Sonic Palimpsest: Heritage Soundmap (physical installation)

This version of the Heritage Soundmap is installed in the Steam, Steel and Submarines gallery at the Chatham Historic Dockyard museum.

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 stories we (re)created were performed by members of the Rainham Theatrical Society on an original script written by our collaborator Purni Morell.

18 soundscape compositions were compiled and composed by Brona Martin, 16 by Aki Pasoulas and 3 by Andrew Knight-Hill.