The City Rings Project

I came across this project, called The City Rings,  while researching ideas for Wellington Calling and as I am setting up a series of workshops for people to learn about and contribute to the project this looks an exciting way to engage with people and communities.

"The main goal of TCR is to encourage young people to exchange experiences about the place where they live through sound. Our main approach is a series of artist-led workshops that are held simultaneously in schools in various countries."

Wellington Calling - Alaejos

The second stage of the Wellington Calling project will be to collect sounds from the Alaejos in Spain. This will involve making contact with people in the town and others in the region to gather the sounds, these will be uploaded to freesound a website allowing users to contribute sounds from across the world to form a global database of recordings.

Along with collecting sounds from Alaejos, the opportunity to have a 'tube' set up in the town will be explored, this would enable sounds to be exchanged between Wellington and Alaejos, with the 'tubes' making a visual connection between the two sites.

Wellington Calling

I have been working on Portal in various forms over the last year and have now stripped the idea down to a participatory sound work. Now the work will involve collecting sounds from Wellington and Alaejos, which is the antipodean point to Wellington, and forming these into a soundscape.

I have identified a sight for the work at Queens Wharf, which is situated close to the waterfront and has a series of ventilation outlets running along it. These are perfect to use the sounds to be played from as they look the part and you can imagine the sounds coming from deep in the earth. 

The next stage will be finding potential collaborators to help develop the work and collecting sounds from across the region.