THE RIVER TAFF

The Taff River is 40 miles from source to sea; each half mile is temporarily given to a group member who becomes a river custodian. Their experimental objective is to disentangle the relationship between the auditory experience of tranquillity along the river and the physical access that the public has to it. The artist leads 188 ears to sense and create the world’s first regional map of Tranquil Access.

This work came out of earlier walking the River Taff with artist Valerie Coffin Price who responded to my proposal during the Emergence conference at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) .

The interactive below documents our walks 2013-14 and lays a grounding for Riversonics.

A field tool designed by Glenn Davidson
for mapping static and moving sound experiences.

BLACK LISTENING TABLE

The custodians distribute themselves along the river with ‘listening hand wheels’, memory devices used by for scoring and notating their listening in the field. Lacking a predefined scale or measure, they can be readily adapted in different ways to plotting diverse sonic attributes through space and time.

Custodians return from the river and, in exploratory groups, compare and contrast the listening data they have collected graphically on their hand wheels, to produce a collective ‘listening table’ composition.

Each custodian marks their stretch of river on a single spoke of a new listening table. The custodian positions a white stone along the spoke to express the degree of tranquil access they experienced. A cluster of paper clips denotes the sound sources which mark that stretch of the riparian soundscape. The layout of the clips forms a readable code.

Continued..

Using texture and form, each custodian expresses the soundscapes they have heard in a tile of their individual stretch of river. Working together, they assemble a jigsaw map of the whole river, braided with golden zones of tranquil access.

Five week curriculum devised by Glenn Davidson & Mike Fedeski.

RiverSonics I is listening, composition and Art in dialogue with landscape.

The concept was to express the entire sonic ecology of the Taff River region from source in the Brecon Beacons to the sea at Cardiff Bay, a journey of around 40 miles from north to south. 

The idea came from "Groups of Mountain Climbers" by Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese:1760 – 1849). The picture is a depiction of collaborative coloration of landscape. This picture was the impetus to walk the entire River Taff, inviting various friends. 

In 2014 I devised a three week Vertical Studio, a collaboration between Artstation, the Welsh School of Architecture (WSA) and Royal Welsh College for Music and Drama (RWCMD).

Regional soundscapes of the Taff River in South Wales.