Doing a PhD at SARC is an opportunity to push the boundaries of sonic practice and research in a vibrant and welcoming environment, with access to outstanding facilities, rich interdisciplinary connections, and supportive mentorship.
My own doctoral project aimed to question the ways in which environments become knowable through sound. This was grounded in the contrasting settings of peatland bogs and arid deserts, with the investigation of two terrestrial sonic phenomena which had never received substantial attention from the disciplinary perspective of sound or music: peatland ebullition (subsurface bog bubbling of carbon dioxide and methane gas) and 'singing' sand (a loud resonance effect in large sand dunes, caused by granular shear flow).
It started from hearing strange sounds from within the miry layers of a peat bog, picked up through a dropped hydrophone. Three years on, the formation of a multi-disciplinary supervisory team, extensive training at SARC in field recording, ambisonics and Spatial Audio, fieldwork in the marshy bogs of the Northern Irish peatlands and the dune seas of the Rub' al-Khali (Empty Quarter) desert in the United Arab Emirates, hours of studio work and the occasional overnight session in the Sonic Lab, hours of supervision happily hashing out ideas, composing with resident ensembles, fourteen presentations at conferences, including international trips to Germany and the U.S., musical premieres, a CD release, and thousands of words later, I had produced a PhD which explored the insights revealed by attending to these two sonic events in different ways. I had contributed to theoretical debates that speculate how sound engenders responsive and reciprocal relations between humans and their more-than-human environments. I had produced two studies providing novel recordings of these two specific phenomena, opening new lines of enquiry in the more niche studies of ebullition and singing sand. I had shared these sounds through the creative labour of installations and concert works, bringing the sounds to new audiences and exploring different knowledge making practices. And I had analysed and reflected on the process of working with environmental sounds, from discovery to fieldwork all the way through to understanding and creative play.
I think it unlikely that my project would have evolved in this way had I conducted it anywhere else. SARC pushed me into new areas of thought and practice, continually opened opportunities to enrich and advance my work, and supported me the entire way. 10/10, would go again.
