On “Events Heard” — Researching and Re-using Industrial Soundscapes. The EU Project “Work with Sounds”

Abstract

“Wherever we are,” John Cage wrote in his book Silence, “we mostly hear noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”1 The noise or, to put it less judgementally, the sound of work was at the centre of the European Union project “Work with Sounds.” For this project, six European museums joined forces in order to collect, document and save the sounds of work in one large database,2 to find new usages for these sounds and to share their experiences in working with the sounds and soundscapes of Europe in the concluding conference on “Theory — Practices — Networks” at the LWLIndustriemuseum in Dortmund. The project partners of the LWL-Industriemuseum were the Museum of Work, Sweden (lead), the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas, the Technical Museum of Slovenia, the Museum of Municipal Engineering in Krakow, Poland und La Fonderie, Centre d’histoire Économique et Sociale de la Région Bruxelloise, Belgium. The project originated in WORKLAB, the International Association of Labour Museums. John Cage is one of the composers who actually worked with sounds: after the Second World War he assembled his four-minute long electronic composition “Williams Mix” from a series of tape recordings of city, country, electronic, handmade, wind and other sounds.3 A generation before him and on the other side of the globe, Soviet composer and People’s Commissioner Arseni Avraamov included the sounds of work of the harbour in his “Symphony of Factory Sirens,” performed in the port of Baku in 1922 on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the October revolution. He used real foghorns, artillery canons and factory sirens, accompanying a 1,000 people strong choir intoning the “Internationale.”4 Today, all the sounds he used are probably gone, the ships and their foghorns dismantled, the factories closed.