The Lincolnshire Soundscape

I have been delivering community soundscape workshops for several years. These can take on different forms, but for the most part they’re experimental and encourage participants to think about / explore the sound of their community and ‘home’

I ran a workshop recently where members of the Lincolnshire community were invited to Lincoln Arts Centre to attend a soundscape workshop with myself and colleague Dylan Roys (lecturer in radio and sound). We began the workshop with a discussion about sound, place, community and home and what our community sounded like to use. This encouraged a really thoughtful and engaging discussion around how Lincolnshire has a very natural sound associated with farming, and even the beach at Skegness, and how this clashed with the city urban sounds with more hustle and bustle.

After thinking about and discussing the sounds of Lincoln, we went out into the city to record sounds that came up in our discussions. We were also on the lookout for any other sounds that were dominant and may represent Lincoln. We even experimented recording underwater and mixing busy sounds with those more natural ones.

After the workshop, I edited the sounds together alongside University Radio & Sound Student Caitlin Robinson, to create two soundscapes (one for our morning group and one for our afternoon group) and the audio was aired on community station Siren Radio. You can listen to the broadcast here: