Voices of The Avon Tideway

A public art commission and residency at 40-46 Albert Road, exploring the surrounding soundscapes of Bristol and the river Avon.

One of the largest tides on Earth flows into Bristol twice a day. It is easy to live here and barely notice the twelve hour surge of the North Atlantic Ocean, but for the birdlife of the city it creates a constantly shifting ecosystem with new opportunities and challenges at every stage of the tide.

None of this happens silently. As these birds follow their food upriver or retreat from flooding mudflats they add their voices to the city's soundscape.

Our daily urban lives move in counterpoint to this immense slow pulse of nature. Our voices reflect off concrete and glass, echo through underpasses and multiply via unintended quirks of architecture. The acoustic ecology of the city presents us with our own opportunities and challenges.

This project aims to tune into the rich chorus of these voices and the acoustic spaces they share. It will explore Bristol’s most interesting soundscapes and ask what we can learn from them, as well as from those who rely heavily on sound to navigate the city.

As an artistic response to this research, spatially choreographed compositions will be developed for human voices. Drawing inspiration from birdsong and ecological time, these pieces will emerge from their environment and move through it in patterns informed by embodied listening and sighted guiding.  

The creation of this work will also feed into the design of a piece of public art for permanent installation on the banks of the tidal Avon at 40-46 Albert Rd. 

An acoustic sculpture that generates no noise but simply reflects what it hears.

Always listening and inviting us to do the same.

This work is being produced by Ginkgo Projects on behalf of funders Deeley Freed.