Everyday sound has had a curious and extraordinary year in the midst of some of the toughest of times. Amongst the sounding memories we have of the last eleven months is the shuffle of papers, hushed voices and birdsong on the live feed from the Rose Garden at number ten Downing Street as journalists waited for Dominic Cummings to make a statement about his visit to Barnard Castle; the sound of rain falling on the turf at Elland Road, home of Leeds United, audible only because there was no crowd, no sound in the stadium other than the sporadic shouting of the players and coaches and the falling rain; the still quiet of the fields alongside the A34 usually saturated with the deafening sound-making of tyres on asphalt but during the first lockdown in England filled instead with the sound of birdsong and children playing.
Since its inception in 2008 Sound Diaries has sporadically had an advent calendar – 24 seconds of sound everyday from December 1st to December 24th. We considered doing that this year but it didn’t really sit well with us. Instead we thought it could be interesting to mark the end of the sounding year by posting audio documentation by a different contributor each day in December. The contribution could be a recording, a text, a photograph, a drawing, a diagram, a sentence scribbled on the back of a beer-mat, a few words – anything that could be used to document an aspect the everyday sound experiences of twenty twenty – a year of strange soundings.
Contributor: Thomas Martin Nutt
Location: 3rd floor of KM Building, Fukuoka
Time and Date: 15:00 26112020
