Dreaming at the Turner Contemporary

I’m just back from a second field recording trip to Margate for a project coming up later this summer – while I was there, I paid a trip to the Turner Contemporary gallery, currently offering a comprehensive Grayson Perry show.

Like many museum and exhibition spaces, the Turner has big, open rooms that lend themselves to that distinctive reverb you experience so often in galleries, conversations mixing together and drifting up into the ether, creating a general miasma of human voices being blended into the air.

I wanted to play around with that feeling of reverb by overwhelming the reimagined version with multiple tracks of heavily-reverbed versions of the original, so that by halfway through you can barely make out anything from the original sound, though it’s all in there.

On top of the reverb, some other effects that track the original sound’s wave form to create some self-generating melodic lines add to the effect, with the only addition some metallic sound waves around the edge of the stereo field.

Snippets of un-effected conversation from the gallery pop up every now and again, until at the end we come full circle and arrive back at the original sound, as if the reimagined version were just a brief dream you’d experience if you stared at one of the exhibits for long enough.

City version:

Memory version: