Sounds of Isolation is a sound installation, which will be the result of a collaborative artistic project, exploring some social and emotional aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic related lockdowns. In a face-to-face workshop for students, who in their majority are not professional musicians or students of music, at the University of Debrecen during the autumn semester 2021 the sound material for the sound piece is created and recorded. This workshop and the resulting sound installation are my contribution to the artistic research project Experiential Translation which focusses on meaning-making across languages and the arts.

The workshop is organized in five phases:

Phase 1: Exploration of emotional aspects of isolation: writing text about personal experience of isolation during COVID lockdowns (meditation, creative writing). In this phase the students found and recited and recorded single words they associate with their experience of the lockdown situation. They tried to express their feelings in the way they recited their word. In a following step they created beginnings of a narrative using their word, found in the previous phase. This time they should recite their narrative without feeling.

Phase 2: Field recording basics (what is field recording, listening and field recording, technical basics). This phase started with an exploration of several theories about the nature of sound. After this I demonstrated how the listening perspective defines different field recordings and how the recorded sounds can be manipulated and arranged in a compositional way. The main aspects were spatialization, extension, filtering and resonance.

Phase 3: After the students had installed the Zoom recording app on their cell phones they recorded sounds of isolation at the places they spent the lockdowns in. During the following workshop session they presented their field recordings to the other participants and told them what the recorded sounds mean for them and why they decided to record them.

Phase 4: Two sessions of the workshop will be lead by a guest lecturer. Poet, visual artist, performer and sound artist Kinga Tóth will show the students some of her own pieces written and recorded during the pandemic and then she will work with them using the method of ASMR (Autonom Sensory Meridian Response). Sounds will be created in a process defined by ASMR and the experiences with creating them and listening to them will be reflected.

Phase 5: In this phase I will compose a sound piece using the contributions of the participants of the workshop. This sound piece will contain composed music, manipulated field recordings and spoken word.

The final product will be a stereo mix of this piece of sound art, that can be played on stereo speakers or/and headphones. For the installation of this sound piece at an exhibition in London in July I also will create a visual component. The images in this blog post are a first version of this visual component.

Sounds of Isolation will be shown from July 7 to July 10 as part of an exhibition curated by Ricarda Vidal and Madeleine Campbell at Ledbury Poetry Festival and from July 13 to July 15 at King’s College London.