Sounding the West Bromwich Way by Lee Mackenzie

Artist and poet Lee Mackenzie presents ‘Sounding the West Bromwich Way’ 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 have been embedded into each digital point on the map, alongside access to an audio track (below) describing a first-person perspective of a person wandering along the high street, encountering sounds and landmarks along the way.

There was also a performance of the musical score used on the map at Green Roots on the Meadow (a celebratory event that will brought together the Green Roots activities that we’ve delivered as part of Sandwell Council’s urban greening scheme.

Experience the poetry map here.

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'.