Sonic Histories of Cork City

Past Sounds: In this podcast series, meet the researchers uncovering the lost sounds of the past. Their projects to reconstruct past sounds can tell us something important about real people’s experiences, and they can also tell us about ourselves and our world today. In the first episode of series 2, the past and the present overlap, through a collaboration between two different ways of approaching sound. Elaine Harrington is an archivist, working to preserve sound through her work in Special Collections at University College Cork. John Hough is a senior technician and trained in film sound design. They work together to use historical sources like film scripts, recreating past soundscapes for SHOCC – Sonic Histories of Cork City. They also record present day sounds, which quickly become historic, as Cork continues to change. Cork’s historic docks are slowly closing, being cleaned up and redeveloped, while tourists snap photos of the last ships coming in and share them on social media. But who will snap the sounds of the docklands? Elaine and John race to collect disappearing sounds, because of John’s conviction that hearing the past is not at all the same as looking at it.