Shoot-'em-ups and crashing waves: Martyn Ware seeks that seaside sound
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Version 0 of 1. He may be the founding member of two of the most revered bands of the 1980s, a renowned music producer and the creator of arty, moody soundscapes. But Martyn Ware – once of the Human League, still of Heaven 17 – has parked his cool at the doors of this garish, blaring amusement arcade on Brighton pier and is darting around the insistent fruit machines, the shoot-’em-up video games, the coconut shy and the hissing air hockey table, gleefully grabbing noises on his digital recorder. “It’s an incredible, impressionistic mess of sound,” he says. “It’s totally chaotic but totally brilliant. The whole place is like a giant reminiscence machine. The jangle of the penny falls games, the beeps and the snatches of tinny tunes. It takes me back to my childhood and also to the many happy hours I’ve spent with my kids here. It’s brilliant.” Ware’s madcap charge around the arcade, however, is not just for fun. He is taking part in a unique mapping project to capture the sounds of the British coastline, being launched on Monday by the National Trust, National Trust for Scotland and the British Library. Members of the public are being asked to record sounds of the coastline – whether it be the busy sounds of a working fishing village, the cries of seabirds on a remote island, the whistle of a beach-hut kettle, or a seaside arcade – and upload them to a sound map hosted on the British Library website to be added to its sound archive. Cheryl Tipp, curator of wildlife and environment sounds at the British Library, said: “There is something really evocative about the sounds of our coast; they help shape our memories of the coastline and immediately transport us to a particular time or place whenever we hear them. “As millions of us head to the coast this summer for holidays or day trips, we want the public to get involved by recording the sounds of our amazing coastline and add them to the sound map. This could be someone wrestling with putting up a deck-chair, the sounds of a fish and chip shop or a busy port. “We’d also love to hear from people that might have historic coastal sounds, which might be stored in a box in the loft. This will help us see how the sounds of our coastline have changed over the years.” At the end of the three-month project – called Sounds of Our Shores – Ware will choose some of his favourite sounds and combine them with some he has collected himself to compose a new piece of music. Hence his trip to Brighton pier and his madcap dash around the arcade. Though he is best known for electronic music with an industrialised or urban feel, Ware said the seaside has always been hugely important to him. “I grew up in Sheffield, one of the furthest places from the sea you can get in Britain,” he said. “We were poor and one day at the seaside a year was our holiday.” His family used to travel by train to resorts such as Cleethorpes, Skegness and Scarborough. “That first sight of the sea was so exciting but so were the sounds – the seagulls, the laughter of children, the bells on the donkeys, the old rickety rides, especially when they were made of wood,” Ware said. After satisfying himself that he had recorded every interesting beep, buzz, bell, clatter and crash from the pier (he loved the sound of screams from the ghost train), Ware went for a walk on the pebbly beach. He said: “Wherever you go the waves sound different. It depends if they are breaking on sand, on shingle, against cliffs.” Ware was delighted with the acoustics he found under the pier – he likes the noise that comes after a wave has crashed. “It’s a natural resonance chamber. The waves sound great here ... there’s a high-pitched sound as the water recedes and pulls the shingle back. I prefer that to the crash actually.” But he suggested that anyone considering taking part in the project should think imaginatively about the sounds to be found at the coast rather than plumping for spectacular sounds like the crashing of waves. For example, putting a smartphone or recording device next to a rock pool might yield some fascinating noises. “You can listen to crabs messing around, shellfish squirting water – the tiny sounds are interesting too, not just the big sounds.” |