We worked with the team at Imperial War Museum to reimagine what the end of the First World War might have sounded like for their Making a New World season. They asked us to create an interpretation based on a unique piece from their archive: a section of film called the End of the War which shows a before and after recording made by a ‘sound ranging’ unit at the end of the First World War, on 11 November 1918.
Interpreting an image
The End of the War shows a ‘recording’ made on film (magnetic tape did not exist at the time) of sound pressure impulses picked up by ‘sound ranging’ equipment stationed along the allied front.
The purpose of this equipment was to try and determine where enemy guns were positioned by analysing the length of time it took sound impulses from the firing of guns to arrive at the allied front. The equipment above would have had six ‘microphones’ (indicated by the six parallel lines on the film) whose signals were recorded simultaneously on the film recorder. Specially trained analysts would then try and decode the patterns on the film and use them work out the positions of enemy guns, a process called multilateration.
How effective sound ranging was in locating enemy guns in World War 1 is not known, however, the document above does give us a great insight into how intense and chaotic the barrage of gunfire must have been to those fighting. The missing section that has been edited out of the film in the middle of the image also begs the question “what would those 2 minutes have sounded like?”
Forensic sound
Using this document, the team at IWM were keen for us to try and create an interpretation of how this ‘missing’ moment might have sounded as the introduction to a series of exhibitions they were working on to commemorate the centenary of the end of the First World War.