Sound Sculpture to record memories of a lost era

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-28563835

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/08/listening-to-the-active-sounds-of-history-field-recording-and-museums.html

Memory is at the heart of much human activity. Memory drives us to collect, to record, to create documents –"information or evidence that serves as an official record" – that we then spend a lot of time and effort preserving. Some of these documents are strictly personal and kept as family heirlooms. Others end up being judged by someone else as having a broader significance, and end up being preserved in places like museums and libraries in order that they be made accessible to a wider audience. There are countless institutions around the world whose mission statements may not explicitly express it, but which are essentially dedicated to honoring the human desire to remember.

So why do we record sounds? Because we want to remember them.

Affective Digital Histories: Recreating De-Industrialised Places, 1970s – Present explores the hidden and untold stories of the people who lived and worked in former industrial buildings at two locations in the East Midlands: Leicester's Cultural Quarter and Glossop, a mill town in North Derbyshire.

It hopes to gather sounds reflecting their industrial heritage to show how the areas have changed over time.The sounds of part of Leicester and Derbyshire are being collected to create a digital audio archive for future researchers.The aim is for people to explore and research history through sounds.

Composer and sound artist Dr Andrew Hill said the aim was to capture the sounds before they disappeared."Yes you can look at old photographs and old maps and that gives you someway of getting into the past, but through sound people can really immerse themselves in the environment," he said.

Sounds of a hosiery factory and a movie reel being rolled in a theatre brings back direct memories of a human habitat that has since then vanished.

 People with memories and recordings of old buses, parties, hosiery and shoe manufacturing machines have been encouraged to get involved in the project.