Sound Assembly – Improvised Sound from the Bede Street Arches

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Sound Assembly returns to Radio Lear at 8pm on Friday 9th October 2026 with a recording made during the session held at the Bede Street Arches in Leicester on Wednesday 30th September.

The broadcast consists of two improvised sound assemblies, each lasting between twenty and twenty-five minutes. There was no central direction, score or curator deciding what should happen. Instead, the participants worked with what was available: physical objects, electronic devices, voices, fragments of sound and the particular acoustic character of the room itself.

Discovering Sound Through Improvisation

Sound Assembly begins from a simple proposition. What happens when people gather in a space and listen to what can emerge without first deciding what the result should be?

The recordings retain this openness. They are not edited into conventional compositions, and the conversations and exchanges between participants remain part of the material. Moments of discussion sit alongside periods of concentration, hesitation, repetition and unexpected conjunction.

The boundaries between preparing a sound, making a sound, listening to somebody else and talking about what has just happened become deliberately uncertain. What emerges is less a performance than a shared exploration of sound, attention and the possibilities of the moment.

The Acoustic Character of the Arches

The Bede Street Arches are important to this process. The room has its own acoustic presence. Sounds travel across the space, reflect from its surfaces and become entangled with one another. Sometimes an individual object seems to come sharply into focus; at other moments it becomes difficult to say where one sound ends and another begins.

The objects and devices used during the session similarly move between familiar and unfamiliar roles. An everyday item can cease to be something primarily useful and become something to strike, scrape, shake, resonate or listen to. Electronic sounds enter alongside these physical textures, creating brief relationships that were neither planned nor necessarily repeatable.

Across the two recordings there are consequently a series of interspersed moments of reflection. Some are dense and active, while others open into quieter spaces. The interest lies less in reaching a finished musical statement than in noticing what happens when attention is shared between people, objects, technologies and the room itself.

Listening Without a Predetermined Outcome

This is one of the principles behind Sound Assembly. It is a place for listening as much as making; for discovering rather than demonstrating; and for treating sound as something that can be explored collectively without needing to arrive with a completed piece or a predetermined idea of what should happen.

Without a central organising authority, participants are free to respond to one another, introduce new sounds or allow existing ones to develop. This creates a form of collective improvisation in which the relationships between sounds are as important as the sounds themselves.

There is also something valuable in leaving the conversations and exchanges within the recording. These are not interruptions to an otherwise complete work, but part of the shared experience through which the assembly takes shape. The process of listening, responding and reflecting becomes audible alongside the objects and instruments being explored.

From the Arches to the Radio

Radio can extend that experiment further. Once the recording leaves the room in which it was made, another listening space begins. The particular acoustic of the arches becomes translated through transmitters, radios, loudspeakers and headphones, arriving somewhere else in Leicester, Loughborough or across the East Midlands.

Something that was temporary, situated and dependent on a particular gathering becomes available to other listeners. The recording does not reproduce the original experience exactly, but creates another opportunity to attend to the relationships between the sounds and to discover moments that might have passed unnoticed during the session itself.

For Radio Lear, this is an important part of exploring radio as an artistic medium. Broadcasting is not simply a means of distributing finished cultural products, but an opportunity to experiment with forms of collective expression, listening and shared imagination.

Listen to Sound Assembly on Radio Lear

Sound Assembly broadcasts at 8pm on Friday 9th October 2026 on Radio Lear, available on DAB+ in Leicester, Loughborough and across parts of the wider East Midlands.

The programme features both improvised recordings from the Wednesday 30th September session at the Bede Street Arches, retaining the discussions, exchanges and unexpected acoustic encounters that formed part of the gathering.

A podcast version will follow the broadcast, allowing listeners to return to the two sessions and experience the recordings in their complete form.

For now, the invitation is simply to listen: to the objects, the electronics, the voices, the room, and to the accidental relationships that emerged between them.

Radio Lear – Leicester Emergent Arts Radio

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