Falkirk Wheel, Panoramic view.

Falkirk Wheel, Panoramic view.
Image by Cameron Lyall, GNU license Wikimedia

17 June 2011

The Sounds of Verdant Works


The Verdant Works is/was a jute mill from the days when Dundee was Juteopolis, the principle maker of jute materials. Jute is a fibrous plant that after processing can be woven into spools and then into larger sheets and materials. Jute provided the sails for the British Navy as well as the coverings for the covered wagons heading west in the United States.

The mill is currently kept as a museum of Dundee’s past. The mill still has jute on hand to process. Though none of it is exported, it is kept for demonstrations. A striking feature of the mill was the sound and noise of the mechanized looms and the other machines that processed the jute. I was able to obtain an audio recording (thank you Zach) of the machines. There was only one machine running at a time, but even so it was loud. On the wall behind the machines were pictures of row up row of them. They all would have been running at once.

I’ve edited the audio recording to show the sound of one piece of equipment and as it goes on layering in copies and slices of the machines to try to recreate something like the sound of being in the mill. For the full effect, hook subwoofers up to your system. Put your speakers on full volume. Then get the rest of the computers in your residence to do the same thing. And if you friends are nearby have then get their speakers as well. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll know how loud it was in a mill.

1 comment:

salvo said...

Love this, Ross. When I played it in the classroom, I thought the folks in the Economics office would come over and ask us to quiet down ;-)