Sound Arches – Listening to the Memories of a Place

What happens when we listen to a building as though it has something to tell us?

At Radio Lear’s Sound Arches meet-up workshops, we have been exploring that question through sound, spoken word, music and audio experimentation.

These are experimental sessions with an open destination: to build a soundscape together, drawing on the character of the archways and the imaginations of the people who gather there.

The recordings will become material for broadcast on Radio Lear, carrying something of this Leicester space into the digital airwaves.

In the sessions so far, we have recorded found and gathered sounds in the archways, poems and spoken pieces, and the ambience of the space itself. Each offers a different way of listening. A voice gives words to an experience; a gathered sound may suggest something that words cannot quite reach. The surrounding ambience holds them both, reminding us that every recording happens somewhere.

The archways are more than a backdrop. They are part of Leicester’s old industrial infrastructure, belonging to a route that once carried movement through the spine of the country. That arterial past now survives in archaeological traces and memories: structures whose original purpose has receded, leaving room for other uses and other meanings.

Today, artist Traci Howard curates and cares for this alternative space. Her stewardship makes it possible to gather within these remnants and discover what they might become. A place once shaped by passage and movement becomes somewhere to pause, listen and make things together.

The Archway as a Threshold

An archway is an opening, but it is also a frame. It marks a passage between one place and another. That makes it a suggestive setting for work concerned with mythic ideas and archetypal structures: the threshold, the journey, the shelter, the encounter with something unfamiliar.

These ideas offer starting points for experimentation. What might a crossing sound like? How might a voice suggest a return? What happens when an ordinary noise, heard closely or placed beside a poem, begins to feel strange?

The weird enters through those small disturbances of recognition. Something familiar becomes difficult to place. A sound seems larger than the object that produced it. The room appears to answer.

There is a hauntological quality to this listening, too: an awareness of how the past can remain present through echoes, absences and unfinished possibilities. The archways invite us to hear the distance between what a place once was and what it might still become. We can work imaginatively with that distance, allowing industrial memory, present-day voices and new sounds to occupy the same composition.

Gathering a Shared Soundscape

The recordings made so far are the beginnings of a shared soundscape. Poems, spoken passages, found sounds and ambience provide material that can be brought into conversation through further experimentation.

A spoken piece might sit within the atmosphere of the archways. A small sound might become a recurring motif. Music might follow the rhythm of a phrase or leave space around it. These are possibilities to explore together as the work develops.

Part of the pleasure is discovering what other people notice. Each person brings a different ear, a different association, a different sense of what deserves attention. The resulting work can hold those differences, allowing several imaginations to inhabit the same acoustic space.

Bring Something That Makes a Noise

You do not need radio or music experience to take part. Curiosity is a good place to begin.

Consider bringing something that makes an interesting noise, a piece of writing, or an instrument. An everyday object might offer an unexpected sound; a few lines of your own writing might open a whole scene. You are also welcome to come and listen. There is no requirement to arrive with a finished performance.

We want to make work that can be freely shared for broadcast, so bring original or copyright-free material, or something for which the necessary permission is in place. With contributors’ agreement and the rights clear, these creations can become part of Radio Lear’s broadcasts across the East Midlands.

There is something fitting about sending new sounds out from a place once connected to an arterial route through the country. The archways become a point of departure again. This time, what travels is a gathering of voices, noises, music and imagined worlds: made together in Leicester, and carried outward through the digital airwaves.