Lucinda Guy
Lucinda Guy is a composer and sound artist exploring broadcast radio as a space for democratic participation and creative expression. She is a researcher with Transtechnology Research at the University of Plymouth, looking into the use of automation in broadcasting. She is the creator of numerous works for radio and live performance, encompassing ritual, song, improvisation, and participation, frequently drawing on hymns, dreams, and traditional music and enquiring into landscape and ritual. Since 2006 she has been the artistic director of Soundart Radio, the community station for the Totnes area of South Devon. Lucinda is creator of Skylark - an unique FM radio station for Dartmoor that began broadcasting in 2020 and gives voice to the landscape. An ever-changing and continuous broadcast weaves together oral histories, new music, and live audio streams from people, animals, plants and weather into an endless and evolving song. It can only be heard in Dartmoor National Park or nearby two transmitters broadcast on 105.8 FM from Princetown and 107.6 FM from Holne.
‘Over five years of planning, imagining, daydreaming, composing and chatting, I have been trying to solve the puzzle of how to achieve this in a way that absolutely is radio – socially, culturally, legally. How to get a full time FM radio licence, and fit all the legislative criteria, whilst doing everything differently.’
Skylark’s creator, Lucinda Guy
"Skylark blends the scripted and unscripted, clean sound on professional microphones with rough on a cassette tape or phones, the outdoors with echoey village halls, new content and archive. And it enlists the human ear and brain to make sense of whatever material appears together. Many of the immersive recordings of Dartmoor’s wildlife are produced by Skylark’s chairperson, Tony Whitehead, a Dartmoor based artist and conservationist, with an interest in the sounds of the natural environment, especially bird-song. Lockdowns provided Tony with a unique opportunity to record on his daily walks, when the absence of traffic allowed animal voices to be heard more clearly."
Photo by Annemarie Bala