Sound installation made with a group of 8-11 year olds at the CYDS youth club in Saxmundham.

Exhibited as part of the ‘Animal Vegetable, Mineral’ exhibition at Art Station, Saxmundham, 2 Dec 2022 to 29 Jan 2023.

I brought my grandmother’s curiosity cabinet along to a free youth club session one dark and stormy Friday night in late November 2022. The children spent time looking at all the weird and wonderful objects. We re-imagined objects of their choice as musical instruments, creating new histories and sounds! We then chose one idea to focus on. Over 2 sessions, we used a phone to record and sample voices, adding soft synths and effects in BandLab, and then onto the computer for final editing and processing using Paul Stretch and Valhalla Super Massive. To finish we used the BBC SFX Library and Free Sound to find field recordings and textures, creating a beginning and end that had common elements so it could loop nicely on the audio player in the exhibition.

“Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is a community exhibition, showing work and objects from artists working both locally and further afield, as well as pieces produced during recent workshops with local groups in Saxmundham. The show is inspired by the 1952 game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral where a panel of experts were asked to describe and classify an artefact of unknown origin. These artefacts were sometimes fake, sometimes modern and sometimes with an unknown origin.”