Sound mirrors

Seaham sound mirror photograph

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Seaham sound mirror in 1976 (Photo: Ivor Parrington)

Ivor Parrington has sent the Seaham Family History Group a 1976 photograph of the now demolished acoustic mirror at Seaham.

This is the first picture that I have seen of it. As had been reported, the design looks like the World War I sound mirrors at Boulby, Redcar and Sunderland in the northeast, and the one at Selsey in Sussex. The sketch of the reported mirror at Hartlepool looks the same too.

This would date the Seaham mirror to about 1916.

Apparently there is nothing left now, but the location has been identified as being here:
Probable location of Seaham sound mirror

There is some discussion from people who remember it and a painting of it at Seaham Scenes.

(thanks to Raymond Thompson of SFHG)

Dutch acoustic research in the 1920s and 30s

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

The Museum Waalsdorp near Den Haag reflects the history of TNO Defense, Security and Safety at location Waalsdorp (and its predecessors) since 1927.

At the Waalsdorp site, Dutch scientist JL van Soest investigated the use of listening equipment for aircraft observation by the army, developing his own equipment. The Van Soest apparatus was a great success and has led to industrial production for the Army.

The museum’s website has an interesting short history of Dutch sound location. From the first world war until the 30’s air acoustics played an important role in the air defence. Air vehicles carrying a weapon could not be located from the ground e.g. at night time or under cloudy conditions. As radar was still to be discovered, vision had to be supplemented by hearing using the sound of the engines.

Sites of Special Sonic Interest

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Scott Hawkins has been documenting, cataloging and performing at Sites of Special Sonic Interest across the UK. I classify a performance as any kind of physical interaction resulting in an audible product. Here, looking into the eye of the Sound Mirror at Kilnsea on Spurn Head, the wind (persistent ghostly presence) combined to produce and aerophonic ambient extravaganza.

Disinformation and Sound Mirrors

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Roadside Picnics – Disinformation and Sound Mirrors

by Joe Banks & Caroline Grigson

The following text was written in 1997, but did not appear in print until it featured under the title “Antiphony Architectural Supplement” on pages 57-64 of issue 6 of Sound Projector – an experimental noise magazine published in 1999 (Sound Projector is still going strong, but issue 6 is no longer available). The “Antiphony Architectural Supplement” was published to document and explore ideas suggested by the imagery of the Disinformation “Antiphony” double CD and “Antiphony Video Supplement” (later retitled “Blackout”) – both created in 1997, which featured images by photographer Julian Hills and film-maker Barry Hale of air defence Sound Mirrors found at various sites on the UK coast.

….

The solution was provided by an article by W. Harms in Shortwave Magazine, which described a series of massive concrete monoliths which still stand, slowly crumbling into waste-land at a site near Dungeness in Kent. These structures, built in the 1920s and 1930s, formed a primitive experimental early-warning system – several elegant, but extremely austere concave shapes designed to allow the precise triangulation of directional-fixes on the distant sounds of incoming enemy Zeppelins, aircraft and ships.

These shapes rise up out of the Kentish shingle like the strange ceremonial relics of a dead civilisation or unknown tribal culture (and if you consider military R&D as an anthropological entity as well as a purely technical enterprise, then perhaps this interpretation is not as wild as it seems). Appearing alongside a picture of the abandoned Church of St. Giles in the village of Imber (the ghost-town on the tank-ranges of Salisbury Plain) and digital artwork representing the anthropomorphic slang of the RAF, the sound mirrors provided photographer Julian Hills with his Disinformation ‘remix’ for “Antiphony”.

Extensive literature and archive research has so far uncovered a total of seventeen mirrors, sixteen on the Kent and Yorkshire coasts, and one at a site in Malta (which, according to Casemate magazine, is “approached through a slurry of cow muck and dead chickens”). Ten of these can still be visited today, one is buried, two have collapsed, while there are four more mirrors whose status remains, from my point of view, unknown. Architecturally many of the sound mirrors look as though they could have been designed yesterday, and it is on close inspection that they their true state of distress is revealed. It is hard not be impressed by this geometry – the striking contrasts between elegant, concave parabolas and their rough textures, their impressive solidity and substantial physical forms.

More at /seconds

Kilnsea sound mirror on the BBC

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

A huge concrete dish, pointing at the North Sea from an East Yorkshire field, was once a vital part of Britain’s defence system says a BBC video about the Kilnsea acoustic mirror.

The interview with local historian Jan Crowther is part of the BBC Look North programme’s Abandoned series with Matt Richards.

Matt was recently in touch seeking information for a proposed broadcast about Drewton tunnel on the old Hull & Barnsley Railway.

History of the Future of War Noises

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

The Sound Mirrors: A History of the Future of War Noises is a July 2008 article by Ithamar Silver from Le Panoptique.

Although “not part of architectural history proper,” a series of moss and graffiti covered ruins along England’s southeastern coast belies one of the more grandly misguided displays of national insecurity to be produced by the tumult of the twentieth century. The remains are as imposing and impenetrable as any fortress—yet these were not traditional fortifications meant to withstand an enemy onslaught, a fact that renders their solidity largely palliative.

They were, essentially, ears.

(where it says one in Boulby that had somehow been transformed into a private residence, it should presumably read “Selsey”)

Abbot's Cliff sound mirror
Meanwhile, Peter Frost has sent this photo of the Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror, which he came across whilst walking towards Dover from Capel-le-Ferne in Kent.