West Bromwich High Street by Lee Mackenzie

We are excited to share a new digital commission by artist and poet, Lee Mackenzie: ‘West Bromwich High Street’ is an illustrated poetry map and musical score of West Bromwich that connects the High Street to green spaces, as part of Multistory’s urban greening cultural programme, Green Roots. The map contains drawings of many of the area’s well-known buildings and the sounds of the high street as represented in musical notations.

Working in collaboration with musician and sound artist, Lorenzo Prati, and with Sandwell Visually Impaired (SVI) community members, Lee led a series of guided walks and workshops using poetry, sound and writing exercises around the local urban and natural environment to inform his mapping of West Bromwich. From this, sound played an integral role in representing the town and prompted the question: how can we translate the sounds of West Bromwich as a musical score?

Sound recordings were made into musical notations resembling traditional Western stave music and spectrograms and integrated into the map at the locations where they were recorded by Lee, Lorenzo and the SVI community members. Positioned along the illustrated representations of the High Street and green spaces, the musical stave acts as a ‘road’ for an auditory exploration of West Bromwich.

The notations are for music readers to interpret and to also give a sense of the sounds of the local urban environment, with its beeps, market calls, revs and street music; it also notates the birdsong of Dartmouth Park, giving reverence to the quietude and openness of this vast park that is only fifteen minutes walk from the town centre. 

An accessible version of the map has been produced for blind and visually impaired users, by SoundScribe, a global majority collective of multidisciplinary audio describers and consultants who specialise in access for performance work, arts institutions and moving image.

Sound descriptions will be embedded into each digital point on the map, alongside access to an audio track describing a first-person perspective of a person wandering along the high street, encountering sounds and landmarks along the way. This version will be available on our website from mid-May 2024.

There will be a performance of the musical score used on the map at a celebratory event that will bring together the Green Roots activities that we’ve delivered as part of Sandwell Council’s urban greening scheme later on this year, in September, with more details to follow.

Click here to view the West Bromwich High Street Map.

“In Dartmouth Park, I could hear the birds, water, aeroplanes, children playing. It was a song like a hum and whistle.”

SVI member
MORE ABOUT THE WORKSHOPS HERE

Across October and November 2023, Multistory collaborated with artist and poet Lee Mackenzie in delivering two further workshops with Sandwell Visually Impaired (SVI). 

Part of the long-term mapping project, Lee previously worked with SVI in Spring 2023 where he collected their thoughts and responses of West Bromwich High Street, whilst on a guided walk led by The Wildlife Trust. SVI members expressed their impressions of the local environment through poetry, descriptive exercises and written/audio recordings.

From these initial workshops, Lee decided that sound and audio should be a central aspect of the digital map he will create, which will act as a visual and audio resource for communities and individuals to use whilst walking from West Bromwich High Street to Dartmouth Park and Sandwell Valley.

With this in mind Lee hosted two workshops with SVI members in late 2023. Taking the form of sound walks, Lee (and invited musician/sound artist Lorenzo Prati) worked with the group to record sounds heard on their walks.

Lee Mackenzie

(he/his) is an artist and poet who works on interdisciplinary projects centred on poetry and the visual arts. He has worked on various societally-engaged projects and is interested in the practice of ‘Poetry Mapping’.