Up on the roof

Chris Watson

Award-winning BBC wildlife recordist Chris Watson worked with children and young people to create a permanent sound installation for the Children’s 7th floor Roof Garden. Young patients supplemented, remixed and remodelled sound tracks taken from Chris’ extensive library of location sound recording. The results are a series of soundscapes from all seven continents creating an exciting and energising journey through the richest and most diverse acoustic landscapes on our planet. The installation is so popular that it was reinstalled in a children’s hospital corridor and is also available to patients on a limited edition CD.

Asia

The forests and jungles of Asia are wild and magical places where we sometimes fear to tread. During the nocturnal darkness the soundscape beneath the canopy hums with the strange songs of insects and frogs. Harmony and discord bounce around the foliage in the humid blackness as bats, the night hunters, swoop and dive towards their targets. Then, just before sunrise, there is a change in the atmosphere as birds and monkeys wake to greet the dawn light. The bright rays streak down from the high canopy and create patchwork patterns across the damp leaves and the forest rings the the songs of a new day.

Antarctica

During an Antarctic summer the sun never sets and within this time the landscape is transformed each year. Huge glaciers calve onto the surface of the frozen ocean where the ice starts to fragment, melt and merge into seawater. This is a powerful process which is marked by a natural symphony of pulses, groans, creaks and drips as the ice shifts, softens and slips. This break up creates passages for marine animals. Adele penguins, Weddell seals and Orca navigate the newly opened channels between the ice shelves; Mysterious, beautiful and haunting voices announcing their arrivals with far carrying songs and signals above and below the surface.

Africa

A male lion greets the sunrise over the African savanna with a loud territorial roar. A huge sound that signals a new day of high drama across the grasslands. Hoopoes sing out their name in the morning chorus and the bird songs mix with human voices as the Masai herd their cattle towards fresh pastures. The crackle of vultures and flies on a carcass mark the intense heat of mid-day just after which the weather breaks over the hills and a thunderstorm drops torrential rain to refresh all the plants and animals. Hippos bellow and boom in the swollen river and frogs emerge to join a chorus of unseen voices from the water filled ditches. At dusk, as the sun sets, the night shift prepares for duty. Nightjars croon, a cheetah purrs, crickets warble and the chilling howl of spotted hyenas drifts through the cool night air.

North America

The wild voices of the Mojave desert in Arizona start well before sunrise to escape the blistering heat of the day. By mid morning there is just the metallic solo song of a cactus dodger cicada hidden in the shade cast by a tall Seguero cactus beside which comes the ominous warning sounds of a diamond backed rattlesnake. In the Nebraska grasslands to the East there are some strange ritual bubbling and hissing notes from a group of Prairie chickens displaying and dancing around the short dry turf and these birds are watched over by families of Prairie dogs which bark their high warning calls from the entrance to their burrows.

The sounds slip further to the East and from slow rivers and large pools by late afternoon the air vibrates to the songs and calls of bullfrogs and spring peepers, whilst down in the swamps and creeks of the everglades alligators grumble, growl and roar lurking just below the water’s surface. As the sun sets Sandhill cranes fly over head calling to each other on the way to their roost sites.

South America

Magpie jays anticipate the new day by singing from low perches in the forest before sunrise and they are followed from high above by the huge roars of black howler monkeys who watch the sun rise quickly to the East. The whole forest community greets the new day with a chorus to match the sun’s rapid ascent into the clear blue sky. Spider monkeys clatter through the branches, their chattering contact calls carrying clearly above the piercing insect chorus. Cicadas sing in sharp pulsing waves unseen in the dense undergrowth in contrast to the soft rolling notes of doves and pigeons who sing as the temperature and humidity keeps rising. On the forest floor the air hardly moves at all and by mid-day the pace settles into the slow rhythm of stillness which descends from the tree canopy like a cloud.

Australia

The rain forests of Queensland have a special acoustic quality. In late afternoon the striking songs of bell birds and warblers ring out across the woodland and build into a spectacular evening chorus. In the grasslands and marshes beyond the trees the dry swish of reeds catching a breeze mixes with the sharp clicks and calls of micro frogs hidden at the base of the reed stems. A dense cloud of flies swarm and pass into the low, rolling hills where Kookaburras, magpies and parrots call from bushes and copses bordering the pastures.

Whitechapel

At 4am in May a blackbird sings from a television aerial in a narrow street behind the hospital. This beautiful solo song is quickly joined by a robin singing on top of a street light. Dusty looking blue tits join in as slowly human life and urban sounds filter through the quiet side roads. Sirens dash down the high street, market traders kick into action and commuters surge from the tube station and into the mix of traffic, ringtones, conversations, construction sites and music from the stalls and shops. Somewhere in this rich city chorus a wren sings from a street sign, pigeons coo and clatter down the rail tracks, crows call in flight above parked ambulances and the helicopter takes off to reach a new patient.

Outcomes and evaluation

This project was part of our LOOKING UP! series.

Vital Arts has been awarded a Transformers grant, funded by The National Lottery, through the Olympic Lottery Distributor, and managed by ELBA. The Transformers grant programme is directing nearly £1.5 million of funding to communities in five of the Olympic Host Boroughs over two years. The grants are awarded to projects that really make a difference in people’s lives, particularly by those communities most affected by their proximity to the Olympic venues.

Looking up! focuses on the Children’s Roof Garden on the 7th floor of the new Royal London Hospital and captured the spirit of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Children and young patients at the hospital took part in workshop activities including film making, oral history, tailor-made sporting activities, sound recording and a dance project with the physiotherapy team. The programme ran from October 2011 to December 2012 and was developed in partnership with Rich Mix and Trinity Laban.