Two sonic installation projects will reinvent the tunnels at Fort Amherst in Chatham next week, as the Excavating Sound project by students on the Music and Music Technology programmes from the School of Music and Fine Art unfolds.

For one afternoon only, If The Walls Had Ears and Sonic Memories will re-shape the historic fort, originally built in the eighteenth-century to defend Chatham Dockyard, and its network of underground caves.

The synthesis of found and archive sounds across eight speakers around the tunnels forms the basis of the first installation’s exploration of particular moments in the tunnels’ history; whilst Sonic Memories will extend to the wider context of the fort through sound and visuals.

”The idea is to reconstruct an aural history of the tunnels and the audience can wander through as though they were walking through the tunnel’s memories” reveals curator of the If Walls Had Ears project, Thomas Graves.’Working with site-specific sound is a real challenge, as the tunnels are not designed as a sonic art venue and the technical requirements are quite strenuous – we need a lot of wiring! This sort of representative work really gets my mind buzzing and hopefully the space should come alive with sound.”

Excavating Sound takes place at Fort Amherst on Wednesday 8 April from 2-5pm. Find out more about the project here, and follow @ExcavatingSound on Twitter.