Soundscapes of the Past: Historical Imaginings

Histories are primarily documented in visual or written form. Our ‘Sonic Palimpsest’ project seeks to subvert this occularcentric focus, exploring the potential of sonic perspectives, to unlock alternative understandings of our past. Chatham dockyard, our case study site, was founded in 1547 and closed as a working yard in 1984. During the 400-plus years of its operation, tens of thousands of people were employed (or forced to work) in building construction and in launching more than 500 warships and repairing thousands of others. Countless stories have been collected throughout this period, some through diaries (the 17th C. diary of Samuel Pepys is a notable example) others found in oral history archives, books and papers. Our team has explored these sources and conducted new oral history interviews, applying anthropophonic perspectives to see if we can unpack new insight through sound. Our research has demonstrated the rich potential of musical and sound-based knowledge frameworks to inform human, embodied and affective understandings of history which foreground people and place across time. This paper gives an overview of some of the salient sounding histories uncovered, focusing on three selected areas: the life of convicts in the dockyard, Samuel Pepys’ diary, and our own interviews with former workers of the yard. In this article, we describe information we used to create two main outputs for our project: a) A collection of 10 miniature compositions called Whispers of the Past, based on oral history interviews;1and b) a Heritage Soundmap that presents scenes from 5 different centuries (in progress); the soundmap will be available online and as a physical installation in Chatham Dockyard.