Sagrada (unfamiliar) was created for the Sonic Heritage project organised by Cities and Memories, where composers and sound artists were invited to respond to one of around 200 sounds from World Heritage sites around the world.

I chose to work with a recording, made by Serge Bulat, of the interior of the iconic Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain. This 4½ minute recording captures the enormity of the space, as well as providing a stage on which small sounds can play.In my sound art practice, I normally make my own recordings, using this activity as the first stage of composition. Working with recordings made by others can sometimes prove difficult without that initial engagement with the sound, however, as I had visited the cathedral a number of times in the early 2000s, I at least have a visual and aural memory which allows me to have a sense of ownership of the sound and to deploy that memory when working with it.

 As with all recordings made in large spaces, it is not only the vastness of the spaces which is interesting but also how humans often behave in them. In cathedrals, like the Sagrada Familia, there is a tendency to lower one’s voice to a whisper, perhaps out of reverence, perhaps so as not to be heard by others, as sound travels differently in these spaces. Not so for young children and babies, who often use the long reverberation times to play with sounds, letting out short vocalisations to hear what comes back. This can also happen in other large spaces, such as libraries, art galleries, shopping malls and caves.

I decided to add to Serge Bulat’s recording, delving into my own recorded archive to find similar spaces which I could then juxtapose with the original. The piece starts with the Sagrada Familia and is soon joined by an art gallery in Aberdeen, Scotland and a shopping mall in Buenos Aires. Early on, a trio of children’s voices interact in the space where we are listening, made up from children recorded in these three very different, yet also similar spaces – soon railway station concourses in New York and Glasgow are added and further spaces are added as the piece develops.

Deep listening to the original recording suggested that there was an underlying pitch to the recording – around F# - so I teased this out and as the piece gains momentum, the pitch takes over in the form of a low drone, overwhelming the original recording as what we are listening to gradually becomes more and more unfamiliar.

Thanks to Serge Bulat for the original recording and to Mark O’Keefe for the trumpet F#, recorded in the cavernous acoustic of the University of Aberdeen’s Institute of Medical Sciences.