RESONATING SILENCE - Vinyl record with hand screen printed cover, limited edition of 100

Abstract

In this collaborative project, artists Magda Stawarska-Beavan and Heather Ross explore the tensions between the dominant architecture of Manchester City Library's reading room, its acoustic and the functionality of this building as a quiet place of study. Libraries, as ‘sanctuaries of quiet’, are unique places, both culturally and acoustically; they soundproof our thoughts from the distraction and the noise outside their walls. But they also coerce us into behaving quietly, amplifying the sounds we make beneath their domed acoustic chambers. Manchester Central Library’s main reading room, placed on the top floor and filled with natural light, was designed to impose a state of quiet on the reader, with every small sound amplified by the unique acoustic of the domed roof. The amplification of the personal sounds of page turning, typing, coughing etc. turns the ‘silent’ reader immersed in their private experience into a performer within the public space of the reading room.

Stawarska-Beavan's recordings delve into the different gradients of sound and silence, capturing the acoustic properties of the physical structure of the building, the sonic environment of the library created by its users, its technology and the noise of the city seeping in. Presented with an audio recording of this public space, Ross was invited to respond, through writing, to sounds heard and images conjured. This written experience of an unknown space was performed and recorded by Ross and then composed by Stawarska-Beavan, to produce a new onomatopoeic soundscape.

A
18’35’’
An audio assemblage of field recordings of the interior and exterior of Manchester Central Library Reading Room by Magda Satwarska-Beavan (2017).

B
14’06’’
Retelling Soundscape – Resonating Silence
Heather Ross - Voice
Magda Stawarska-Beavan - Composition
Text written by Heather Ross in response to listening to Magda’s composition while sitting in a different library: “I claim my usual seat at the windows in LCC library. They meet and point like an arrow to the almighty blue and cream Goldfinger buildings, just off the roundabout at the Elephant and Castle. Here is the beating heart, my ‘London Symphony’ ...I'll miss you when I leave. And in my ears, the sound of Manchester (or so I'm told) from one city to another, one library to another. My future points North. Information rich surroundings - a time based proposition - overlapping events, objects and descriptions - to begin. Then sounds scribbled vertically down the page; a list, a cue sheet of foley – one at a time please...as they enter and exit”
(Heather Ross, 2017)