Sound is the medium I work with and during my first visit to the Liddell site, the turbines were still operational. You can hear how this sounded in the Liddell Tuning Drone. This was an extremely loud sound that had been running constantly for fifty years or more. It would have had a huge effect on any living thing that relies on sound to communicate or locate itself.
The sounds I tried to gather on this trip were completely masked by this noise. Upon my second visit, the turbines were shut down and the site was close to silent. Sonically, this is like knocking the sand off a pharaoh’s tomb. Many of the sounds heard in the Liddell Symphony would have been there, however, never heard by the people who frequented the space.
One of the employees talked about the creativity of the people who worked there. That because of the age of the facility, it required a passion and ingenuity to keep the station running for so long. I found this particularly inspiring. I’m still shocked by the sheer amount of noise that I encountered on the first visit. The sound and physicality of the space certainly matched in behemoth scale.
Watch the Liddell Symphony video here.
Below are some of Huw’s intriguing photos from his time collecting sounds from the Power Station.
