A professional musician is taking up residence in the remote wooden hut on the Cornish coast used by Guglielmo Marconi to transmit the first radio signal over the horizon, which led to the modern era of global telecommunications.
Joe Acheson will record the both the natural and man-made sounds of the Lizard coastline in Cornwall as part of the first “sound residency” of the National Trust, which owns the historic wireless station and maintains the nearby coastal footpaths.
Mr Acheson will tape the sounds of everything from the crashing waves and distinctive calls of the Cornish chough, a member of the crow family, to the noises made by the restored electronic equipment housed in the wireless hut used by Marconi in the early 1900s.
“While I’m staying in Marconi’s historic wireless hut I’ll be making recordings of things that were not intended to have aesthetic qualities, such as whirring cogs, ticking clocks and tapping Morse codes,” Mr Acheson said.
“I’m also excited about the possibilities of scanning the airwaves above Marconi’s wireless station with the help of local radio enthusiasts who use the hut today. I want to see if I can find any useful noise using techniques pioneered in the same hut over hundred years before,” he said.
The sound recordings will be added to the British Library Sound Archive as part of a National Trust project to capture the sounds of the British shores.Reuse content