Sounding Peace

Sounding Peace is a digital artwork by Dr Joseph Young that re-imagines memorialisation. It centres around conversations with military veterans and their experiences of peacekeeping/peace enforcement missions, and how this has affected their ideas about peace in the world.

Six older people sharing memories in a Sounding Peace workshop

As part of the project, CEEUPS' Dr Hannah West collaborated with Dr Young to lead a small series of workshops in Belfast, gathering veterans’ thoughts on the subject of peace and peacekeeping. Hosted at the UNTOLD Belfast site, we explored what peace looks like and sounds like for the veterans involved as well as opening up to broader discussions about peace in contemporary Northern Ireland.

At the workshops, participants were asked:

  • Tell me about your experience of serving on a peace-keeping/peace enforcement mission, or as the partner of someone in that situation.
  • Why did you decide to join the military?
  • How has serving in the military affected your ideas about peace and peacemaking?
  • What is peace? (Exploring questions of peace in the home, the wider society and the role of the military in defending democracy.)
  • What is the sound of peace?

Recordings from these sessions – anonymised by AI voices – will initially become part of the oral history archive of UNTOLD: The Collections & Archive, with the possibility of being used later to form part of a new audio sculpture, Sounding Peace.

Sounding Peace logo

Taking Buckminster Fuller’s concept of the Geodesic Dome as its visual inspiration, the proposed sound sculpture will consist of a multitude of voices arranged in a virtual dome or augmented audio reality environment.

The project as a whole aims to install a number of these sonic sculptures in public spaces in military garrison towns across the UK, and in museums and galleries internationally. The sculptures will be geo-fenced in the vicinity of existing war memorials and in museums, to prompt reconsideration of these spaces as sites of memorialisation by expressing veterans' perspectives on peacemaking.