“Plas Bodfa” is a 100-year old manor house on the isle of Anglesey in Wales UK. The soundscapes featured in this soundwalk were originally designed as an immersive sound experience for the “Plas Bodfa Continuum” art exhibition at Plas Bodfa in April 2022, curated by artist and initiator, Julie Upmeyer.

The art exhibition’s title, “Bodfa Continuum,” implies a continuous flow of time—ideas and energies from the past, carried into the present and stretched out into the future. Like time, sounds can also be malleable—stretched and compressed, layered and manipulated. The soundscapes created for this experience propose a deliberate engagement with sound and time, using Plas Bodfa’s grounds as a framework.

The sounds featured in the soundscapes are both current and historic and were constructed in the style of musique concrète, utilizing field samples recorded on the manor house’s expansive grounds, while also mixing in samples of vintage ambient sounds from various decades over the past century. Several of the soundscapes also feature samples of traditional instruments used in Welsh music such as the crwth, tin whistle, and fiddle.

Each soundscape is mapped into the SonicMaps web app, creating an immersive, geo-locative, smart-phone-based, GPS-triggered audio experience while strolling around Plas Bodfa’s North Garden, Visitor’s Garden, Wildflower Meadow, Pond, and greenhouse areas.

For those wanting to engage with the interactive SonicMap but are unable to attend on-site, you can interact with the remote SonicMap (above) via computer, smartphone or tablet.

To experience the Plas Bodfa Continuum SonicMap on-site in Wales, visit the following link on your smart phone. Make sure to enable location services on your phone.

https://sonicmaps.xyz/player/?p=786&s=sat

For more information about Plas Bodfa and the Bodfa Continuum Art Exhibition, visit:

https://www.plasbodfa.com.

Soundscapes composed and SonicMap designed by Jennifer Howd.
Plas Bodfa field and fiddle samples improvised and recorded by Ynyr Pritchard.
Crwth samples from “Ffion Felfed” and “Gruffudd Rowland” by Cass Meurig from her album, “Crwth.”
Special thanks to Julie Upmeyer for her support with on-site app testing and additional sample collection/recording.
Album art by Jennifer Howd. Photo by Jim Thomas.

Freesound.org artists/samples utilized in this project:

81188__juskiddink__strong-wind-through-leaves.wav
223563__captainvince__vintage-cadillac-muffler-turn-on-idle-off-rattle.wav
243815__klankbeeld__eating-great-pond-snail-140731-0322.flac
276550__beerbelly38__spitfire-slow-oh.wav
457569__florianreichelt__peaceful-sound-of-a-herd-of-cows-in-the-swiss-alps.wav
505816__jedg__car-idle-and-turn-off-vintage-mg-convertable.wav
571632__casonika__tin-flute.wav