Harrisville Soundscape

About Harrisville Soundscape

In 2020 I was commissioned to create a piece honoring the 50th anniversary of the nonprofit Historic Harrisville and the 150th birthday of the town itself. The result was the piece Harrisville Soundscape.

Composer Barry Truax defines a soundscape as follows: 

The essential difference between an electroacoustic composition that uses prerecorded environmental sounds as its source material, and a work that can be called a soundscape composition, is that in the former, the sound loses all or most of its environmental context...In the soundscape composition, on the other hand, it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced, and exploited by the composer.

In the town of Harrisville, the mill buildings and the streams are two major landmarks. They also provide two major soundmarks—the sounds of the streams and the mill. 

I created this soundscape of the Town of Harrisville, spanning 1870 to 2020, by imagining the sounds of the past and listening to those of the present. The bass line in the composition is the sound of the stream which flows in and around the mill buildings of Historic Harrisville. Then various distinctive sounds enter, each conveying, in chronological order, an aspect of the town:

• The horses and wagon/carriage and steam locomotives speak to the earlier town of the industrial era; steam engines prior to electrification and the introduction of the internal-combustion engine.

• The Model T automobile heralds a new era for the Cheshire Mills. The narration describes, in vivid imagery, the sounds enveloping the town and is accompanied by the spinning machines of the mill, along with dance tunes (which would have been heard in Eagle Hall above the General Store on dance nights).

• In these last 50 years, with the closing of the mill, new soundmarks distinguish the town—the hand looms of Harrisville Designs, the voices from Children’s Center, and the conversation and bustle at the General Store.

• Ending the composition is the soundmark heralding the future of Harrisville—the turbine powering not only the mill, but the town!

I hope you enjoy this soundscape and are inspired to go out into your world and listen.

You can listen and read more about the piece in this article on the Historic Harrisville website. You can also hear the piece above and follow along with the handwritten score below.