Hearts, Lungs and Minds
August 20th, 2008 by Steve Bowbrick
Here’s an orgy of high-end medical sound for you: gurgles and pings, clicks and whirrs. A mesmerising programme recorded at Harefield heart hospital by sound artist John Wynne. The quiet voices of patients offset the clinical cacophany with their stories. The show went out in Radio 3’s Between the Ears slot in June and was accompanied by photographs taken by Tim Wainwright, including the one on the left (MP3).
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Thanks for your interest in my work - the hospital’s PR department spotted your blog and sent me the link. Tim, the photographer, and I have an installation based on our residency in the transplant hospital starting September 5 at the Nunnery Gallery in London. Info here:
http://www.bowarts.org/thenunnery/index.php?code=42
August 22nd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Great to hear from you, John. Loved the show. You could really do the Speechification community a favour by alerting us to future projects as they come up - and if you have any interesting audio you’d like an audience for, just drop me a line!
August 30th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
You can find out more about John’s radio work - including a clip from his previous ‘Between the Ears’ about the vanishing click languages of Botswana, ‘Hearing Voices’ - by visiting http://www.fallingtree.co.uk.
December 8th, 2008 at 8:19 am
[...] Hur låter ett sjukhus? Ljudkonstnären John Wynne utforskade Harefield hospital under ett år. Något av resultatet finns här (mp3). [via Speechification. [...]
January 5th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
My older sister is going to have a lung transplant at Harefield soon and hearing other people’s accounts of surviving transplants has helped me to understand her situation better. Hearing stories first hand is so much more effective than reading about them. A great piece of work - thank you.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Thanks for your comment, Victoria. One of the things we hoped the project would do was to help demystify the process, and we hoped it would be of use to patients and their relatives. Because we didn’t have a medical, personal or psychiatric agenda, the patients were remarkably open with us when we recorded them, and many of them said specifically that part of their reason for participating was to let people know what it was like.
We also published a book of essays, with contributions from a wide range of writers including the hospital psychiatrist, one of the heart transplant patients, David Toop (a writer on sound art), Charles Darwent (an art critic), Marcia Farquhar (an artist), Tom Rice (an anthropologist), Lesley Sharp (a medical researcher and writer). We also interviewed Magdi Yacoub, who more or less founded Harefield and has performed more heart transplants than anyone in the world. The book also contains a DVD by myself and Tim.
You can find out more about the book and DVD at:
http://www.sensitivebrigade.com/Transplant_book.htm