SWS19
Dozens of events in many countries, covering all inhabited continents of the world, took place during September 2019.
After Andrew Stuck pioneered Sound Walk Sunday in 2017, he teamed up, at the end of 2018, with Geert Vermeire, the convenor of Made of Walking, writer, curator and a locative multi-media expert with a focus on the environment, travelling and living in between Europe and Brazil, and with Babak Fakhamzadeh, an award winning locative app developer, based in Sao Paulo in Brazil. We reprised Sound Walk Sunday in 2019 as a global festival, in a joint organisational structure of the Museum of Walking and Made of Walking, with key institutional partners in Brazil, Australia, Greece, Spain, Germany and Poland.
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library hosted, in the run up to this event, our ‘Explore with Sound Walks’ symposium, a half day event in June 2019, which saw presentations from experts from Poland, Greece, Spain, Brazil and the UK. By this time, we realised that Sound Walk Sunday was evolving into something else, Sound Walk September, becoming not only a showcase for innovation, but also a valued community-building resource, bringing practitioners together, many of whom are remotely working creatives who had previously perhaps felt isolated.
The results:
- 80+ live events.
- 40+ countries.
- 50+ walking pieces made in 2019 eligible for the Sound Walk September Award 2019.
- 2 joint winners, 4 honourable mentions.
Download the media pack.
Experience a walking piece
The listing of walking pieces which Andrew started on the Museum of Walking website has grown into our directory of walking pieces.
Key contributors and supporters
- Marcin Barski founder of IPD (Soundscape Institute of Poland) – Poland.
- Hamish Sewell, founder of Soundtrails – Australia.
- NG Bristow – Goldsmith’s, University College London UK
- LISTEN, – a summer of sound Frome – co-ordinator Mel Day, curator Helen Ottaway from ArtMusic – UK.
Additional thanks
- Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Western Macedonia (Florina and Lesbos, Greece). Organiser of Walking Arts Encounters-Conference Prespes 2019.
- hearing places – an Australian online umbrella for creative projects which unite sound and place.
- Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library
- The many artists and creatives who have submitted their work.
Listen to the Sound of the City, Walking in Silence / Berlin, Alexanderplatz
A walk by Ienke Kastelein This is a shared walk around Berlin Alexanderplatz,from 8 am – 8.30 am on september 1, 2019We will listen to the Sounds of the City while walking in silenceand focus on the experience of space emerging from sound and resonance. We will make a soundrecording of the walk and share
Recording the Unseen; recreating a lost city through audio narratives
John Beauchamp's soundwalk Unseen is set in Warsaw, and recalls hidden stories and lost sounds from places wiped off the map. John's piece is available on Josh Kopeček's Echoes, and received a honourable mention at Sound Walk September 2019. Here, John talks about his work.
The mycelial web, developed hundreds of millions of years ago, now on your cellphone
David Merleau was one of the two winners in last year’s Sound Walk September. His piece, Forest Talk Radio, set in Ontario, Canada, weaves together folktales and forest science to produce a radio comedy experience delivered right to your smartphone. Here, David talks about his work. For decades I have been fascinated, some could say obsessed,
Touched by sound in Munich
Last year, for Sound Walk September 2019, Mathis Nitschke received an honourable mention for his piece Inside Mphil. Here’s Mathis in his own words. I’m a music composer working regularly with orchestras, a fascinating and thrilling experience, especially when you can be really close to the musicians: the notion “touched by sound” actually turns into
The fight to preserve green spaces in an urbanised world
At last year's Sound Walk September, the majority of submissions came from Europe. But, not all. Yonatan Collier received an honourable mention for his work Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance, set in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here's Yonatan, discussing his work.
Sound Walk September 2019 winners
For the Sound Walk September Awards 2019, over 60 contributions were accepted, connected to over 80 events worldwide. Accepted pieces were sound walks, or walking pieces, created in 2019. A huge variety of formats, approaches and subjects from a wide range of creative disciplines, including arts, heritage and history, health and wellbeing, silence and architecture, social
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• Thalweg by Convex a choral meditation promenade along the Thames
Would the Amazon forest still be burning if it was legally recognised as a living entity? Environmental rights and ecoside are some of the themes of Convex’s new performance: Thalweg. The artistic collaboration Convex is presenting new work at Totally Thames for the second year. Thalweg is a choral meditation promenade along the river Thames
Talking to trees
Talking to trees is a local walk around some beautiful trees in suburban Holt in the Australian Capital Territory. These trees silently watch our daily comings and goings and we often do not notice them quietly supporting our life and work through their life giving oxygen and their shade on hot summers day. The walk
Nambour Heritage Soundtrail
Drawing together history and heritage, local stories and great original music, the Nambour Heritage Soundtrail is a contemporary take on an older Australian town that once saw it at the heart of sweeping cane farms for miles around. From the sugar mill, beauty quests and old Vogue cinema, to the infamy of Bayards Corner and
Armidale Catholic Precinct Soundtrail
The Catholic Precinct Soundtrail is a geo locative audio walk and meditation of one of Armidale’s most loved historic sites. This comes to us through the eyes (and ears) of a group of gifted young Aboriginal kids who herald from across the Armidale Catholic diocese, from as far as Walgett to Tenterfield. These kids (dubbed
Tenterfield Soundtrail
Just 20km south of the border, Tenterfield is a clear-sky town at the very tip of New South Wales. Rimmed by national parks and large granite outcrops, this is a town built on crossroads; between the coast and the western plains, traditional aboriginal tribal lands, states lines, time zones and railway gauges. The Tenterfield soundtrail
Walgett Freedom Rides
Walgett was where the Freedom Ride exploded onto the national stage. It was the place, as Charlie Perkins said, which was the first big test of moral courage. “Are you with it? Or are you against it? Are you fair dinkum? Or are you not?” It was the place where the Freedom Rides students found
Aboriginal Diggers Soundtrail, Moree NSW
You are standing on sacred ground, Kamilaroi ground. Beneath your feet are the remains of 220 Aboriginal people, 120 children among them, many who never made their first birthday. Most here were buried here between the years of 1940 and 1968. This was at the height of segregation, opportunities for Aboriginal people were few and
Highbury SOUNDwalk
An early morning guided SOUNDwalk of Highbury Park which will offer participants an opportunity to tune in and expose their ears to sounds of the environment that we may not normally hear. The walk will begin at 7am and depart from the play area. The route will take soundwalkers off the beaten path and participants
Food Walk Wageningen
This walking project will take place in Wageningen, an important city for agriculture in the Netherlands. The theme is about food, more precisely, about crops and food products. YiLing Hung is running a long-term artistic research project on food – how we prepare and consume food in relation to different seasons, ‘Food Walk Wageningen’ is
Sometimes We Wake
Sometimes We Wake is a self-guided sound walk set in The Palm House, Botanic Gardens in Belfast. It reflects on a music performance that took place there in 2009 which Richard Davis was involved in. The walk will guide you around the Palm House, remembering the experiences of what it was like to perform in
Fiesole Urbana Ascolta (Listening Urban Fiesole)
The piece is a silent urban listening walk I will lead for a group of 15 people maximum in the ancient streets of Fiesole up the hill of Florence in Italy where I live and operate. The route includes outdoor public spaces such as hilly gardens, small squares, tiny streets, indoor areas such as the
London Street Noises
This is the 2019 event. Similar events are scheduled in 2020, for September 17 and September 20. In September of 1928 five locations across central London were recorded by a team from Columbia Records led by Commander Daniel and supported by the Daily Mail. The project was prompted by a pressing concern for the impact
