Voices of The Avon Tideway

Voices of the Avon Tideway is a public art residency and permanent artwork exploring the soundscape of Bristol and the River Avon, as part of the regeneration of St Philip’s Marsh.

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.

Human 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 city’s acoustic ecology shapes how we move, communicate, and listen.

This project tunes 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, particularly for those who rely on sound to navigate the city.

As an artistic response, spatially choreographed compositions for human voices will be developed. Drawing inspiration from birdsong and ecological time, these works will emerge from and move through their surroundings, shaped by practices of embodied listening and sighted guiding.  

This research will also inform the design of a permanent public artwork on the banks of the tidal Avon. 

An acoustic sculpture that generates no sound, but reflects what it hears.

Always listening and inviting us to do the same.

This commission is produced by Ginkgo Projects on behalf of Deeley Freed, the project funders.

Team:

Dan Pollard - Lead Artist

Holly Thomas - Choreographer, Embodied Listening and Accessibility Specialist

William Goodchild - Orchestrator and Conductor

Ellian Showering - Vocalist

Ellie Williams - Wildlife Sound Recordist

High Tide Dawn Chorus:

On Monday 30th March, at high tide, I joined Ellie Williams to record the dawn chorus along the banks of the Avon at 40-46 Albert Rd.

As the city woke up we captured the sounds of Wrens, Magpies, Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps, Moorhens, Gulls and Willow Warblers. We also heard runners, cyclists, traffic and trains. This combined chorus revealed the reverbs, reflections and echoes of the tidal river valley. Acoustic spaces that have been formed by the flow of the river as well as the urban development and industrial history of the site.

Footbridge explorations:

Visits to the site with collaborators Holly Thomas and Will Goodchild have revealed further acoustic characteristics of the location. The footbridge over the river has some particularly interesting, and presumably accidental, sonic features.

Clapping at particular points on the bridge produces echoes which whoosh and bend, sometimes sounding like bird cheeps or water drips. We also found two rows of drain pipes, pointing down towards the river which produce resonant pitches when played percussively and amplify any sounds that are played into them.

The Tideway Choir:

I have been developing vocal pieces from melodies discovered in the dawn chorus bird recordings. The most exciting discovery has been what happens if I play Ellian Showering’s performances of these initial sketches through the architecture of the footbridge. The bridge itself seems to sing and these voices resonate up and down the river. Playing this music back into the landscape it came from activates its rich acoustic qualities and allows the listener to explore these three dimensional compositions in real time and space.