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Memoryscape with Toby Butler and Lewis Gibson | ||||||||||||||||||||
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 Memoryscape is a unique audio walking tour of two stretches of the river Thames, exploring London's hidden history through the voices of people who have lived and worked along the river. Using rare recordings from the Museum in Docklands archives as well as new interviews, cultural geographer Toby Butler has devised an audio CD and downloadable MP3 tour which uncovers the heritage of two routes. One walk takes in the scenery of West London from Hampton Court to Kingston; the other in East London from the Cutty Sark to the Millennium Dome. The tours, which are designed to be played on a personal stereo, consist of sounds, interviews and archive recordings which chart a century of social history. Listeners can experience an insider's view of the river first-hand, as each recording is designed to be played on a personal stereo at specific places along the Thames path. The double CD comes with a fold out map and guide which will allow users to take a tour of London's fascinating river at their own pace. The more computer-literate listeners can also download the tours onto i-pods and personal MP3 players. The West London tour was devised by Toby whilst he was living in a houseboat on the river. To explore the history of the Thames and the people who live on or around it, he created a raft, which he set loose on the current; wherever it landed Toby would speak to someone about the history of that specific spot. What emerged was an original patchwork of histories and tales that are recounted on the CDs. Of the 35 voices on the recording, listeners can hear from a lock keeper, a boat dweller and a Swan Master as they recount their lives and journeys on this very scenic part of England. The Memoryscape audio walk is part of an ongoing PhD research project in Royal Holloway's geography department and benefits from collaboration with the Museum of London and the Economic & Social Research Council. In this feature Mark Mclaren talks to sound artists Toby Butler & Lewis Gibson about the project and how it came to fruition. About the artists Toby Butler has studied public history at Ruskin College, Oxford and cultural geography to Ph.D. level at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Museum of London. He has been a professional tour guide, journalist and directed several oral history projects in India, USA and the UK. His Ph.D. research was focused on sound walks spoken memory. He worked on Graeme Miller's Linked sound art work along a motorway in East London before creating his own memoryscape walks on CD and Podcast. He is currently working on several projects including a series of sound /video trails around the Royal Docks in East London in time for the London 2012 Olympics Lewis Gibson studied composition and performance at Dartington College of Arts. His work for contemporary theatre and mixed-media companies as a composer, sound designer and musician has taken him around the globe, most recently around the middle-East and Japan with a tour of The Mirror for Princes – Kalila Wa Dimna. He has used these travels to binaurally record a variety of environments and is currently using these to construct an imagined city. Lewis has created sound works, audio walks and installations for galleries, museums and festivals internationally. For more examples of his work see soundpostings.com Interview Mark McLaren: Can you briefly explain the way memoryscape was recorded and realised. Toby Butler: My research focused on using oral history to gather experiences and memories of people at riverside locations along one of the most famous landmarks in Britain, the River Thames in London. The presentation of oral history tends to be limited to publishing extracts from transcripts, or playing extracts in a museum context. I wanted to experiment with presenting memories coherently in a spatial context, using some techniques borrowed from sound art practice, and in the process encourage people to encounter parts of the river – and its culture – that they may not have considered exploring before. My research was a collaborative project between Royal Holloway, University of London's cultural geography department and the Museum of London. The museum funded the publication of two sound walks on 1,000 double CD sets with accompanying walking maps, which can be ordered and downloaded (in MP3 form) from a website (memoryscape.org.uk), or bought in the museum shops. My intention was to try and apply the situationist notion of the ‘dérive' and the alternative pedestrianism suggested by de Certeau to the riverscape [1], but by incorporating memories of many different people, avoid the isolated observation of the classic flaneur. One of the first hurdles to constructing a walk is to decide on a method of choosing a route – through the landscape as well as the subject matter. I had worked on Graeme Miller's Linked Project and I was heavily influenced by his approach of using a route way – in his case a motorway – as a way of linking a series of ostensibly unrelated places; an idea that has also been adopted in literature by authors like Edward Platt, Iain Sinclair and Patrick Wright [2], using a route to organise their reflections. Using the conceit of a journey is a quickly understandable way of organising narrative; it has an aesthetic of its own that can embrace the unusual and the unexpected in a creative way. As it is easily understood, it also lends itself well to work that is constructed for a wider public audience – something that was very much a part of my brief. In London, the Thames is generally seen as a barrier or divide rather than an entity in itself. I also wanted to find a way of acknowledging the spatial and natural dimensions of the river by developing a more artistic and intuitive approach to structuring my work. I developed a method of using the current of the river to find my ‘sample' of river interviewees and physically link their lives up. A float was made out of driftwood and other river-carried material, using a design borrowed from hydrologists that use floats to track currents in rivers and oceans. I followed the float for many days, tracking its route through London, and noting where it collided with the bank (or any other interesting thing). These collision points became sound points on the walk, as more often than not a potential interviewee would become apparent – it would hit a boat or a property that was owned by someone, or a place where an individual was working or resting, and people were generally willing to be recorded. Usually this was an in-depth interview at their home or place of work at a convenient time. In this way I wanted to experience London from the river, feeling its flow and using a natural phenomenon as a memory path through the modern city. The landscape of the banks of the Thames in London contains some of the most imposing architecture in Britain, as successive political and economic powerhouses were built along the prestigious waterfront (palaces, bridges, parliaments, corporate headquarters). Many of these buildings have such strong historical and visual centres of gravity on the riverscape that they are all but impossible to ignore. Yet the float managed to do so. On long, straight stretches the float would move fast, disregarding royal palaces, whole industries, entire localities. The flow gave me a strange, unfamiliar structure to my beachcombing of river-related memories. It gave me a fresh set of memory places; the latest in a long line of practices that in some way challenge dominant cultural practices associated with national places of memory by providing an alternative; neighbourhood tours, parish mappings, public art, gardening projects.  The drifting method became unworkable in the Eastern part of London, as the river became too wide, tidal and strong for enough impact points. My ‘dockers' walk used the same style of a river-culture based walk, using binaural recordings of the route, but this time I mostly used a rare collection of archived interviews with dock workers recorded over 20 years ago when the London Docks were shut down. Using archive interviews presented a whole new set of challenges, particularly in trying to find location-relevant material in archive catalogues that are not very location-specific. I want to try and encourage oral history archivists to start cataloguing in a more location-based way, because these collections would be an incredible resource for future locational media work. It just needs interviewers to ask interviewees to be more specific about where their memories are located, and this to be noted in interview summaries. Unlike drifting, the sound point locations were picked to match either the material in the archive, or for practical reasons (good views, benches etc). I worked with Lewis Gibson, who has a lot of experience in binaural recording, theatre sound design and creating sound walks, to construct the sound design. Mark McLaren: Many practitioners I have interviewed work by collecting sound and presenting the results in a different spatial or aural context. Memoryscape is different in that it reuses sound that will be heard in the walk anyway. What do you think are some of the advantages and problems inherent in this 'doubling' of sound? Toby Butler: I think there are a number of advantages – firstly people wouldn't actually hear the background sound around them very well with earphones on and I wanted to gently draw attention to their environment, not take them anywhere else. I think you are battling against two things here – firstly people's natural propensity to ignore things around them when they are walking, and secondly the problem of listening to anything on headphones, which tends to remove your consciousness from your surroundings to some extent. I wanted people to experience the walks more carefully; think about their surroundings more because they were the settings for the memories. We thought that the sound would either blend in and go unnoticed if it was similar to the walker's experience, or create little pricks of consciousness if the sound didn't match – like the sound of a bird, or a boat passing, or the tide on the dockers walk – the idea is that people would look out for these things and either see them or realise that they were there some other time – a reminder that, like any river journey, it cannot be travelled in the same way twice. I suppose it is also like having someone saying ‘look around you, look at that' all the time (but hopefully not quite so annoying). Some sound work can be way too busy; there is a real danger of asking the ear/brain to do too much at one time. Now I probably sound like Joseph II who said that Mozart's music had too many notes. Basically I wanted people to really listen to the voices, so it was kept simple. Lewis, you did much more complex walk compositions in Auckland? Lewis Gibson: As Toby has explained, we used these 'in situ' binaural recordings to generate a multi layered connection with the sites. Listening back to an environment whilst being there, can engender both a disorientating distance, as your aural and visual information seem to slide out of sync, and a very focussed attention, as you are drawn to a sounding object that is now inert. My piece 'soundpostings: konei, kona, kora' was a binaural soundwalk through the city of Wellington in New Zealand made for the New Zealand Fringe Festival and supported by the city's community arts department.The route for the walk was devised by a series meanderings and pragmatic decisions. I recorded the route over 3 months, and encountered all kinds of weather, isolation, marching scots bands, fireworks, diwali festivities, rugby despair and people. I also interviewed a selection of individuals as we walked the route, recording their memories that were thrown up by the space. These ranged from childhood vacation scenes, through the first steps of an immigrant from the UK to how the land had been when it was populated only by the Maoris. In Memoryscape, it was essential that the voices were heard, and the narratives remained clear, whereas in Soundpostings I would jump from clarity to bombastic confusion, with 5 or 6 people, rain and a busker all trying to tell you their story at the same time. Mark McLaren: What were some of the sounds that you decided to include onto the walks and what were sounds which you excluded? Toby Butler: This one is for you Lewis. As far as I was concerned all sound went in except windy microphone feedback. Some of the interview editing was technically very, very complex because we wanted to make the stories as clear as possible and sometimes we had to deal with some really difficult background noise. This was particularly a problem with some of the drifting interviews which were done in the field. I've got a lot of experience of recording oral history, but I wasn't used to recording interviews for ‘broadcast' so I made a lot of recording mistakes which drove Lewis nuts. He also had to deal with a lot of archive interviews from 30 years ago from the Museum of London, which were generally very good quality but naturally variable depending on locations and interviewers. We used over 30 different voices in all.  Lewis Gibson: There were lots of technical difficulties with the on site interview recordings which were all quite lofi stereo recordings. As well as drawing the listener back into the space where they were, I wanted to add the environmental sounds to create a cohesive frame for these disparate events to hang from. Toby had to decide what text to keep or discard and then I could attempt to shape the material into a sonically logical shape. The 2 walks were very different. 'Drifting' followed the river through classic British countryside and the voices talked about a hugely disparate array of subjects. 'Dockers' took us from the tourist filled iconic Greenwich through industrial sites to the Millennium Dome and the voices were generally more consistent in their subject matter. I made a series of recordings of the walks at various times of the day. When appropriate, we used a footstep track to keep the listener at the right pace, sound events as bridges between voices and audio cues to focus on objects or things that we simply liked. In the 'Dockers' walk, the listener stands for a while looking at a gate which obscures the water. During high tide, the river gurgles and splashes onto and under this gate and sometimes the gate is open due to boaters getting access to the water. We used the sound of the high tide events in the walk so one can hear the potential of the space. There is also someone practicing their opera singing in a flat behind, and a pram going past on the cobbles. We kept these because they sounded great. Most of the material simply occurred as we were recording, the only contrived sounds were footsteps, and I could not resist playing some railings in Greenwich with a pen. Listening back on the work, there seems to be an element of soundtracking the narratives. I do not remember this being part of our conscious process, but I suppose as so much of my work is involved with generating emotional connections through everyday sounds, it was inevitable. Mark McLaren: Why was your [Toby Butler's] voice not recorded on site? Toby Butler: The narration was added last. The first version of the walk didn't have any narration, because I wanted to get as far away from the authorial/tour guide style as possible. People just had to use the maps and work out what to do. In the pilot study it was clear that some people liked it, but a lot of people just weren't sure what was going on. The whole drifting experiment got lost; people wanted to know who/why people were included and they wanted to feel that they were in the ‘right' place. Artists like Graeme Miller celebrate this – he likes the idea of getting a bit lost because that is when you start to have a bit of an adventure. It is the opposite of most people's instinct, particularly of curators in museums who take great effort to make things as accessible as possible. Basically some people will have a great time, but a lot of people just don't get it or feel very insecure without being guided. I wanted the walk to appeal as widely as possible, and the whole point was to locate the memories, so in the end we put in the narration. I think it works particularly well on the drifting work, which was a highly personal piece – it gave me the chance to get that across and lay bare some of the mechanics of the drifting experiment. Lewis Gibson: I think it was important to have Toby's voice as a separate entity. The notion was to try to place this guide voice into the realm of radio, or as a thought inside your head to distinguish it from the other voices that were part of the environment you were experiencing. This also allowed us to control with more detail, the sounds that were used from the environment. Mark McLaren: How were elements like binaural recordings and other techniques such as giving instructions to walk at the same speed as the river used to alter the listener's perception of place? Toby Butler: The most exciting element of the binaural recording for me was the playful way you can set up different times in one place. When you use it with oral history you get three presents going on – the present of the interview, the present of the binaural recording and the walker's present – this might even be divided further into the walker's physical present and his mental / memory present. Put that lot together, and you can get some quite strange effects. Walking speed and pace play a very important part of the walk too. The number and crucially the location of the drifting sound points corresponded to the flow pattern of the river, so it is a very different trajectory than usual. The whole design of the walk was meant to slow people down, to take more notice of what surrounds us and therefore make place more meaningful. We decided against continuous audio to allow people to reflect, process and have their own adventure between sound points. Of course, the medium also allows the walker to skip or listen at their own pace, and some people enjoyed the walk in a very different way, for example by walking and listening non-stop. Lewis Gibson: Nothing to add here. You have said it all Toby. Mark McLaren: What have been some of the audience's response to the perceptual nature of the work? Toby Butler: I have done a lot of audience evaluation using questionnaires and interviews with nearly 150 adults. I think this is something that artists don't tend to do so much, but it has become standard practice in museology and funders are starting to demand it more. I think it is very useful, because you can find out a lot about the intended and unintended effects of the work. The good news was that almost everyone was very positive about the experience, which bodes well for future work that is aimed at a wide public audience. The questionnaire survey showed that 41 per cent rated it 9 or 10 out of 10, 83 per cent above 8 and 96 per cent above 7. In terms of satisfaction the experience seemed to have a wide adult appeal which did not alter significantly between sex, walk location or whether the walk was undertaken alone or in an organised group. There was some indication that adults aged below 30 and above 70 did not enjoy the walks quite as much. Comments suggested that the distance of the walk, the style of presentation, subject matter and difficulties in using equipment were likely explanations for these relatively small differences. The evaluation process revealed some interesting benefits to the memoryscape concept. Several people remarked that they felt empathy towards the people that they listened to despite the fact that they were from a different age, class or culture. This ‘normalisation' effect seemed to come from a combination factors including the content of the recordings, the style of speaking and the fact that the listener could not see the interviewee. Listeners seemed to respond particularly well to the variety of voices used which gave the recordings variety, authenticity and emotional impact. The intimacy of some of the recordings combined with hearing them outside someone's house or workplace made some people feel uncomfortable. As the memoryscape process involved listening, understanding, consent and empathy I think it runs contrary to an act of voyeurism, which is based on the powerlessness of the subject. The walks also seemed to engender a feeling of identity with the landscape. Respondents reported that using a variety of senses, imagination, physically participating and references in the landscape all helped to make the experience more meaningful and therefore memorable. Creating these connections, or links to place seem to have had led to a feeling of closeness, or rootedness for some people. One newcomer to London wrote ‘now I know a sense of a beginning attachment'. Another walker described the process beautifully as ‘deepening my attachment to the river. Like roots shooting off into the soil.' Several people talked about the experience adding a new reality, or a new dimension of reality to the existing landscape. Furthermore, anyone who visits the landscape again can use those links to remember something of the stories that they heard: 'Memoryscape has made me consider the part the river has played in so many people's lives. I think about this whenever I visit the river since listening to the recording ‘drifting'.' Perhaps this aspect of the experience could be of interest to those wishing to encourage feelings of belonging and identity in a particular community or location if memorable links can be made between individuals and the cultural topography of a place - past and present. Notes 1. Pedestrianism: the act, art, or practice of being a pedestrian; ie walking, running; travelling or racing on foot. Dérive: Literally means ‘drift' in French. The dérive is a technique for moving around without a goal. Guy Debord thought this activity lent itself particularly well to appreciating the urban environment. He explained it like this: ‘In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for work and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the derive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry or exit from certain zones.' (Guy Debord,Theory of the Dérive, 1956) 2. Platt, E (2001) Leadville: A Biography of the A40. London: Picador. Sinclair, I (2003) London Orbital. London: Penguin. Wright, P (1999) The River: the Thames in our time. London: BBC Books. Review by Mark McLaren
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