Laganside: A Mobile Poetry Experience in Belfast

Laganside: A Mobile Poetry Experience in Belfast is an application for iPhone and Android smartphones, released August 2012. The application is an interactive sound walk that situates poems along Belfast’s River Lagan. Users are led to key riverside locations that trigger voice with accompanying film, music and soundscape on their handset. The app encourages an exploration of Belfast’s rich poetic culture through its unique sonic presentation of poetry in the redeveloping areas of the city.
Each poem is performed by its author and augmented with musical transformations of the voice and recordings of the Belfast soundscape. Some voices have been effected and transformed into abstract musical sound material in the spirit of electroacoustic composition. Accompanying field recordings follow the contours of speech rhythms, emphasising tempo and articulation. These are also manipulated with spectral processing in a surrealist approach to soundscape composition. Each poem is significant to a specific place along Belfast’s River Lagan. This creates strong a personal experience where sight and sound are enhanced through poetics. Oral narratives presented in the poems are given extra leverage by the listener’s surroundings in this novel approach to audio poetry.

This is a 15 minutes documentary film that captures the on-site sonic poetry experiences on the Laganside smartphone app. The film also features interviews with Laganside’s poets, as well as thoughts from members of the public who have experienced the sounds of Laganside.