Custodians is a site-specific sound installation developed for Copped Hall’s State Hall through close collaboration with the Copped Hall archive and Essex historical archives, where I worked alongside archivists to research and gather materials connected to the Hall’s layered history. This process led to a pivotal discovery: a set of interview recordings made in the 1980s with former workers, then in their nineties, who had lived and worked at Copped Hallin 1917 and were among the last surviving eyewitnesses of the fire that devastated the house that same year. Rather than presenting these testimonies as neutral documents, I treated them as a fragile, partial “living archive”: the voices were composed, layered, and electronically transformed into near- ungraspable traces—memories hovering at the edge of intelligibility. A core compositional tool was the Sonic Planimetry of the State Hall: an acoustic survey mapping resonant frequencies and spatial response. Each narrative was then processed through a comb filter tuned to the room’s natural resonances, allowing the architecture itself to act as an instrument that shapes what can be heard. Four black-cloaked mannequins, each with a megaphone in place of a head, form a small chorus of “guardians”; as visitors move, the balance between these custodians shifts, revealing overtones, obscuring details, and turning listening into a mode of reading the site.
