Sound + Environment 2017 is a four day conference bringing together artists and scientists to explore the ways that sound can deepen our understanding of environments at the University of Hull. My concert piece Urbs Culturae explores the sounds of cultural spaces in Hull and “remixes” them using my custom-made performance controller the Sonic Baton, seen below in action at the Kinetica Art Fair in 2013.

I was originally due to go to Hull a couple of days early to record these cultural spaces myself and then was offered the wonderful opportunity through the Director of Sound + Environment, Dr. Rob Mackay to use existing recordings from Peter Cusack’s long-running and seminal ‘Favourite Sounds’ project which has been gathering the sounds of urban spaces since 1998 in cities across the planet; the latest iteration in Hull being a commission for Hull City of Culture 2017.

My thanks to Peter Cusack and Jez Riley-French for the use of their sounds in the performance. I’m currently in the studio preparing this work for next week.