West Ward Works in Dundee was home to the printing and binding of DC Thomson’s comic publications, Beezer, Twinkle, Sparky and Topper, for over sixty years before the facility closed in 2010. Across its four floors, vast factory rooms now sit empty, their concrete and brick surfaces producing a reverberation time of around nineteen seconds.
An impulse response was captured on the factory floor by positioning speakers at one end of the space and a microphone at the other, playing a sine sweep, a signal that moves through all audible frequencies, while the building’s physical response was recorded. This allowed the acoustic character of the space to be extracted and used as a compositional tool.
The resulting compositions were developed using modular synthesis, with each piece shaped around the measured acoustic properties of the space. The project was commissioned by Sion Parkinson for Songwork.
