Sound Pioneer Lottie Sadd: “I wanted to make the walls ooze”

Have you ever heard a 25-channel speaker system belch? As one of the six composers on our Sound Pioneers scheme, Lottie Sadd reflects upon her time in the University of Huddersfield’s SPIRAL studios creating a fantastically gutsy new work.

After graduating from university in 2018, I had a difficult few years trying to balance ‘pay the bills’ work with composing. Being selected for YSWN’s Sound Pioneers would have been my first professional composition work beyond university and I was set to begin in July 2020. That year went a bit wonky though (no prizes for correct guesses why), and I began my residency at the University of Huddersfield using the 25-speaker SPIRAL system in mid-August 2021.

I’d already conceived the idea for the piece I wanted to create by the February 2020 introduction session: I’ve always been fascinated by peoples’ gut reactions (visceral and bodily) to gross, weird things and had become intrigued by the physicality in ideas of the Grotesque and the feeling of repulsion.

This inspired me to consider how I might provoke similarly unsettling, physical responses using sound alone. I wanted to make the walls ooze, the air thick and close like clammy breath around the audience; I wanted to emphasise the baseness of the natural bodies we all are/inhabit and, moreover, to highlight the ordinariness of this grossness. Over the year that the residency was postponed, these ideas grew in pertinence with the focus on bodies brought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Using the SPIRAL was my first experience working in multichannel sound design. After an induction learning the technology, I had five days of unadulterated, uninterrupted (except for the University estates team entering the studio in the middle of some particularly belchy playback to replace a fire alarm) 9-5 composing – and it was the best, most (re)inspiring time I’d had in years.

The way I used the technology meant I could disperse sounds within a single recording around numerous speakers at different times, allowing me to create seamless movement of sound through space. This was all done manually which, for a chaotic piece, was possibly a longwinded way of achieving this movement. Having now built this strong foundation of technological knowledge, however, I feel hugely confident being able to experiment with other more intuitive options for spatialisation in my future work. In fact, the skills I developed during that week came immediately in handy for some multichannel work I created for a theatrical installation over September.

Coming away from the Sound Pioneers residency I felt my views on my composing process reshape. Before, I’d always felt that if I didn’t execute an idea the way I’d imagined it, then the piece was unsuccessful. Now, however, I view composing more as an alchemical collaboration between the original idea and the limitations of the technology being used to realise it: I had a firm concept for what I wanted to create which, when being realised through the multichannel technology which I was still learning, underwent an unimaginable transformation, and became a piece that I had not entirely foreseen.

With the time it afforded me to focus on what I love doing, the access to incredible space and equipment, and the opportunity to revaluate my practice, this residency was a truly formative and magical experience.

Lottie Sadd’s work ‘I’m made up of more space than I actually take up’ premieres at the hcmf// shorts 2 concert on 22 November.
Sound Pioneers is delivered by YSWN working in partnership with the University of Huddersfield, University of Hull, hcmf// and Brighter Sound’s Both Sides Now programme, and is supported by the PRS Foundation’s Open Fund for Organisations.
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