Day Four: Sunday 9 November
10am-12pm: Talk 5
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
Andy Popperwell – Somewheres East of Suez: Eighteenth Century Voices
“Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.”
Dylan Thomas’s description of a moment in time as it passes through the fabled village of Llareggub. His words allow listeners to experience, through skilled actors, that moment in the poet’s imagination. A highly-skilled listener won’t even need to hear a performance, reading the text will suffice. As when a skilled musician can hear a symphony just by reading the score.
The past is always with us, but the further away it is, the more imperfect memories are. After fifty, sixty, seventy years, memories are no longer first-hand. More than 130 years ago, not sound or moving image. More than 180 years ago, not photographic. Further back in time – how to preserve memories- and indeed why – form questions central to my practice-based research.
For several thousand years, we have printed material, and many museums use recorded realisations of real or imagined people from such sources. My work, however, attempts to use only genuine original material and ‘authentic’ voices. My talk will demonstrate how volunteering at Copped Hall, a ruined 18th Century mansion near Epping, has led me to investigate new ways of bringing the past to life. I will present some key documents from the house in the 18th century, and, with the aid of two other speakers, will perform this material live.
The documents in question will range from builders’ estimates to Commonplace material as well as a 1783 diary by an unknown British officer in India.
My speakers will be former British Army Officer Gordon Brown and Honorary Royal Navy Captain Durdana Ansari OBE.
I will show how these discoveries and investigations have led me to creating, producing and presenting a series of live events entitled ‘Dark Tales & Strange Sounds’ where paying audiences at Copped Hall have experienced new insights into life centuries ago. My intention is to help listeners to understand what it felt like to live, to work or to support through the sweat of your brow this magnificent house. Apart from material directly related to the mansion, these shows have also examined more general 18th century crime and punishment, medicine, the slave trade, music and much more.
The next production will be on Saturday 22nd November – all welcome!
After reading Physics at QMUL, and a postgraduate year at the Royal College of Music, where he played the ‘cello, Andy Popperwell joined the BBC World Service as a Studio Manager, or Sound Engineer, working round the clock on radio programmes in forty different languages. In the course of his 20 years at Bush House, he did a variety of jobs, including science reporting, magazine programme production, producing for American National Public Radio and spending time on Ascension Island and in southern India. He was for five years Recruitment & Training Manager for the Operations department, responsible for finding new Studio Managers and giving them the skills needed for high-pressure live radio broadcasts.
A second career as a Further Education lecturer in Essex gave him 20 years of teaching radio production to 16-19 year old Media students as well as acoustics for those studying Music Technology.
Having retired, Andy undertook a Masters by Research at LSBU where he investigated the soundscapes of the 18th Century; he has now taken this interest to the next stage as a PhD candidate at the University of Greenwich.
His research is centred on Copped Hall, a substantial Georgian mansion on the edge of Epping Forest. It was ruined in a huge fire in 1917 and he is one of the volunteers who are restoring the building. Andy also volunteers at the Essex Record Office Sound & Vision Archive where he analyses hundreds of quarter-inch tapes while at the same time transcribing 18th Century documents for use in his popular Dark Tales & Strange Sounds events at Copped Hall.
In his spare time, Andy runs the Bushmen Cricket Club, the team associated with the BBC World Service at Bush House.
Gürkan Maruf Mıhçı – Virtual Reality (VR) Experience Prototype of the Ancient Derinkuyu Underground City in Cappadocia, Türkiye
This research focuses on creating immersive experiences by blending historical and futuristic elements. Specifically, I am developing a Virtual Reality (VR) experience of the ancient Derinkuyu Underground City in Cappadocia, Türkiye—the largest subterranean settlement in the world. By employing 3D mapping and sculpting techniques, I plan to reconstruct the complex’s key rooms within its underground architecture so that users can freely explore and interact with its layered historical narrative. In doing so, the project not only showcases Derinkuyu’s cultural and architectural significance but also foregrounds lessons about human adaptation in the face of environmental catastrophes. Through carefully integrated audiovisual storytelling and acoustic modeling, this VR experience will raise awareness of the climate crisis by illustrating how past communities leveraged resourcefulness and subterranean design to survive extreme conditions. By examining ancient strategies for temperature regulation, water conservation, and communal living underground, the project invites contemporary audiences to reflect on resilience and sustainable practices in an era of rising temperatures and ecological uncertainty. Merging 3D scans and architectural sections, I 3D sculptied several key rooms and will expand these scans into a fully immersive audio-visual VR environment. I have investigated Derinkuyu’s acoustic characteristics, and my expertise positions us to illuminate how ancient underground acoustics and spatial strategies can inform modern approaches to climate resilience and sustainable design.
Gürkan Maruf Mıhçı, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design at the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University Indianapolis, and co-coordinated the Foundation Studies program. He works as an affiliated researcher at the Center for SOUND/IMAGE at the University of Greenwich during his sabbatical research leave. He earned his doctorate in Design, Technology and Society, following an MA in Visual Arts and Communication Design, and a BFA in Graphic Design. He has been teaching communication and media design, and art at three universities for more than 17 years.Dr. Mıhçı’s interdisciplinary research interrogates the intersections of creative technology, critical theory, and media history, focusing on cultural heritage, motion graphics, video art and soundscape studies. His work has been presented at major international conferences and published in peer-reviewed proceedings and edited volumes. Mıhçı‘s work has been presented in international exhibitions and festivals. He continues to expand critical discourse on audio‑visual practice through collaborative projects in VR, generative AI, immersive media art, and data visualization.
Andrew Knight-Hill – Composing Heritage and Place – Site-Sensitive Composition Practices Around and Beyond the Museum
Showcasing recent collaborative projects, this paper will explore the potential of composition and sound design practice to create immersive multi-sensory experiences that connect heritage with memory and imagination to engage diverse audiences. Showcasing two case studies “Beyond” and “Around” the museum, we will position site-sensitive composition practice as methodological approach for integrating sound based electroacoustic composition practice into the museum. “Beyond the Museum”: Glasgow Requiem, developed for Glasgow’s 850th anniversary in 2025, is a site-specific sound walk that explores multilayered narratives of place through soundscapes and narrative voices. Audiences walk through the streets of Glasgow and around iconic landmarks (hospital, cathedral and necropolis) reflecting on life, death and urban transformation through immersive audio soundscapes on headphones. “Around the Museum”: Voyages is a composition made in response to the Cutty Sark and the collections of Royal Museums Greenwich, performed underneath the hull of the ship in June 2025 engaging the physical artefact of the ship itself and the specific acoustic features of its space and narratives of international trade and exchange, and technological design and development. These contrasting examples demonstrate how common methodological approaches in composition and sound design drawn from electroacoustic music can be applied to evoke response and create empathy with heritage and collections, animating the past through sound to deliver affective experiences that complement and extend traditional museological paradigms and unite sound as: artefact, soundtrack, art, phenomenon, performance (or event), spatial and immersive experience via technology.