Poster

Poster

Sounding Belfast During Covid-19: Lockdown 1 and 2

The governmental regulations of business closures, distance from people, and Stay-At-Home orders emptied the urban environment from the presence of people. This effectively created new sonic relationships between natural and urbanised sounds within our built society.

As Covid-19 has instilled a state of abandonment from our urban spaces with each variation of lockdowns, there was an opportunity to document these changes through a sonic-journalistic approach.

The research is developed through artistic practice-led creative projects which captures the transitional events of Lockdown 1 and Lockdown 2, between March—October 2020, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. There are 15 locations and 41 audio-photographic files captured during this period which focus on the perception and observations of Covid-19 and the sonic effect on urban spaces.

This collection of material benefits the documentation of place through sensory information and distributed onto online platforms such as soundmaps, which allow for revision and reflection of changes on a communal scale. The creative projects also provide a timeframe on how each of the lockdowns have changed our relationship with our urban spaces during a global pandemic, accounting for the regulations and distancing from others in order to combat the virus.

This paper discusses the creative procedures of capturing material during the events of Covid-19, with a critical discussion on the sonic relationships of urban spaces and the perception of sounds in our surrounding environment.

Georgios Varoutsos

Sonic Arts Research Centre | Queen’s University Belfast

Biography

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