Explore Map   Listen to Introduction  

Combining illustrations, cartography and audio recordings, this poetry map and score, remaps West Bromwich High Street. When you move around the map, different locations are paired with field recordings collected by sound artist, Lorenzo Prati, poet and artist, Lee Mackenzie and Sandwell Visually Impaired community group.

SoundScribe, a global majority collective, has provided this accessible guide. Audio description is written and voiced by Elaine Lillian Joseph and sound descriptions are by Shivaangee Agrawal.

The map is always accompanied by a background soundscape that incorporates a subdued wash of traffic sounds, the good folk of West Brom’s chatter and bird calls. When you hover over different locations on the map with your mouse, you can listen to over 40 sound clips layered on top of this soundscape. Each sound clip appears as a circular dot fixed along the top edge of the map along with an expanded description of the sound, captioned along the bottom edge of the map. To the right of the circular dots you can toggle between autoplay and skipping through each track, you can access the entire playlist at ‘List Sounds’ and adjust or mute the volume according to your preference.

The audio described tour will make 10 stops. Each stop will give a sense of the visual elements of the map, interspersed with Lee’s impressions and memories of that place. This however is just a suggested route. Deviate, explore, revisit the same place as many times as you desire. Listen at your leisure at home, when you’re on the go or even travelling around the High Street itself.

Split into four clusters with smaller offshoots, the map can be read in a wiggly route starting at the bottom left corner, where the tramline and bus station are horizontally parallel to each other. Above these is the high street, which is represented in two halves that also run parallel to each other. On the map, you can think of them as the upper high street and the lower high street. The landmarks on the lower street are upside-down. The third cluster, one level higher, is intersected by a long diagonal road, pointing north west alongside three bridges. To the far left of this cluster is the title: West Bromwich High Street, poetry map and score by Lee Mackenzie, Lorenzo Prati, and Sandwell Visually Impaired. The final cluster occupies the entire top quarter of the map and consists of a park, pavilion and pond.

Black thin-nibbed pen illustrations inked on top of a pencil draft sketch out birds in flight, wilder grassland and brownfield sites. Lee captures the smallest architectural details of buildings in clean, geometric lines. In the bottom left corner there is a key within a square border. It explains that the map contains a mixture of stave and spectrogram notation. All musical notation is in grey. The first is a spectrogram which is a graphic representation of bird calls plotted along two axes. Time is the horizontal axis and pitch (going from low to high) is the vertical. They are to be interpreted by performers as ‘melodic gestures’. Lines of poetry also accompany the spectrograms.

The second type is stave music - this is standard Western music notation. All stave notation begins with a G treble clef unless otherwise indicated and offers suggestions about tempo, dynamics and phrasing. This map is to be played wherever it is on display. Use an instrument or your voice.

The stave inside the key extends beyond the lines of the border into the map itself, stretching from the left edge to the right becoming the musical tracks of the tramline. Conveniently, this is where Lee suggests you begin your tour!

Best viewed in landscape mode, turn your sound on and scroll around to explore.