The online version of the Heritage Soundmap is now publicly available and the physical installation version is under way. Our research team had started developing the mapping in the summer 2022. Since the end of the research project in last December the Principal Investigator, Dr Aki Pasoulas, has been working towards the completion of the Heritage Soundmap.
The soundmap presents events that took place at Chatham Dockyard during the period of five centuries, between its foundation as a working yard in 1547 and its closure in 1984. During that time, more than 500 warships were launched in the dockyard and thousands more were repaired. Our research team collected scores of stories of this period through diaries, oral history archives, written accounts, maps and photographs. This soundmap represents a small sample of those stories, eavesdropping on past ages through a virtual time machine. These are mapped in two ways: in time, starting from the 1500s; and in themes, which are divided in ‘Community’, Growth and Experience’, ‘Technology’, ‘Craftmanship’ and ‘International Relationships’.
The soundmap went through several stages before arriving to its final version. The stories we (re)created were performed by members of Rainham Theatrical Society on an original script written by our collaborator/consultant Purni Morell. 18 soundscape compositions were compiled and composed by Brona Martin, 16 by Aki Pasoulas and 3 by Andrew Knight-Hill. Aki wishes to thank Allen Tullett for his invaluable support while working together on the soundmap website.
The Soundmap can be reached here: Heritage Soundmap