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West Bromwich High St.

Commissioned by Multistory for their Green Roots programme, ‘West Bromwich High Street’ is an illustrated poetry map and musical score of West Bromwich. The map contains drawings of many of the area's iconic buildings and the sounds of the high street as represented in musical notation.

 

Working in collaboration with Sound Artist Lorenzo Prati and Sandwell Visually Impaired (SVI) community members, I led a series of guided walks and workshops using poetry, sound and writing exercises to inform the mapping of West Bromwich.

 

Sound recordings captured by SVI were transcribed into musical notations, resembling traditional Western stave music and spectrograms, and integrated into the map in the places in which they were recorded. Positioned along the illustrated representations of the High Street and green spaces, the musical stave acts as a 'road' of auditory exploration around West Bromwich.

 

The notation is for performers to interpret and give a sense of the local urban environment, with its beeps, market calls, revs, and music; it also notates the birdsong of Dartmouth Park, giving reverence to the quietude and openness of a vast park only fifteen minutes walk from the city centre.

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