I’ll be running my next creative use of sound course at `The Centre of the Earth’ in Birmingham on 15 July 2008. The course is aimed at countryside/environment staff with little or no knowledge of working with environmental sound and audio.
Details here
Aune Head Arts are now taking bookings for our listening retreat to be held in and around Bellever on Dartmoor 15-18 May. More details to follow, but here’s a neat summary from the Aune Head website…
Join artists Richard Povall and Tony Whitehead for a four-day listening retreat on high Dartmoor at one of the most sonically breathtaking times of the year. Designed for artists wanting to build an appreciation of the sonic environment into their work, we will spend time out on the moor at all times of day and night learning to listen to this special place and it’s unique soundscape. Spend time in our digital studios, and produce your own sound compositions based on your creative responses.
In partnership with Richard Povall at Aune Head Arts I am planning a four day ‘listening retreat’ on Dartmoor, provisionally fron 15-18 May 2008. The aim of the course will be to allow participants to explore in depth the soundscape of Dartmoor. More details to follow. If you’d like to register interest please let me know.
Thanks to all who attended this course at Islington Ecology Centre, and for the positive feedback. As always it was good to meet people working in environmental education who want to explore the use of sound in their work. Thanks also to Becca Laurence from Sonic Arts Network for providing introduction and context from an arts perspective.
The next Environment Trainers Network hosted training day will be at the Create Centre in Bristol on 18 April 2008.
Catriona Corfield – education officer for the RSPB’s Wild in the Parks project in London – who attended one of my Creative Use of Sound courses in Birmingham has just published the results of a sound based project in Regents Park. She linked up with the British Library sound archive wildlife archivist and their local City Learning Centre oversummer to produce little photo stories with children from a local estate. Click here to view the results.
Photo stories can be created with free piece of software from Microsoft called, appropriately enough, Photostory 3, which can be downloaded here. It’s simplicity itself to use, but you do need Windows Media Player 10 or above to run it.
On 27 September I’m running a course called Creative Use of Sound in Environmental Education for the Environment Trainers Network. For course agenda and notes please visit this web page.
This will be the third of these I’ve done, the previous two being in Plymouth and Birmingham. The course is based around my work with Sonic Arts Network and the wonderful Sonic Postcards Project and aims to give countryside staff an introduction to listening, recording and creatively processing sounds collected from their local area.
Responses to the courses have been very positive and only the day I received a link from a participant to a set of videos done by children in Regents park using some of the techniques I’d shared on the Birmingham course, particularly the use of Photostory 3 to simply put sound and photo’s together in Windows. (more…)