Many of the recorded sounds are untreated and merge with the real engine sounds.

The effect of this is as much to encourage a musical interpretation of the real sounds as to increase the source awareness of the recorded and transformed sounds. In Living Steam a deliberate confusion arises between the reality surrounding the musical work and the work itself such that elements of the real soundscape of the performance space become conflated with the sound from the loudspeakers and vice versa.

‘Realistic’ or representational spatial distribution of sound in Living Steam serves, then, not so much to represent a possible reality, as in Boomtown, as to call into question the actual sonic reality of the performance space itself. It is not only the real sounds of the steam museum that are heard but of those of an imagined steam museum, in which the sounds are the raison d’être of the engines, in the hope that when the piece is over the aesthetic mode of perception will remain, and the audience’s perception of the everyday soundscape of the museum will be transformed.

The tape opens with the sound of the Waddon engine starting up. This engine has a very characteristic deep growl (bass bins were positioned in the Waddon enclosure to accurately reproduce this sound). During the performance it was arranged that the Waddon itself would be activated toward the end of the piece. The result was a kind of recapitulation of the opening sounds, so most of the audience were unaware that this sound was, on its second occurrence, coming from the engine itself until the tape finally dropped out and the live sound continued on its own.

Another moment of strong interaction between the recorded sounds and the live sound came from the Dancer’s End engine which needs to be set to a start up position using a thick iron bar. The sound of this features prominently in the piece and is placed in its untreated form in the loudspeaker associated with that engine (sometimes along with a resonated echo in one of the further roof speakers. During the performance the engine driver was cued to start up the Dancer’s End at the first entry of the barring sound (which is introduced by a long stretched out transformation of itself moving freely through the space) resulting in an eerie duet between engine driver and tape.

Actual Audience Reaction

In practice many people were surprised how little of what they assumed was live actually came from the engines. In particular, the recordings often magnify details of the sound that are normally inaudible. Another common experience reported by listeners was an inability, after the event, to remember the music separately from the overall impression of the space. Other visitors, while obviously displaying a heightened awareness of the aural dimension of the experience, seemed unaware that they were hearing anything other than the sounds of the engines, asking which engine was responsible for the ‘musical’ sounds.

The overall effect could be summed up by Walter Siegfried’s useful expression a “soundtrack to reality” (Siegfried, 1996) The work is experienced as a part of the