The Sound of Time
Timepiece: 24 Hours in Sunderland is an interactive digital artwork that transforms the passing of time into sound and movement. Every hour, the work activates across Culture House’s digital screens, combining contemporary local sound recordings with dynamic visualisations from the archive to create a living clock for Sunderland.
Please explore this page to see the vision for this project in more depth.
Capturing Sound and Engaging with the Public
My proposed artwork is underpinned by audio recordings, which I will take over a 24 hour period at different locations across the city to capture authentic soundscapes of work, leisure, and daily rhythms. Marking each hour of the day, 24 sites of cultural or social significance will be selected in consultation with local stakeholders, including a cross section of the general public, for me to visit and capture the sounds of life in Sunderland, such as the football stadium, shipyards, schools, markets, and nightclubs. Each recording will include a marker of time, such as a bell, clock chime, or other rhythmic signal. The recordings will be edited down to 240 seconds (2 minutes) for each of the locations, with 10 seconds per hour allocated to each month, enabling the artwork to change across the year. These snippets will form both the soundtrack of the work and a new contemporary archive for Sunderland.
The public can access the full 48 minutes of recordings via QR codes embedded in the artwork, enabling deeper engagement with Sunderland’s soundscape.
Audio-Reacative Experiments
Using TouchDesigner, recordings collected across the 24-hour journey will drive responsive visuals such as particle clouds, point clouds, and deconstructed 3D forms. Each sound, whether from bells, markets, or crowds, creates distinctive patterns, ensuring every hour produces a unique visual identity. This makes time itself an immersive experience.
SOUND ON : church bell ripples:sample
PLAY: Sound ripple over multi screen test
Initial Visual Tests
The following images are reference-only, showing early indicative designs that explore the potential form and feel of the final work.
church 3d animation
Budget Breakdown
Creating Digital Assets from the Sunderland Archive
The contemporary sound recordings will be paired with historical archival materials (e.g. photographs, documents, and audio) which will be reinterpreted using AI and 3D modelling. Using TouchDesigner, a visual programming tool, these digital assets will then be scripted to move and shift in direct response to the collected recordings (i.e. the audio will drive the movement of particle clouds, point clouds, and 3D reconstructions, creating an immersive, responsive display that evolves throughout the day). In this way, Sunderland’s past, present and future are woven together to become animated digital sculptures grounded in both lived experience and collective memory, a poetic take on the concept of ‘time’.