Sound Escape

A portrait of a place in sound and video, Sound Escape was a collaboration with a group of young people with learning disabilities and autism. It was designed to enable the group to explore their local heritage, learn new skills, experience the world differently, and to share their voice and often overlooked strengths and abilities with others.

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The project took place between December 2017 and May 2018 and was focused on Riverside House in Stourbridge, the site of an old iron works. The group together with Helen and Bill went through a process of ‘deep listening’, recording soundscapes, making sounds using found materials and playing sounds isolated from those recordings using keyboards, and finally using graphic collage and chance techniques to organise the sound into a sound piece with what we have called the ‘Sound Escape Machine’.

 

A video was then produced in response to the sound machine’s output and this was presented with the young people to local people on May 10th and as part of the Ideas of Noise festival in August 2018 and which can be viewed below.