Deep tones - Mineshaft recording captures carbon

“It was odd, but really fun,” said Adam Cooper of his time spent helping to record the sound of an empty coalmine. “To put it in one word, I’d say it sounds cavernous. But it also has its own complexities and depth.”

- Mark Brown

Cooper and his colleagues spent time down an old drift mine to capture the “sound of carbon” for a musical commission that will premiere this weekend. The piece includes the reverb of the mine as well as music played by colliery pit bands and interviews with former miners and their families.

Titled Ancestral Reverb, it was commissioned by Durham Miners’ Association and will be heard for the first time at Durham book festival on Saturday.

The recording, in a mineshaft at Beamish Museum, County Durham, involved blasting out different sound waves into the space and recording what came back.

“You subtract the original waveform from what comes back so you’re left with the sound of the space,” said Cooper. “But you need to blast out lots of different kinds of sounds to get the full effect.” Those sounds included white noise and jazz drumming. “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.”