Sound and listening
Recent work
‘Sounding the Past’ with Fiona Brehony
Sound walk with Fiona Brehony along the River Gout, for New Mills Festival in September 2025 to explore how sound connects memory and place while listening for traces of the areas’ industrial past.
Facilitator - Field Recording and listening workshop in FACT Liverpool - April 2025
Lead Artist - ‘An Inquest Concerning Teeth’ - soundwalk on Crosby Beach for Liverpool Independent Biennial 2025, commissioned by The Royal Standard. Read more here
Crosby Beach (Alex Marcus Davies)
Sara’s work often explores the overlap between human experience and the natural world, and she is interested in how listening can connect us to places, and each to other.
Sara runs a soundwalk collective, Sound Pals, exploring the neighbourhood sounds of Liverpool through active listening. With this project, in addition to testing different listening techniques and theories, Sara wants to explore how active listening can build appreciation for the green spaces close to home, and build connections between people in the local community. Follow on Instagram and message to join the Whatsapp community.
Sound Pals
Princes Park (@saltinmyshoe)
Current work
Picton Play Soundwalk
A geo-located soundwalk as part of the end of Metal Culture’s Picton Play Project. Through creative workshops with local Wavertree community groups, participants were invited to write about a particular place in Wavertree that means something to them. Using original music, interactive sounds, field recordings and voicenotes from the neighbourhood, Sara created a sound map that can be explored in the Echoes app.
Read more here
‘Sounds of Goodison park’
An archive of the neighbourhood sounds of the stadium in the months leading up to its closure. She recorded the sounds of the streets during the final six matches of the season, to document the sounds of the neighbourhood, ahead of the drastic change for businesses and locals. This will be presented as a sound map, as well as a sound installation.And an ambisonic microphone build with Mali Draper…
Gary Lambert
Soundwalk March 2025
On our first soundwalk we walked in a loop around Otterspool Park in Liverpool.
The group walked for about an hour and a half, and afterwards we had a coffee and spoke about the things we heard.We spoke about how challenging sometimes it can be to get our ears tuned in to active listening and how nice it was to listen in silence together with others. The Otterspool soundscape featured the sounds of spring birdsong, wind through the leaves and people jogging, all against the backdrop of the very noisy Aigburth Road. Although at some points during the walk you could barely hear the traffic!
I made a soundmap for each person on the walk, mapping out the route, our stopping points and the landscape around it. I also created a list of writing prompts, inspired by some of Hildegard Westerkamp’s writings on soundwalks.
