The Sound of Healthcare:
Birth + Death, 2018 - 19
A project exploring each end of our lives through the soundscape of those experiences within the NHS healthcare system. It was never fully realised.
The Sound of Healthcare, An Installation proposal for HeARTh gallery in Llandough Hospital by sound artists Artstation exploring maternity and palliative care in the NHS.
There is a growing need within healthcare to develop better ways of encouraging people to talk about birth and death. Culturally speaking, these have until recently been areas of our lives kept out of sight. As society becomes more open, birth and death find more prominence in our conversations. There is a shift towards speaking about giving birth, primarily as a support to women experiencing this physical and emotional turmoil. Likewise, we are gradually becoming more able to discuss our own deaths, releasing us perhaps from the fear of the unknown which often dominates the final period of our lives.
The aim of the immersive installation is to capture this discourse in a powerful new medium and maintain a high degree of accessibility for all ages, physical abilities and sensibilities.
“…A young girl heads toward HeARTh gallery to meet her brother, who has been looking forward to being well enough to see her for some time. The siblings are both excited as they don head-mounted displays and quickly become immersed in a shared virtual reality experience. They can sense other visitors around them; together they explore a space divided only by light and dark.
Navigating by sound, they find here mums and babies at the start of life, over there, the everyday hustle and bustle of hospital staff and visitors, and elsewhere the stillness of people at the end of their lives, their quiet breathing framed by the sound of monitors...”
The HeARTh Gallery is enriching its exhibition programme by commissioning this new work in sound and virtual reality with broad appeal to a wider audience. The artists will collect ambient sound and spoken word for the installation whilst engaging with staff, visitors and patients in the maternity and palliative care departments over time and in dialogue with the Health Board.
For the gallery the research is to explore a new model for dialogue between the gallery and the hospital, whilst helping to foster exchanges between unconnected areas within NHS. The artists are developing their practice by exploring a new medium - virtual reality - which will require specific resources and learning new technological skills. The work also extends their existing sound practice. There are significant challenges to mounting work in virtual reality, generally considered a visual medium, in a way that gives prominence to the distinctive qualities of sound.
A crucial aspect of the proposal is to learn how to foster the trust of participants and develop appropriate ethical protocols in gaining access to what are highly personal areas of people’s lives. In search of unobtrusive access, the artists will trial new acoustic research on discrete sound recording systems.
Soundscape
Sound has always played a part in healthcare. The sounds of the body are indicators of health used both informally by family and friends and professionally by medical practitioners. Sufferers express their suffering or recovery with vocal sound. The tones and cadences of speech are used to reassure and sooth, to startle and admonish. Medical equipment makes use of sound to signal normality or emergency.
The theme of our exhibition is healthcare. Using sound, it focuses on the need for care during birth and death, portrayed as overture and epilogue to the life between. These events can be regarded from two viewpoints: the third-person perspective of a visitor to the hospital or a care professional, who sees a patient lying on the bed, and the first-person perspective of the patient. In the case of a birth, there are two possible first-person perspectives, the mother’s and the child’s.
The soundscapes surrounding care provision at the beginning and end of life, from both body and environment, can be very evocative of those times. Heard in an exhibition, these soundscapes are capable of bringing visitors into direct contact with the human condition. In a sufficiently immersive installation, visitors who listen reflectively should find their attention turning towards the life within themselves.
We propose that sound, in several ways, is an apposite medium for contemplating care at these intensely personal moments of life:
• Listening and caring are closely related – they are both aspects of giving attention: in order to care we must listen, we can express care through listening, and it is by listening that we learn to care: we will use sound to capture a ‘sense’ of care.
• Sound, memory and association work well together; sound can be suggestive and soundscapes evocative; in the exhibition we will associate the experience of birth and death with memories of them suggested by sound.
• In contemplating birth and death from the first-person perspective, we imagine a living consciousness coming into being and expiring; sound is an ideal medium for attempting this.
Virtual reality
We propose to host our soundscape in Virtual Reality (VR) using a head-mounted display with a built-in audio headset.
The deployment of this medium is timely. Its potential and accessibility are advancing rapidly, and are beginning to reach a very receptive public. Recent developments in the medium, and excellent connections with local university and creative industry contacts, mean that it is now viable to mount an exhibition of this kind.
The way in which we will deploy it is unusual. We will shift the emphasis from vision to sound. Instead of creating a 3D simulacrum of a physical space, we will use the potential of the medium to cancel out the real gallery space, replacing it with formless light. This allows us to take light as a metaphor for life.
By eliminating form and focussing on soundscape and light, we increase the degrees of freedom afforded by the VR medium to explore the immaterial qualities of care. The transparent space that we simulate allows us to get up close to the experience of care-giving and -receiving. It also allows us to get closer to a first person perspective on the subjective experience of birth and death.
By these means, we bring the highly personal experience of birth and life into the public realm. Before and after life, of course, light or sound are absent. There are moments before birth and death
of calm and acceptance, withdrawn from the bustle of everyday life. By making contact with this in the exhibition, we hope visitors will be able to shed worries and fear for a while.
Commissioned by the Hearth Gallery at Llandough Hospital and supported by Velindre palliative care centre Cardiff.