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Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

08 October 2024

Posted by Harley Truslove

Hear This!

We had a full house of writers this evening, which meant we had plenty of creative minds to come up with wonderful work from Ali’s auditory prompts! The theme of the session was ‘soundscapes’, and Ali started our writers off by getting everyone to close their eyes and listen to a series of sounds, then jot down what sort of ideas those sounds evoked (there was a very mixed reaction to these sounds. Some of our writers enjoyed it, others found it to be like an anti-ASMR video).


Here are the sounds and what they reminded our writers of:


  1. Nails on a cardboard box - Scratch cards & desperation, talons on sandpaper, rain when you’re in a car.

  2. Bells on a necklace - Someone wearing jewellery down an alley, Christmas fairies and bells, shattered glass on glass.

  3. Maraca - Cicadas, rattlesnakes.

  4. Humming - Scotland/the show Outlander, a siren song, breezy day in the meadow, a sombre funeral, the moments after a battle.

  5. Lentil chips bag - Someone being bound in bubble wrap, newspapers, astronauts, walking on broken glass, shoes on a sticky floor, someone throwing stuff into a fire.

  6. Thunder noisemaker - Sisyphus' boulder, spaceships, people on the other side of a battle in a valley, something rolling away, death roll through a tunnel, thin windows, old steam train.

  7. Rice on a metal lid - Shaking a salt shaker to get rid of spirits when making a circle, a box of beads when making a bracelet, twigs rolling down a hill, rain on window, static across sky, sand timer, fingernails on the roof.


Ali then played a stormscape sound effect and got our writers to come up with a story where they were awaking in the middle of a storm. She asked everyone to think about how they got there and challenged them to focus on what they could hear but not see. After a few minutes of writing she went around with the Box of Wonder, getting everyone to pull out a sound effect domino to add into the scene. After a few more minutes of writing everyone passed along their sound effect to the next writer and had to include this new sound too! In the end, our writers gave us stories of girls wearing the wrong outfit in the rain, people kidnapped by bullies and bound to chairs, and a main character in love with their best friend but trapped inside a metal box.
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