Suffolk Libraries has been reflecting on the work of Martin Scaiff, who recently completed a six-month residency as Environmentalist in Residence. A teacher and field recordist, Martin undertook a six-month walking journey connecting all 45 of Suffolk’s libraries and collecting sound along the way.
The recordings Martin gathered during his residency have been developed into an audio collection called Seconds of Sound (S.O.S), capturing acoustic moments in time across Suffolk’s landscape, with the collection featuring a compilation of tracks for each walking route.
The collection is an open access resource and is freely available to listen to and download by anyone, anywhere, anytime. The tracks represent both the sounds that we experience in our everyday lives, as well as sound above and below the limit of human hearing. The project uses the acronym S.O.S to urge people to dedicate moments to listening, and each track has several seconds associated with it, encouraging listeners to reflect on what they spend their seconds doing.
Martin explains the importance of appreciating the sounds of our environment:
“As environmental sound is commonly an aspect of our lives that is borderless and beyond our control (think of traffic or industrial noise) we often take back control by creating individual acoustic habitats, increasingly through technology but also by isolating ourselves in other ways. This isolation has consequences for the natural world. As our encounters with the infinite richness and complexity of natural sound decrease, the appreciation of its influence and importance declines in equal measure. Through technology we can listen to environmental sound from all over the world like never before, but in a search for meaning, the basis of caring, nothing beats actively listening for a few seconds to wherever you are, whenever you can, right now!”
Martin has also spent time visiting libraries, engaging with staff and customers by delivering talks and facilitating soundwalks with the intention of listening, as well as encouraging people to understand and appreciate their local terrain. Martin has also piloted quiet listening parties (Nature Silent Discos) in Sudbury, Glemsford and Mildenhall libraries. These offer a mix of pre-recorded sounds from the collection, as well as live elements incorporating sound from the immediate environment the ‘disco’ is happening in, and the use of bisonification – the science of making plants sing as people touch them!
You can hear more from Martin in these two videos, with the second an ‘in conversation’ interview with Sophie Green:
