Beyond the Bassline — Designing the Exhibition Soundscape
2 May 2024
It was an honour and joy to work on the Sound Design for Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music’, which just opened at the British Library. We were commissioned to help design and deliver the overall sound design and acoustic design experience for the whole exhibition. Here we’d like to walk you through some of our process.
It’s the first major exhibition to document the 500-year musical history of African and Caribbean people in Britain. Inspired by the British Library’s sound archive, the exhibition explores the people, spaces and genres that have transformed the landscape of British music. Curated by Dr. Aleema Gray at the British Library in collaboration with Dr. Mykaell Riley, Director of the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster, Beyond the Bassline follows a three-year partnership to research, foreground and reposition six centuries of African musical contributions to the UK.
Traversing musical genres, from classical, gospel and jazz through to reggae, jungle and afroswing, Beyond the Bassline charts the influence of Black British musicians, creatives and entrepreneurs on popular music since the 16th-century. The exhibition considers the role emerging technologies and the internet have played in creating, listening to and sharing music. It spotlights the spaces–physical, digital and symbolic — that have cultivated creative expression and inspired a number of Black British music genres, from The Reno in Manchester, Bristol’s Bamboo Club, Scottish club night The Reggae Klub and The Four Aces in London, to carnivals, community centres and record shops across the country.
Many stories, one space..
Echoing and articulating these narrative layers and storytelling of the curation, exhibition designers Freehaus proposed a layered 3D exhibition design that allows the spaces of the exhibition to flow together around dedicated exhibit designs and housings, offering views across the spaces that juxtapose and knit together the narratives of the exhibition.
Whilst the exhibition spaces manifest as distinct environments visually, acoustically sound travels almost unimpeded between them. This meant that we had to consider the albeit distinct scenographic and narrative sections of the exhibition as one acoustic volume wherein the sound from all of the different exhibits must be able to co-exist. We had to work with sound bleed instead of against it.
Working with sound bleed.. not against it
It was imperative to put in place at an early stage both a hierarchy of sound delivery typologies and carefully design the pacing and sequencing of the numerous different sound and music sources featured out loud in the galleries in order to avoid cacophony. Sound and music in the principle galleries would need to have a coherent choreography and structural form over time that allows visitors to engage with the sound world of the exhibition and comprehend the narratives and content it seeks to articulate.
Any kind of solution would have to successfully present the enormous breadth and depth of the sound-worlds that compliment the exhibition narrative, and support the curatorial aspirations. These would also need to be agreed early enough so they could be integrated into the design as well as the content briefing / creation process across the whole team.
Audio Typolgies and Hierarchies
Audio delivery within the exhibition needed to comprise an easily differentiable hierarchy for visitors, so that they can understand how to ‘read’ and interface with sound based on the way it is delivered / broadcast in the space. Separating out the ways audio content is delivered would also help in mitigating soundclashes. These could be delineated as:-
Headphone experiences: proposed for all documentary style narrative A/V content (for example oral histories, testimonies, newsreel / TV footage, commercially recorded and released music). To ensure comprehension of the spoken / musical content, and to allow visitors to engage with the content in their own time and at their own pace and discretion.
Enclosed / semi-enclosed localised audio experiences delivered over semi-directional speakers from above: for dedicated “interruption” spaces. A core ambition of the exhibition was to engage with Black British communities and to co-create an inclusive exhibition that invites new audiences to cross the threshold into the Library. A series of community commissions feature in the exhibition, and have been created by community-rooted, youth-led arts group Jukebox Collective, charitable enterprise and network Rastafari Movement UK Wellbeing, specialist speaker studio Friendly Pressure, literary activist, theatre maker and published writer Khadijah Ibrahiim and visual artist Marcia Brown
Larger section specific soundscapes: delivered over full range audio systems in each section, to contextualise each of their five themes:
The Ocean (1500s-1870s)
On Stage (1880s-1960s)
The Frontlines (1950s-1980s)
In the Record Shop (1960s-1980s)
Cyberspace (1990s-2020s)
Below you can see how the sections flow.
Soundscape sequencing and choreography
Given that all the larger thematic exhibition soundscapes would have to share the same acoustic volume of the exhibition space, all of the relationships between these soundscapes needed to be carefully planned and sequenced and choreographed over time. This allows each soundscape to have its moment, to rise and fall in loudness / prominence, and create dynamic interesting ‘dialogues’ between sonic ideas across the exhibition.
Our strategy was to create 3 principle zones for the 5 exhibition sections (along with 2 further contained zones for dedicated installations). We grouped the sections that share the most acoustic space — as illustrated by early speaker plans below.
We could then devise / support creative treatments for each section and focus in how the soundscapes within each zone would best work and interact with each other. For example, in Zone 1 (The Ocean and The Stage) we consulted with The Ocean composers MeloZed and Felix Taylor who created a moving piece integrating BL archival materials with the sound of the ocean — this would sit alongside The Stage, whose soundscape comprises archival footage of 6 different live performances and immersing visitors in the sound of an old music club.
Creating a timeline for these two soundscapes enabled us to work out optimal durations for each soundscape and a sequence for them to alternate between ‘active’ and ‘idle’ modes, how they might blend in and out of each other, where overlaps could occur and where we might want (or not want) clashes to arise. The diagram below shows where we finally landed with a sequence for the whole exhibition.
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Once we got on site, we were able to do more precise orchestration and arrangements for each soundscape and their zones, finding the right kind of interplay between them. Here we could essentially work with all the soundscapes to create a kind of long form composition, creating a dynamic coherent sound experience across the exhibition.
Acoustically separated zones
The Jungle Fever documentary (1994) and The MOBO Awards are housed in their own contained sections of the exhibition. For these spaces we consulted closely with exhibition designers Freehaus to look at ways to make them as soundproof as possible in order for visitors to be able to watch the films and speeches without sound bleed from the other sections impacting comprehension and vice versa.
The sound of Carnival
In the Frontlines section we move from performance spaces to outdoor and domestic spheres, to explore the relationship between music, community and identity formation, and a period in which a new soundtrack for Black Liberation and Black British identity was emerging. Working with the curatorial team, we landed on the soundscape concept for this section taking inspiration from the annual community / cultural gathering of Notting Hill Carnival in London. One of our team went to take part and gather lots of field recordings in 2023, which we edited into a long form piece to recreate the sonic worlds and traditions that Carnival embodies.
iwoyi — within the echo
For the closing section of the exhibition, Dr Aleema Grey commissioned a new film and sound installation — iwoyi: within the echo, directed by Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde in collaboration with the South London-based musical movement and curatorial platform Touching Bass. It’s a deeply moving and beautifully crafted film, which explores the radical potential of Black British music to manifest reparative futures.
We had the immense pleasure of working with composer MeloZed, Tayo, Rohan and Touching Bass on how to realise their sonic vision for the installation, helping to deliver the overall sound design and acoustic design experience.
Following their aspirations to immerse the audience in an experience, together we designed an audio system comprising 11 speakers and a subwoofer. 6 speakers positioned by each screen, for more detailed sound design plus a 4.1 sound system primarily carrying the bigger musical elements of the score.
“Creating an installation that cannot be comprehended from any singular position felt like it spoke to this,” explain the directors, who went with a five-channel setup to get across this idea.
“We also chose the installation format because we wanted you to really feel like you were inside the echo, tethered to the past, future and present through multiple points of sound and image. We wanted to work in a form that really made people need to sit and listen, feel and engage in order to access the breadth of the work’s ideas.”
If you’d like to find out more about our work or want to us about a project drop us a line here
Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music is on now until 26 August, more information and tickets here
Credits:
Client — British Library
Curatorial Team — Aleema Gray (Lead), British Library and Mykaell Riley (Consultant Curator), University of Westminster
Community Interpretation — Halina Kaszycka-Williams, British Library
3D Design — Freehaus
2D Design — lombaertstudio
Lighting Design — DHA Designs
Sound Design-Coda to Coda
Audiovisual — ADi Audiovisual
Digital software — Clay Interactive
Creative Consultant Architect — JA Projects
Commissioned Designer (PACCAR 2 Gallery) — Touching Bass
Branding — The Elephant Room
Exhibition Fabrication — Sam Forster Associates
Photography — Jim Stephenson
