Sixteen new compositions for the Interactive Heritage Soundmap, created as part of my AHRC-funded research project Sonic Palimpsest. The soundmap also includes 21 additional compositions created by my research team (eighteen pieces by Brona Martin, and three by Andrew Knight-Hill).
By recreating these soundscapes as part of the Sonic Palimpsest interactive heritage soundmap, the unseen and usually unheard, and the vantage point of the restraint and oppressed are highlighted. Sounds have the potential to evoke embodied responses in the listener, and so they provide an ideal opportunity to create affective connections with historical events. A script writer and a theatre company were employed for dialogues, which were used to create dramatic scenes in the heritage soundmap.
The 16 compositions composed by Aki Pasoulas explore events in the Chatham dockyard in five past centuries and include:
16th C
– Marshlands
17th C
– The Plague
– Gun Drill at Sea
– Chatham vs. Portsmouth
– Gun Wharf
18th C
– Strikes
– Hierarchies
– Sailmakers
– Blaise Ollivier
– Clocktower and Commissioner’s House
19th C
– Prison Hulks
– Prison Escape
– Draining Marshes
– Saw Mills
20th C
– Arms Race
– Submarines
In the 20th Century section, the heritage soundmap also includes my earlier compositions ‘Covered in Coal’, ‘Sirens in the Night’ and ‘The Fog of November’. You can experience the soundmap either online (sonic-palimpsest.org.uk) or by visiting the physical installation at the ‘Steam, Steel and Submarines’ gallery at Chatham Historic Dockyard museum.
back to Compositions from 2000 onwards
Aki Pasoulas 