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Sound Piece Update

Writer's picture: Amy F. DochertyAmy F. Docherty

After scanning the areas of the Ouseburn that I plan to place the sound piece back into the context of, I decided to take another shot at mastering the sound piece to include more found sounds, analog recording techniques and found sounds from site. This added even more layers/dimensions to the piece, and allowed me to rely less on the heritage/historic sounds of Tyneside folk songs, which I turned down to under -5db. Following a reduction in volume and then pitch to these layers, I added in the new scanned sounds, at a slower speed (a reduced frequency) and a lower pitch to assemble them as an almost bass/percussion line throughout the piece.


Having removed a lot of the audible lyrics to the Tyneside folk song, leaving it almost as a whisper to the background of the piece, I began to think about taking extracts of a conversation I had with a local Tyneside man with an interest in Maling pottery and isolating the voice of this man from the dialogue to allow for this to become the main strand of audible sound, the 'top' layer.


Unfortunately, the audio quality was too poor so I wrote another piece to overlay on top of the sound piece. A summary of my research so far, the poem represents the Ouseburn through the ages, from the 1600s to the present:



To the North side of the river was the Ewes Burne

The Plaine glass industry predating its name

A monopoly was built from here

When the industries boomed so did the people

A close-knit and colourful community on both sides of the river

They built a hospital to look after our sick, aged and their families

The river runs through us down to the quay

Rail carts stacked up to hold the loads

And a tunnel ran under it all to link the colliery and the river’s mouth

At the pottery white mice leave the factories

Named so for their powder coated faces

Their faces coated with hard work

The doors closed in the sixties

Two hundred years in the making

Most of the mice scurried long before that

The great war had left its mark on the industries

Those who returned found the area lacking

In work and in spirit

The second war saw the tunnel shelter the people

Better damp than dead was the general attitude

Those of mining blood were better suited to conditions than those in the South

New life-blood flows through the river now

The buildings of the past now host new ventures

And the creative-quarter fills the shoes of the centre of industry

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