All Ears: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
At this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, you can don a pair of headphones and listen to the train station with White Cane – an exploration of the sounds of public spaces, developed in collaboration with blind and visually impaired performers. We talk to the artists behind it about the idea of 'sonic vision'
We are accustomed to seeing people using a white cane. But have we ever really thought about the 'sound' it makes?
For the last two years, artists Isabel Jones and Duncan Chapman – co-directors of socially engaged performance collective Salamanda Tandem – have been presenting White Cane, a site-specific performance involving blind and visually impaired (VIP) performers, around the UK.
Wearing wireless headphones, listeners are immersed in a sound world comprised of field recordings, musical performance, an audio description sung by Jones and – crucially – the sound of a white cane as it rolls along the surfaces of the local environment. All these inputs are mixed live, enabling participants to hear what the VIP performers (violist Takashi Kikuchi and dancer Mickel Smithen) are experiencing in real-time.
It is a project with a strong principle of accessibility behind it; as Chapman says, “We were trying to create something that was like an insight into a different world.”
Different every time
As each performance of White Cane involves a great deal of time researching the site where it will take place, gathering recordings and considering what to include in the pre-recorded music, each performance as a result “has a different feel to it entirely.” And while some of the performance is prepared ahead of time, much of the final experience is down to what's happening in the moment – for example, it is possible to participate unwittingly, as a passer-by who wanders into the field of play and finds they have become a part of it.
A creative approach to audio description – here conceived of as a mixture of practical information and unusual observations sung by Jones rather than simply an aid – is something she and Chapman have been developing for many years.
“If you ever go to a performance and put on headphones to listen to the audio description, most of the time it's hideous, it's rubbish, it's really pedestrian,” Chapman says. “For a dance performance, say, it goes 'There's a man. He's walking. He falls over. He jumps in the air...' – and it tells you something, but it doesn't necessarily tell you anything interesting or imaginative. So what we're trying to do is make that process of experiencing through someone else's sense more imaginative, and more compelling to listen to.”
Speaking without words
The audio description does not just consist of words, but also wordless vocalisations, drawing on Jones' many years of artistic practice using only “pre-verbal sounds.” As she explains, “one has to be careful with text because immediately you make it referential,” so sometimes something more “textural” is needed; “stones, cobble, brick, air, temperature, dampness or heat... these are not always easy to describe in words.”
Though each performance of White Cane by its nature cannot be repeated, it's what the audience member takes away from it – hopefully, a deeper appreciation for an otherwise hidden sonic world – that is lasting. “There's that realisation when you see people using a white cane: 'Oh, they're getting all this information,'” Chapman says. “There's a whole world of stuff, this sort of tactile, sonic experience... It's a sound that nobody hears, [yet it's] going on all the time.”
White Cane: Salamanda Tandem, Huddersfield train station (platform 1), 23 Nov, 12.30pm, 2.30pm & 5pm, free. Arrive 15 minutes before the performance to collect a headset
Four more to see at HCMF:
Body-opera
HCMF presents the UK premiere of Polish composer Wojtek Blecharz’s 'living organism' opera, a work exploring the relationships between sound and the human body comprised of different media including music, installation, choreography, sculpture and video. They'll be sticking a coach on if you're travelling from Huddersfield. The Hepworth Wakefield, 20 Nov, 3pm, £17 (£14)
Zubin Kanga
Piano as you don't know it: Australian pianist Zubin Kanga performs brand new works that use 3D sensors, semi-artificial intelligence and pitch-bending electronics to extend the possibilities of the piano and explore 'malevolent doppelgängers, hyper-virtuosity and the sonification of the pianist’s body'. Wowzer. St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, 21 Nov, 12.40pm, free
part wild horses mane on both sides.
Experimental music fans will be familiar with Kelly Jayne Jones and Pascal Nichols of part wild horses mane on both sides: a boundless free music group hailing from the North of England via France. Tonight they're joined by Kamran Ali and Greta Buitkuté to present the world premiere of a new composition, Cooking up a stew from other’s oddments, likely a witches' brew of sonic artefacts, rural noise and bent time/space. Bates Mill Photographic Studio, 26 Nov, 8.30pm, £12 (£9)
Colin Stetson: Sorrow
Acclaimed saxophonist Colin Stetson presents a reimagining of Henryk Górecki's famous Symphony No 3, aka the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Released on disc earlier this year and receiving its live UK premiere tonight, Stetson's Sorrow feeds the composer's original features into a brooding new form, finished with gurgling menace and – according to our reviewer – Godspeed-esque bluster. Bates Mill Blending Shed, 27 Nov, 7pm, £22 (£19)
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 18-27 Nov