VOICES REQUIRED Share YOUR Professional Lockdown Experiences... whatever your job!

Help me make a series of new compositions reflective of the effects of cover-19 on various professional practices across the Irish workforce! I’m now collecting spoken word accounts of professional changes, troubles and incites revealed through the challenges of Ireland’s ‘lockdown’ and working from home.

Will the ‘new normal’ be a radically different Ireland? What is perhaps interesting now at this time for many professionals lucky enough to be working from home is that the opportunity to create change in professional practice seems greater and more necessary than ever. There have already been devastating consequences from lockdown for many and yet there exists somewhere too an elusive blueprint for how things may change for the better in many vocational practices.

Between August and October 2020 I’ll be hosting a series of 1-2-1 zoom encounters with teachers, trades people, taxi drivers, restaurant managers, health professionals, musicians, and other professionals. My purpose here will be to compile a speech archive elicited from a variety of Irish work experience throughout the lockdown. Contributions can be anonymous and I would love for YOU to contribute a few ( or many) words to this work, whatever your background or experience. Through my musical analysis of speech melodies I have come to ‘meet’ many people who’s voices, accents, inflections and maxims for life have found their way incidentally into the heart of some of my work. It’s a strange kind of intimacy I know. Please think on this invitation to have your voice of lockdown experience recorded in musical time.

Excerpts of voices contributing to this project will be brought into a spatial, musical and conversational relationship to one another.

Just send me an email through the link below to set up a short 2-20 min zoom recording (as long or short as you like). Only small selections of audio will be kept for musical treatment, I’ll not be using any video of contributors. Again, all contributors will remain anonymous, so you can feel totally free to articulate your lockdown woes, gripes, hopes and more, there’s no ‘right’ response here, it’s whatever you’d like to say, especially about working from home, losing work, suspending college plans, discovering new freedoms, challenges to home life… it’s all good! Let’s set up a short zoom call.

Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their support for this work through the Covid Response Award 2020.