Thrumming halls

Thrumming Halls is a site- and presence-responsive sound installation created with warped, fractured and manipulated field recordings made in the Barnsley Nation Union of Mineworkers Hall, surrounding building, peripheral spaces and streets, combined with elements of electroacoustic composition. It incorporates additional live processing driven by sound and movement in the environment of the installation, re-tuning the composition to the spaces, places and communities where it is heard. By creating simultaneous overlapping sonic temporalities/spaces, the work seeks to interrogate the relationships between space/place/memory and sound/music/noise by fracturing the soundscape of the present with the echoes, phantoms and potentialities of the soundscapes of the past/future. The resulting sounds, perhaps, suggest how we might listen out for the multiple layers of sonic histories - pasts, presents, futures - that are heard and un-heard in the environments we occupy. Thrumming Halls is one of two sound works by Danny Bright commissioned for the AHRC funded Connected Communities project Working with Social Haunting: past- and present-making in two "communities of value". Based in Manchester Metropolitan University's Education and Social Research Institute, the project sought to explore the concept of 'Social Haunting' as outlined by Avery Gordon, in relation to past and present making, community, place, and work.