+ WHO?
Marcin Dudek & Mark Burman
Collaborations:
OOF Gallery
+ WHAT?
The building as an organ within the urban ecosystem?
+ HOW?
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The Ground Harbours the Soul is a three-part audiovisual installation, resulting from long-term research into the sound of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (London, UK). The driving concept of this work is the idea that the sound of a crowd inside of an athletic stadium is an experience which impacts the individuals producing it and those hearing it: connecting them to the collective consciousness of the crowd, influencing their emotions and, later on, their memories of the event. This project aims to consider the phenomenon as a whole, from the more positive aspects of crowd behavior to the more calculated or dangerous aspects of mega-events: cheers can be uplifting, but insults can quickly escalate to violence; the stadium itself is full of sound cues, meant to direct behaviors from orderly passing through turnstiles to consuming products sold inside. The three parts of the installation represent the emotional cycle of the event, from the tension rising during the journey to the stadium, to the adrenaline rush of the match, to the cooldown (or crash) following the game.
Each part is composed from a variety of materials: cork, representing the organic shell of the body; a range of different speakers, inserted in various ways into cork or plexiglass; sound recordings, produced by the artist and his partners during Tottenham Hotspur matches, and abstracted to varying degrees. The project was first shown at OOF Gallery, which is located inside of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium vicinity. It engages with the urban dimension of sound, as it reflects on stadiums and athletic mega-events as an essential part of the sonic landscape of the city, functioning (as it has throughout much of history) as an emotional outlet for the densely populated social fabric. The project includes a digital component, which is currently in development with CERTH – a digital archive of the recorded sounds, organized into different categories (e.g. single voice, multiple voices, architectural sounds, etc), which will be made freely available on the artist’s website.
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Tools and Methodology: Curated Datasets
The artist is currently in the process of developing a sound archive, using the AI tools made available by the consortium, notably Universal Source Separation (a diagram of the preliminary results can be found below). This archive will contain the recordings produced by the artist and his partners at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium during the course of the residency, organized into specific categories, and made freely available online on his website. The objective of this tool is to share information to inspire reflections on the sound of the crowd, which is not considered as simply a unique and spontaneous event, but as a somewhat systematic expression of the human experience of mega-events.
Preliminary results diagram
Collaborations
These recordings were produced by the artist, together with sound designers Mark Burman and Jon Calver, with the recording assistance of Paul Kobrak and Louis Morand. They were produced using a variety of microphones, including contact microphones, rifle microphones, binaural microphones, and more. Access to the stadium for recording was granted by the Tottenham Hotspur team, made possible by Eddy Frankel and Jennie Hammond of OOF Gallery, who also organized the first presentation of the project inside their space. The project was enriched by discussions with Beatrice de Gelder and Antonio Camurri, who offered insights on the mind and on the transition from the live sound of a mega-event to a recording played on the scale of an individual listener.
Impact
The outcome of this archive has yet to be evaluated, and will only be possible with the benefit of hindsight: long-term, the objective is for this archive to serve both scientific and artistic pursuits, as an encyclopaedia of sounds which shape daily urban life.
The physical portion of The Ground Harbours the Soul, which consists in a three-part audiovisual installation, has been presented once in a solo exhibition at OOF Gallery, which is inside of the vicinity of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. This exhibition will be presented a second time at BASE Milano in the autumn of 2025, alongside the other ReSilence residents, and a third time in January of 2026 in Brussels. Each time the installation is presented, it reaches a new public, which allows for a new vision on how the work impacts the world around it. The first presentation opened to enthusiastic feedback and engagement, from a public which is closely related to the subject – visitors to the stadium where the sounds were recorded. The second and third presentations will involve a different audience, but one could expect a similar level of engagement, as the experience of athletic events is a very common one across many cultures, and the project deals with wider themes such as memory and crowd psychology.
On the theme of crowd psychology, the sound archive currently being developed by the artist and CERTH might be useful for a variety of reasons, including research into the movement of crowds. The moment where an individual becomes part of a bigger whole is difficult to capture, and the variety of recordings made available and organized by factors such as tone and number of voices might be very useful for a social scientist. The recordings will also exist as a document of certain cheers in a specific space and time: the way that cheers, chants, and boos sound is culturally specific, and might interest anyone looking into contemporary football culture in the UK.
Lessons learned:
The Ground Harbours the Soul has yielded a variety of interesting results. One surprising element, which appeared during the recording sessions, is the importance of architectural sounds inside of the stadium, which often go unnoticed. The project began with an interest in the sound of the crowd, but in the process of recording, Marcin and Mark discovered a range of sonic cues that subtly shape the experience of visitors inside the building: turnstiles click to guide movement through the passageway; plexiglass partitions vibrate as they absorb sound to separate sections; ATMs ding to invite open wallets. This is one example of an observation which emerged from the recordings – as each person approaches the project with their own curiosity, they might notice some other new thread inside of the recordings.
Artistic, Social, Technological, and Urban Benefits:
This project contributed to the Pilot Use Case 3 (the Sound of Urban Spaces) by documenting a large, urban stadium in London, and studying it as a unique and important part of the soundscape of the city. The Ground Harbours the Soul blends these sounds with sculptural elements, to present this research into a common experience of urban life. This approach has merit on an artistic level, with a pathway into the social sciences. Artistically, it encouraged Marcin Dudek to find novel ways to integrate sound into his visual practice, and opened a creative channel for Mark Burman, who usually works more as a journalist. The result is an installation which engages multiple senses, sharing thoroughly researched information with a poetic quality. The cork shells evoke the body, both of an individual and of a crowd, while the car speakers play careful compositions of fragmented sounds, capturing the emotional highs and lows of a game day. The concept which is developed here, and the sounds which are shared in the installation as well as the archive, contribute to an understanding of the stadium as an important part of the social fabric: a place where an individual can break from daily life, and experience a sort of catharsis in a semi-controlled environment. This idea can be gathered from the project, and expanded upon using the information that is shared online.
Adaptability / interoperability:
The Ground Harbours the Soul has multiple entry points for those interested in expanding upon this research. The nature of an artistic project means that it can inspire others in endless, unexpected ways. For example, an earlier series by the artist has recently been featured in an article by Oliver Basciano for OOF Magazine, where the writer uses Marcin’s collages as a visual metaphor for imprisonment in stadiums (a power structure which the artist had researched for this series). For social scientists, or anyone interested in crowd psychology, the online archive will offer a breadth of information, pre-sorted and organized both with the help of AI and with the artist’s critical eye. Both the physical artwork and digital archive are an open-ended set of information that can be freely consulted.