Wormit Reservoir exterior
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Wormit Reservoir

Wormit, Fife · Scotland
Reverberation Time
40 seconds

Wormit Reservoir was built in 1923 to serve the growing community on the south bank of the Tay, buried into the hillside above the village. War intervened before the population growth it was designed to anticipate, and the reservoir was eventually decommissioned.

Its sealed concrete interior, a subterranean chamber with hard parallel walls and no absorptive surfaces, produces a remarkable acoustic environment: dense, booming, with a long decay and unpredictable focal points as sound ricochets between surfaces.

The space has been used as a performance venue specifically because of its acoustic character. An impulse response was captured here as part of this project.

3D Impulse Response
Reverberation Time (RT60)
40 sec
Structure Type
Reservoir
Material
Brick / Water
Status
Decommissioned
Hear the Space
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Recordings
04 Tracks
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Tonal Layers
0:00
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Vol

Wormit Reservoir is a sealed concrete tank buried in the hillside above the village. Its geometry, low ceiling, hard parallel walls, no absorptive surfaces, creates an acoustically extreme environment where sound builds slowly and decays in complex interference patterns.

Built for water, not sound, the reservoir's acoustic character is entirely incidental, a consequence of the materials and enclosure of a Victorian utility structure, now emptied of everything it was made to hold.

The building has been decommissioned for decades. It stands as a monument to a now largely mechanised agricultural industry, its interior silence broken only by the occasional visitor.