Soundscapes

Fermynwoods Contemporary Art has been working with The Complementary Education Academy for ten years, bringing arts programming to students who have been excluded from mainstream education. Or, rather, we bring the students to the arts, using our site at Sudborough Green Lodge, deep in Fermyn Woods, for workshops.

This week with artist and musician Rebecca Lee’s help, we finally answered the age old question, “What would it sound like if you put a contact microphone on a tree branch and then gently touched that tree with a yellow rubber glove filled with water?” 

The answer is "gross".

Rebecca brought a host of exciting tech with her into the forest today, all with the plan to create something magical from the noises we made and discovered. In addition to the aforementioned contact mic, students got to experiment with a loop machine and a submergible microphone. This was fortuitous, since the weather was so nice that walking to the nearby stream and throwing things into it was on everyone’s agenda. The resulting audio collection features strange nature sounds interspersed with children shouting and making bizarre noises with their mouths - a pretty good encapsulation of what a day with CE Academy students is like!

Rebecca will be joining us again in two weeks’ time, building on student requests from this workshop and helping us turn the noises we collected into soundscapes with a musical structure. The finished soundscapes will be part of our year-end Fermynwoodstock festival, featuring a programme of music, performances and sound art made by our students with the help of a variety of artists.

To learn more about our Alternative Provision programming: http://fermynwoods.org/alternative-provision/