Living Waves, Sea Box, and more at Coastival 2014!

University of Hull @ Coastival, February 14th – 16th

There are a number of events on at Scarborough’s Coastival Festival this weekend involving staff and students from the University of Hull, including Living Waves by Rob Mackay – Featuring Evelyn Glennie.

Living Waves

Living Waves is a sonic journey in to stone. It uses the sounds of ringing rocks found in the Lake District to create an immersive sound installation. It was commissioned for the Ruskin Rocks Project and features Dame Evelyn Glennie playing a new lithophone specially created for it .

I’ve seen Rob present this piece three times and have heard excerpts from it several more. This is the first time it will be exhibited in a complete form but Rob assures me there so much more material to create more work

It will be on at Coastival in Scarborough this weekend on Friday and Saturday (10am – 5pm) at Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum of Geology. FREE ENTRY!

There are two other installations including sound design by Rob Mackay, installations by Sam Eaton and Sea Swim:

Sounds of Our Surroundings

by Rob MacKay and PhD student Sam Eaton is a virtual instrument in which you make music by interacting with a map of Scarborough. “Create your own composition by combining the sounds of the landscape!”

Sea Box by Sea Swim

This is an installation with 3 channels of video and surround sound which immerses viewers into the experiences of swimming in the North Sea. By Lara Goodband, John Wedgewood Clark, and Rob MacKay.

The festival will involve over 700 performers from the town in the epic production of
Orpheus the Mariner which uses giant puppets, some of which have been made by Music and Drama students from the University of Hull, including the world record attempt at the largest puppet ever built!

Sounds of Our Surroundings Workshop

Dr Rob Mackay ran a sound mapping and field recording workshop as part of his artist’s residency with ‘Sea Swim‘ on the 28th July in Scarborough’s South Bay.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Meeting at the ‘Sea Swim’ Beach Hut, participants traversed Scarborough’s South bay, mapping the soundscapes which can be heard, using a range of recording techniques. Sounds were captured using Zoom H4 recorders, a set of Soundman OKM binaural mics, and a pair of Aquarian H2a-XLR Hydrophones.

The different recordings were woven into a sound collage on a laptop in the Beach Hut on the 29th July, conveying different perspectives of the bay, both above and below the waves. The finished collage can be heard here: 

The sound recordists/workshop participants were: Tariq Emam, Rory Saxman Stephenson-Eves, Pat Lawty, John Wedgewood Clarke, Suzen Fyfe, and Martin Haswell.

‘Sea Swim’ is part of imove: a cultural Olympiad programme in Yorkshire. It is a project that explores how swimming changes the way we feel ourselves to be IN our bodies:

‘I am thrilled to be patron of this beautifully simple and simply beautiful idea.  Poetry is going down to the sea again.’

Carol Ann Duffy, The Poet Laureate, Patron of Sea Swim