Voices from the peat

On the STACKS website, the three film windows run alongside an 18-minute sound piece exploring key issues in peatland landscapes across south-west Britain. In creating the sound piece, we had been inspired by the BBC Radio Ballads created by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Radio Ballads offered thick descriptions of people and place through collages of music, field recordings and documentary interviews.

We wondered: could the sound piece in STACKS work in a similar vein to take shape as an experimental radio play broadcasting voices from the peat?

Listening can be a powerful means of exploring worlds that are otherwise hard to access. Using a variety of different microphones, I began to experiment with ways of recording sound in and around peatlands in STACKS. This approach had two aims: first, to record traces of the complex webs of life that exist above and below the surface of a bog; and second, to create a sonic palette of peatland life with which to compose new music for our sound piece.

Devon’s peatland, vital spaces for climate resilience, biodiversity and flood prevention - addressed in the new STACKS creative commission. Credit: Rose Ferraby

One approach was to use hydrophones: underwater microphones which can detect subsurface vibrations. They look like small waterproofed spheres attached to long audio cables, and are gently lowered through the water’s surface.

Hydrophones offer sonic windows into worlds beyond the limits of normal human hearing. In peatland pools, they detected the buzzing stridulations of underwater insects: remarkable sounds generated by the animals rubbing their back legs together at rapid speeds. In deep sphagnum moss, they recorded ebbing and flowing crackles as water bubbles coalesced and popped. In upland streams they transmitted the tumbling rattles of sediment being moved downstream by turbulent water flows.

Another recording approach used contact microphones. These are microphones which record vibrations through different materials. Shaped like thin coins, contact microphones can variously be clipped and stuck to objects in the landscape as a means of listening to how they resonate with the wider soundscape.

In STACKS, we clipped contact microphones to wire fence lines strung across open moorland. In effect, this created landscape-scale string instruments tuned to the contours of the land and ‘played’ by patterns of wind and rain acting on their surface. This created a variety of unearthly plucks, shivers and drones transmitted along long distances across the moorland. Contact mics were also clipped to metal signs, which acted as sound mirror-like resonators for bird calls across the fell tops.

We also used more conventional stereo and binaural microphones to record the soundscape of the peatlands, as moorland birds such as skylarks, meadow pipit and stonechat animated the air. We used xeno-canto to source Creative Commons recordings of important bird species which are native to these peatlands – such as ring ouzel and cuckoo – but which we didn’t record ourselves.

This palette of sound recorded above and below the peatlands’ surface was then handed to Tommy to begin the process of musical composition. The composition is structured in three parts – Archiving, Altering and Adapting – to represent the past, present and future of the peatlands, and the lives they support. Tommy worked largely across the keys of E and A (from PEAT…) to create subtle drones and melodies which reflected the tone of each section. So, where Archiving is built on layers of slow, stretched drones, Adapting is composed from more airy, synthetic textures.

The field recordings we made were central to this composition process. Sounds from the hydrophones, contact microphones and stereo microphones were variously stretched, pitched, granulated and decomposed to create new rhythms, drones and melodies. This working process offers a conceptual reference to the ways in which traces of historical landscapes are preserved and remade in layers of peat. Tommy used washes of Brownian noise – another nod to the colour palette of the peat – across the piece, creating an effect akin to tuning a landscape radio through flickering signals of the past.

The team behind STACKS - Rose Ferraby, Tommy Perman & Rob St John

These abstractions of the three peatlands were woven with our field recordings of bird calls and vegetation moving in the wind. The resulting soundscape was then overlaid with voices of people who live and work in these landscapes. Rose spent time interviewing restoration practitioners from the South West Peatland Partnership to hear about the value of these landscapes, and the pressing need for their restoration. Rose also recorded the poet Luke Thompson reading word lists of local names for the peatlands, and the biodiversity which typifies it.

We also were given permission to use snippets of archive recordings from the Dartmoor National Park ‘Moor Memories’ project from 2008. The voices in these recordings reflect on historical practices of peat cutting and stacking across the landscapes.

Together, our collage of field recordings, music and voices offers a sonic exploration of the three peatlands across south-west Britain, and their unique patterns of life across scales of space and time both vast and tiny. The sound piece can be listened to on its own, or ideally, alongside the three film windows on the STACKS website. We hope you enjoy tuning into these voices from the peat.

Thank you to Rob St John for his blog on the process of creating STACKS with Tommy Perman and Rose Ferraby. You can visit the website at this link here.

STACKS is a creative, interactive, project commissioned by the South West Peatland Patnership, a collective of organisations working across Exmoor, Devon and Cornwall to restore dried and degraded peatlands to benefit wildlife, people, water and the climate.