Tutto, Tuttavia, share the common
purpose to contribute in unique ways to
the cultural life of a city whose image can,
and is, being redrawn through art, even
art so intangible it can’t even be seen.
In both metaphorical and actual ways,
the projects mentioned here can be said
to “recompose the city”: They position
the city not as an object or collection of
objects, but instead as a resonant idea
that is cocreated by, and shared among,
its inhabitants, visitors and, most espe-
cially, its listeners. Through these sound
works the city can be newly understood as
a collectively generated, unstable and un-
fixed, imagined and experienced, lived
and living composition: one that can
be continuously heard and sounded—
E, when filtered through the dynamic
matrix of sound, art and environment
(physical, social, cultural and politi-
cal)—recombined, reoriented and re-
composed.
SoundS and StorieS of
the City
On 20 April 2012, the Metropolitan Arts
Centre (MAC), an £18-million building,
opened its doors in Belfast with the aim
of becoming the region’s premiere inter-
disciplinary arts center. The first Artist-
in-Residence program at the MAC was
a sound art program that featured the
work of researchers from the Sonic Arts
Research Centre, and one of the MAC’s
first exhibits, Sounds of the City, featured
the work of sonic artists Pedro Rebelo,
Rui Chaves, Matilde Meireles and Aong-
hus McEvoy. Over a 4-month period this
group developed five sound art projects,
working in partnership with participants
from the Tar Isteach and Dee Street
community centers [7]. Among these
projects were The Walk Home, a sound in-
stallation in the MAC’s corridors wherein
the sounds of visitors’ footsteps merged
with “the sound of footsteps made by
thousands of shipyard workers return-
ing home,” described by the artists as
“an iconic aspect of Belfast’s aural iden-
tity”; Call for Work, in which factory horns
evoking Belfast’s industrial past—created
in collaboration with community par-
ticipants who recalled these ubiquitous
soundmarks—were installed in the gal-
lery; and the Belfast Sound Map, an inter-
active, online platform that allows users
to upload field recordings as well as com-
48 Ouzounian, Recomposing the City
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Fig. 4. Details of Sailortown showing the listening station for Fionnuala’s song “the Harbour
Lights.” (Photo © Fionnuala Fagan)
May 2012). For this exhibition Fagan
and Anderson developed the project
Sailortown in collaboration with mem-
bers of a local community that has been
particularly impacted by urbanization
in Belfast [11]. Once a bustling dock-
side village of thousands located inside
central Belfast, Sailortown was, for over
a century, home to seamen, merchants
and industrial workers who manned the
city’s mills and shipyards. Urban devel-
opment and modernization projects in
the 1960s led to a controversial decision
to demolish the town in order to make
way for the M2 motorway. Residents were
promised relocation, but developers
failed to deliver on this promise. Surviv-
ing members of the community continue
to be connected through the Sailortown
Regeneration Group, a community de-
velopment organization whose mission
includes archiving the cultural and ar-
chitectural history of the vanished town.
Upon approaching this group, Fagan
and Anderson discovered that they were
not entirely welcoming of outside inter-
est. Fagan writes:
The community agreed to meet with us
on the premise of exchange—they would
share the stories of Sailortown and we
would then document their words and
experiences, using song and installa-
zione. I had expected the community to
be excited by the prospect of this, but in
actual fact, they were quite suspicious of
our motives—mainly as a result of their
previous negative experience of artists.
. . . During our initial meetings, it be-
came clear that the Sailortown commu-
nity saw us as prospective users [12].
woken by the low rumble of land rovers
and the house shaking from the impact
of the paint bombs.” The recording is
described as “an approximation” of this
resident’s “sound memory,” leading the
visitor to Belfast Sound Map to imagine the
complex sociopolitical histories that in-
fl ected these particular sounds and their
hearing.
As an offshoot of the Sounds of the City
program, two local sound artists who are
also both singer-songwriters, Fionnuala
Fagan and Isobel Anderson, proposed a
sister exhibition, Stories of the City (7–20
Fig. 5. ryan O’reilly, map designed for Resounding Rivers, a site-specifi c audio installation
and multimedia exhibition by Matt Green, 2010. (Map © ryan O’reilly, rinky Design
mentary about the Belfast soundscape
[8]. The latter, designed in collaboration
with Max Stein, co-creator with Julian
Stein of the Montreal Sound Map (2008),
features several dozen recordings that
visitors can browse by searching their lo-
cation on a virtual interface powered by
Google Maps [9,10].
Listening to the recordings featured
on Belfast Sound Map, it is striking to
note the extent to which a city’s unique
character and identity can be described
in sound, whether through local accents
and speech patterns, the sounds of ev-
eryday business and leisure activities,
traffi c and transportation, or natural and
environmental soundscapes. Perhaps in-
advertently, the project has entered the
realms of acoustic ecology as well as so-
cial commentary. One user, Kevin McCul-
lagh, has updated a 1:45 recording titled
“Bog Meadows,” which he describes as
“the sound of what remains of the bog
meadows in West Belfast, a nature reserve
that is being encroached upon by the rav-
ages of commercialism and expanding
urbanization.” The same user has also
posted “Beechmount (RPG) Avenue,” a
2:12 recording accompanied by a photo-
graph of a mural that depicts a soldier
in the Palestine Liberation Organization
and a soldier in the Irish Republican
Army joining forces above the caption
“One Struggle” (Fig. 1). In his descrip-
tion of this recording, McCullagh quotes
a local resident as saying, “I dreaded the
mural on the side of my house being
repainted as it inevitably meant a visit
from the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabu-
lary] in the dead of night. I would be
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Ouzounian, Recomposing the City 49
Ancora, the artists continued to meet with
the Sailortown community over a period
of several months and ultimately found
Quello, “through listening, sympathizing
and repeatedly expressing our genuine
interest in their stories and in the history
Di [Sailortown], we finally began to break
down some barriers” [13] (Fig. 2).
For the Sailortown exhibition, Fagan
and Anderson turned their interviews
with Sailortown community participants
into verbatim songs that comprised the
words and stories relayed to them by
the participants. They performed these
songs at the MAC, and installed record-
ings along a series of “song shrines,” lis-
tening stations that also featured objects
loaned to them by the participants (Figs
3 E 4).
Upon hearing their stories turned into
song and sound art, the Sailortown com-
munity participants expressed surprise
and appreciation, not expecting that
the exhibition would reflect their expe-
riences so effectively. One participant
commented, “[The exhibition] blew me
away. I didn’t realize my story was so inter-
esting” [14]. The artists were similarly im-
pacted by the project. Anderson tells me:
Living as a student in South Belfast, you
rarely spend much time outside of those
streets and student social circles. I feel
incredibly lucky to have been given the
opportunity to hear the Sailortown com-
munity’s stories of this area of Belfast.
Otherwise, the M2 would still just look
like the M2. The docks would still be a
concrete expanse with a couple of in-
dustrial sized ships and the streets that
remain would just be car parks and of-
fices under flyovers, between barbed wire
fences. Now, this area is Sailortown. Quello
feels like an amazing privilege [15].
In a poignant way, Sailortown provided
an opportunity for a community tied
together by a shared experience of dis-
possession to communicate with an au-
dience that had either been unaware, O
else was willfully ignorant of, their plight.
For many community participants, IL
simple act of “being listened to” and
“being heard” was in itself a powerful
experience, contrasting sharply with the
silence and invisibility that had charac-
terized Sailortown’s presence within the
larger Belfast community for decades.
In this way, methods that are inherent
to sonic arts—listening, hearing, transla-
zione, interpretation and recording—can
be understood as providing a route to-
wards cultural exchange that confounds
traditional barriers, in this case barriers
that included socioeconomic, cultural
and historical ones.
50 Ouzounian, Recomposing the City
Fig. 6. Matt Green, Resounding Rivers, site-specific audio installation and multimedia
exhibition, 2010. Poster announcing Resounding Rivers in belfast’s city center. (Poster © ryan
O’reilly, rinky Design
Fig. 7. John D’arcy, Laganside, location-activated sound poetry app, 2012, in use on iPhone.
(Image © John D’arcy)
WaterWorkS
From 6 May to 5 Giugno 2010, PLACE, IL
Architecture and Built Environment
Centre for Northern Ireland, hosted
a large-scale exhibition that similarly
aimed to uncover elements of Belfast’s
lost or forgotten history using sound.
Resounding Rivers (2010) was a site-spe-
cific sound installation by Belfast-based
sound artist Matt Green, who installed
loudspeakers in six public spaces within
Belfast’s city center. The loudspeakers
projected soundscape compositions cre-
ated by Green that evoked the sounds of
rivers that once flowed through those
urban sites, but that literally had been
driven underground through processes
of industrialization and modernization.
These “hidden rivers”—the Blackstaff
and Farset Rivers, and portions of the
Lagan River (which continues to run
along the length of the city, but which
has been significantly curtailed)—today
flow underground in a series of massive
pipes. Green discovered this little-adver-
tised fact while studying old maps of Bel-
fast, which showed rivers in places where
buildings now stand. For Green, Questo
discovery represented the sheer force of
urbanization and the forgetting that can
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sometimes accompany it. He told a lo-
cal reporter, “Something as powerful as
a river and it can just be put aside and
forgotten. . . . You’d never know without
reading these books or looking at the
map that there was a river under your
feet” [16].
For Resounding Rivers Green installed
loudspeakers outside a variety of ven-
ues: three popular pubs, the Waterfront
Hall, the BBC Broadcasting House and
PLACE. The graphic designer Ryan
O’Reilly devised a map for visitors that
showed where each installation was lo-
cated and included short descriptions of
how the recorded sounds related to each
site (Fig. 5):
BBC Broadcasting House
When the Blackstaff River was diverted
in the late 1600s it was brought to cours-
ing along Ormeau Avenue and directly
over the land on which the BBC now
stands. Here, the River was bound in
order to form Joy’s Mill dam which pow-
ered the nearby Joy’s Paper Mill. Nel
1800s the dam was replaced by a circu-
lar reservoir, used to store and distribute
fresh water.
sound to be heard: The flow of small
rivers, and the water wheel and mill race
of Wellbrook Beetling Mill, Co. Tyrone
[17].
For the 4 weeks during which Resound-
ing Rivers was exhibited (Fig. 6), Belfast
audiences had the opportunity to hear
Green’s elaborate waterscapes merge
with the sounds of everyday city life,
and contemplate a process the artist de-
scribes as “the past flowing into the pres-
ent” [18].
The Lagan River, which today has re-
placed the Farset River as Belfast’s most
important river, has inspired a number of
artists to create site-specific sound works.
In 2010, Rui Chaves, a Belfast-based sound
artist, presented walkwithme, a soundwalk
and performance that took place along
a popular stretch of the Lagan. For this
lavoro, Chaves invited small groups of
listeners to join him while walking for
approximately twenty minutes along
the river. The participants wore head-
phones and, using MP3 players, listened
to a prerecorded soundscape created by
Chaves, who led the group through the
site while simultaneously performing ac-
tions along the river. The journey was an
intimate one that recalled a love letter by
a forlorn wanderer; at one point listeners
could hear Chaves saying, “I imagine you,
loving me/I imagine us, having a swim
in the ocean/I imagine playing you all
my favourite records/I imagine hearing
you breathe. . . ." [19] Chaves arranged
prerecorded sounds such that they would
merge in uncanny ways with real sounds
Ouzounian, Recomposing the City 51
Fig. 8. Listener with John D’arcy’s location-activated sound poetry app,
Laganside (2012) near belfast’s Waterfront Hall. (Photo © John D’arcy)
Fig. 9. caroline Pugh, Photo Ballads, multimedia performance, 2012. an image of audience
members taken via pinhole camera is projected onto a screen in the premiere of Photo Bal-
lads at black box belfast, 25 ottobre 2012. (© caroline Pugh. Photo © simon Howell.)
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and real events, heightening mundane
occurrences and creating an altered,
sound-augmented reality. For the brief
moments of the event, the stretch of the
Lagan footpath—an everyday haunt fa-
vored by joggers, cyclists and rowers—was
transformed into a lyrical, poetic realm.
More recently, Belfast-based singer-
songwriter and sound artist John D’Arcy
launched Laganside (2012), which he de-
scribes as “a mobile sonic poetry experi-
ence at Belfast’s River Lagan” [20] (Fig.
7). This location-activated sound work,
which functions as an app for smart-
phones, was inspired by the epic poem
“Laganside” (2006) by Northern Irish
poet and critic Alan Gillis. A listener with
the app can freely roam the length of the
Lagan and hear electroacoustic compo-
sitions by D’Arcy that complement a
reading of “Laganside” as well as poems
by Belfast-based poets Andrew Jamison,
Ben Maier and Sinead Morrisey. The app
invites the user to “Immerse yourself in
augmented, real and surreal soundscapes
that reveal themselves at key spots along
the River Lagan. Listen to these musi-
cal backdrops as accompaniment to the
reading of ‘Laganside’ to experience the
poem in new ways” [21] (Fig. 8).
One user describes his experience of
Laganside as a powerful reminder of the
striking transformations that have de-
fined Belfast in recent years:
The meandering cadence of the poem,
which describes a man’s walk along the
regenerated riverfront with his “better
half,” gradually builds towards an un-
derstated yet profound climax. “Leaving
me to find our way back to the streets, know-
ing I’ll never leave here, or come back again.”
Fighting back the lump in my throat, IL
words resonated so strongly. From the
grit and filth of the late eighties Belfast
has surpassed itself, moving so fast the
city is at times hard to recognise. IL
Laganside area is the embodiment of
Belfast’s decline and regeneration; a city
which never fails to impress and disap-
point in equal measure [22].
Sound art and traditional
MuSiC
One of the distinguishing features of
recent sound art in Belfast lies in its in-
tersection with traditional music. There
exists a rich history of traditional song
in the region, transmitted orally from
generation to generation and kept alive
in the public sphere through trad ses-
sions in local pubs, radio and television
programs, competitions and concerts. In
merging the language of traditional mu-
sic with that of contemporary art, several
artists have creatively incorporated new
Fig. 10. Photo Ballads, caroline Pugh performing with tape recorder and electronics
at the premiere of Photo Ballads at black box belfast, 25 ottobre 2012. (© caroline
Pugh. Photo © simon Howell.)
Fig. 11. Phil Hession performing with custom-designed record lathe in My heart is always
trembling, afraid I might give in, multimedia performance and installation by Phil Hession,
2012. (© Phil Hession. Photo © simon Mills.)
52 Ouzounian, Recomposing the City
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Fig. 12. Phil Hession performing with custom-designed polygraph device in My heart is always trembling, afraid I might give in, 2012. (© Phil
Hession. Photo © simon Mills.)
and arcane technologies in their work.
Al 2012 Belfast Festival, the Belfast-
based vocalist and sound artist Caroline
Pugh (Fig. 9) premiered Photo Ballads
(2012), a multimedia work in which she
photographed audiences using a pinhole
camera and sang traditional songs in-
flected by experimental and improvised
music techniques for the duration that
it took for each photo to develop [23].
A BBC critic described Photo Ballads in
terms of the “heavily postmodernist” ap-
proach Pugh undertook “warping [IL
traditional song ‘Lord Randall’] beyond
recognition by way of looping via tape re-
corder” and “reproducing/re-imagining
melodies and tales otherwise swallowed
by the passing of time” [24] (Fig. 10).
The Belfast-based vocalist and artist
Phil Hession has similarly repurposed ex-
isting technologies in creating sound art
that reconfigures traditional Irish song.
In Hession’s My heart is always trembling,
afraid I might give in (2012), the artist re-
corded the street ballad “The Rocks of
Bawn” using different recording devices:
a custom designed record lathe outfit-
ted with a large crank, an SLR camera
and a polygraph machine (Fig. 11). IL
devices were themselves amplified and
recorded, and these recordings were
broadcast in performance while Hes-
sion sang the tune live, his performance
further manipulated by sound engineer
Christian Cherene (Fig. 12) [25].
In re-interpreting traditional songs
using such experimental techniques,
artists like Pugh and Hession take genu-
ine risks. Unlike the contemporary art
mondo, the local traditional music com-
munity does not necessarily privilege or
reward originality or innovation. Piuttosto,
there are pressures to conserve tradi-
tional song within “authentic” musical
settings, as the tradition has historically
evolved through repetition and imitation
rather than invention. Úna Monaghan,
a Belfast-born traditional harpist and
concertina player, composer and sound
engineer, writes:
Traditional musicians had no desire to
depart too far from the normal tune
types. New music was written, but it al-
ways adhered to the structures already in
place of specific types of dance music,
songs, or airs. Composers wanted their
music to be noticed for its beauty, not its
originality or innovation [26].
Così, the works of Pugh, Hession and
other artists who extend the language of
traditional music into the realm of con-
temporary sound art commit multiple
cultural transgressions, creating works
that rewrite a musical tradition steeped
in conservation, while simultaneously
introducing older traditions into con-
temporary genres that are typically pre-
occupied with newness.
In 2012, Úna Monaghan collaborated
with Belfast-based Irish traditional mu-
sic scholar, sociologist and fiddler Mar-
tin Dowling to create Owenvarragh: UN
Belfast Circus on the Star Factory, a multi-
media realization of John Cage’s 1979
composition ____ ____ Circus on ____.
Cage’s score, previously realized only
by the composer himself, invites the in-
terpreter to create a performance from
the contents of a book. Through a labor-
intensive process, the interpreter creates
a tape part from the different sounds
and places mentioned in a book, com-
piles new texts for live recitation by per-
forming complex chance procedures on
the original text, and chooses “relevant
music” to include in the performance.
Monaghan and Dowling’s version was
based on Belfast-based novelist Ciaran
Carson’s 1998 book The Star Factory,
considered an ode to Belfast [27]. It was
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Ouzounian, Recomposing the City 53
presented in the Sonic Lab, a two-story
auditorium in the Sonic Arts Research
Centre equipped with an acoustically
transparent floor and an elaborate mul-
tichannel audio system. Owenvarragh
featured a tape part Monaghan created
from hundreds of original field record-
ing, digital projections of images that
related to the novel, Carson as reciter,
and an ensemble of five musicians in-
cluding Monaghan and Dowling, who
performed traditional Irish music at mo-
ments of their choosing. A review of the
event described it as
an aural recreation of the soundscape
of Belfast during a particular period in
time, imbued with the cadences of Car-
son’s poetry and the music and song of
past and present generations floating
like ghosts through the ether. It was at
times like being in a multi-dimensional
hologram, close to an out-of-body experi-
ence [28].
Monaghan tells me that her connec-
tion to the city held particular meaning
for her in preparing this project, E
that the feedback she received from au-
diences drew out the emotional valence
of contemplating place through sound:
A lot of feedback I got [on Owenvarragh]
was about how the project struck chords
of memory, reminiscence, familiarity
with people. Sometimes of sounds they
wouldn’t think to listen to, but when pre-
sented in the context of the project were
very moving, and evoked vivid memories
or stories or personal experiences, or re-
minders of aspects of the city that were
no longer available to be experienced
(either to them, or in general), but that
they hadn’t noticed slipping away [29].
For Dowling, working on Owenvar-
ragh changed his understanding “of the
nature of [Belfast] and all places.” He
writes:
Carson’s work shows how places are
nothing more than places of the imagi-
nation. They may be modernised, their
infrastructures (both physical and cul-
tural) preserved and renewed, but they
remain in a sense impoverished without
active imaginings and re-imaginings.
Carson is a master of this imagination
of place. Cage gave us a vehicle for re-
imagining Ciaran’s imagination of Bel-
fast in The Star Factory. A prose narrative
became poetry, and its recitation noisy,
musical, and visually enhanced. We expe-
rienced Ciaran’s imagination of Belfast
in a new way [30].
ConCluSion
Sound art has particular resonance in
Belfast, a city that has historically been
marked by conflict and division and that
has recently undergone rapid and radi-
54 Ouzounian, Recomposing the City
cal transformation. The sound works dis-
cussed in this article have reflected this
transformation in meaningful ways: by
inviting people to document and ob-
serve the changing soundscape of the
città; by performing acts of historical
recovery; by communicating the experi-
ences of marginalized communities and
exposing socioeconomic, political and
cultural barriers; by providing opportuni-
ties for people to form new relationships
to everyday sites through creative acts
of listening; and by bridging the divide
between timeworn and contemporary
musical and artistic traditions. In differ-
ent ways, each of these projects enriches
Belfast through its “active imaginings
and re-imaginings” of place, employing
sound as a medium that can preserve,
mark, transform and reconfigure place,
E, in doing so, exposing the city as a
resonant, shared idea that can be com-
posed, and recomposed, through sound.
references
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prestigious art award,” Channel 4 News (6 Decem-
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Sound’ Susan Philipsz,” The Guardian (14 Novem-
ber 2010); Accessed 1 Gennaio 2013
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Aonghus McEvoy, Sounds of the City (2012):
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2 Gennaio 2012.
8. Rebelo et al. [7].
Manuscript received 2 Gennaio 2013.
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(2012); Accessed 1 Gennaio 2013:
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town: Stories of the City (2012); Accessed 1 Gennaio
2013:
12. Fionnuala Fagan, “The Sound of Memory: An
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ries of Post-Conflict communities,” Ph.D. Disserta-
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University Belfast.
13. Fagan [12].
Gascia Ouzounian is Lecturer in Creative
Arts at Queen’s University Belfast, where she
and architect Sarah Lappin lead the multi-
disciplinary research group “Recomposing the
Città: Sonic Art & Urban Architectures” at the
Institute for Collaborative Research in the Hu-
manities. Her writings on experimental music
and sound art have been published in over a
dozen journals and edited volumes including
Buried in Noise (Seiffarth et al., eds., 2011)
and Music, Sound, and Space (Born, ed.,
2013); her current project
the publication of interactive music and
sound art.
Scaricato da http://direct.mit.edu/lmj/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/LMJ_a_00154/1674905/lmj_a_00154.pdf by guest on 08 settembre 2023
