Aberdeen SoundPark

Aberdeen SoundPark

A large-scale sound and music event to be performed in and projected from four locations in Aberdeen city centre. The performance examines issues around space, place and identity, using the city centre as a kind of ‘theme park of sound’ where residents and visitors can ‘play’.

‘Aberdeen SoundPark’ explores the richness and variety of the sonic and musical landscape of the city, as well as providing an uplifting celebration of its spaces. An immersive sonic experience over a period of 30 minutes, including recognisable sounds of Aberdeen (church bells, ship horns, seagulls), mingling with music and words reflecting Aberdeen’s past and present and displaying the lived experience of the diverse community of Aberdonians. On top of this, the audience will enjoy specially composed music played by local brass players, performed in all four locations and explore the distances between them.

As our daily lives begin to recover from the pandemic, the artist hopes that the people of Aberdeen will gain a positive sense of well-being from this “sounding” of their city, following this strange and uncomfortable period of time, when access to spaces was restricted and a sense of identity challenged.

Pete Stollery is a composer and sound artist, living (Aberdeenshire) and working (Aberdeen) in NE Scotland for over thirty years, having moved to the area in the early 1990s, to work at Northern College and the University of Aberdeen.   

An active member of Aberdeen’s cultural life for many years, as Vice Chair of Culture Aberdeen until 2021 and as founder and Chair of sound, NE Scotland’s new music incubator. Much of Pete’s creative output has used Aberdeen and NE Scotland as both a stimulus and often directly as a resource, many pieces having been made using sound recordings made in the city over many years.   

Pete creates music for concert hall performances, particularly music performed over multiple combinations of loudspeakers; he also creates sound art for outside the concert hall, including sound installations, sound walks, and internet-based sound maps. Pete’s main interest as a creative artist is in how humans respond to the sounds in their immediate surroundings, in particular, sounds that are not necessarily intended for listening purposes; he is even more interested in how this engagement with sound relates to an idea of place, and how that helps people to develop a sense of identity through sound.