UK Music Project Records ‘Sound of Carbon’ in Durham Coal Mine

Professional musician Liam Gaughan, a project participant, records down a drift mine shaft at Beamish Museum. Ancestral Reverb / Threads in the Ground

Sometimes, sound tells a story. And what it says can be used to educate and improve environmental well-being.

The “croaks, purrs, and grunts” of a thriving coral reef and the “underground rave concert of bubbles and clicks” of healthy soil have both been recorded by scientists to boost ecosystem health.

Now, in a new piece premiering at the Durham Book Festival in England, the “cavernous” effects of a coal mine and the “sound of carbon” are being presented alongside music played by colliery bands and interviews with former coal miners and their families, reported The Guardian.

“It was odd, but really fun,” said Adam Cooper, director of Threads in the Ground — a self-described “climate hope organization” — who helped record the sound of the empty coal mine. “To put it in one word, I’d say it sounds cavernous. But it also has its own complexities and depth to it.”

The recording was made in a Beamish Museum mine shaft. It involved projecting various sound waves into the cave-like space and recording the reverberations.

“You subtract the original waveform from what comes back so you’re left with the sound of the space,” Cooper explained. “But you need to blast out lots of different kinds of sounds to get the full effect.”

The sounds used to produce the reverb included jazz drumming and white noise.

“It was a weird experience because you are standing there listening to the drip and the dredgey sounds of the mine and then you have a jazz standard blasting out,” Cooper said.

Durham Miners’ Association commissioned the recording — titled Ancestral Reverb — which is premiering at the book festival this weekend.

Cooper said interviewing the retired miners was humbling.

“There is a complexity because the stories are different depending on who you talk to,” Cooper said. “For some it is danger and the terribleness of the work and the lifestyle. Other people just tell stories about the lads they worked with – the solidarity and the pranks.”

The unique work combines the mine shaft recordings with music by a brass band made up of members of the Durham Miners’ Association, along with historic colliery pit band recordings from 1903.

The composition was put together by musician and producer DJ Bert Verso.

A spoken word piece by poet Jacob Polley accompanies the music.

Plans are in the works for an exhibition of the project and a vinyl record release embedded with coal dust.

Cooper said the timing of the project — in the same year as the last coal-fired power plant in the United Kingdom, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, closed, as well as the start of new energy policies by the incoming Labour government — seemed significant.

“It feels like a flux moment, an inception moment. We’re marking that with this unique music that is drawing on more than a century of history,” Cooper said, as The Guardian reported. “We are reinventing what it means to be human in this new climate reality. That’s why this piece is important, it’s giving people permission to exert their creativity in climate thinking and climate change work.”

A copy of the vinyl record will be donated to the British Library for future generations to be able to hear the sound of carbon.

“You and I, our generation… the changes we set in motion by 2030 will shape the future that all humans inherit and inhabit,” Cooper said. “There is an argument that we are the most powerful generation of humans that will ever exist, which is this incredible privilege and power that we hold. I genuinely believe future generations will look back on us and call us carbon reformers.”

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