The Voiceline

2022 marks the Centenary of the first scheduled Radio transmission ever made in London.

Vanguardia (a Buro Happold company) is delighted to support Nick Ryan Music in the VoiceLine project to celebrate 100 years of the BBC. Nick Ryan is a multi-award-winning composer, sound designer, artist and audio specialist who has developed the VoiceLine installation.

VoiceLine is situated at the site of the first BBC broadcast at Marconi House. In 1922 the radio station 2LO, which later became the BBC, made its first broadcast on the 857 kHz band. This frequency corresponds to a wavelength of 350 metres. Nick pays homage to this by creating VoiceLine in the shape of the same wavelength.

The VoiceLine is an immersive sound installation consisting of a series of 39 L’Acoustics loudspeakers. The audio content has been drawn from the 100 years of BBC broadcasting and specially composed sound and music.

We are proud to be involved with Nick Ryan to celebrate 100 years of the BBC. Nick’s audio installation is a clever mix of recordings from the BBC archives and interviews with students at King’s College. The BBC is a world-famous institution and I have been proud to have been involved in a number of projects over the years including BBC Pacific Quay, BBC Mailbox and now the BBC’s move from Maida Vale to Stratford.

Daryl Prasad, Director, Buro Happold

A development such as VoiceLine usually requires planning permission, which typically requires a noise assessment. Vanguardia works alongside artists’ sound engineers and local residents to establish and maintain sound levels, ensuring the optimum audio experience is achieved with minimal complaints from residents.

We worked with Nick Ryan to take a series of sound measurements from the installation to understand what the typical source levels are. These levels were used to generate a 3D computational model to predict the sound at the nearest noise sensitive receivers. The results were compared against the existing ambient levels and using national and local planning guidance we were able to determine the overall noise impact. The results of this assessment were provided in support of the planning application for the installation.

Over the next 100 years the sound of cities will change beyond recognition and perhaps for the first time we are able to choose how our public spaces should sound. The VoiceLine installation and its novel sound technologies enable us to transform a thoroughfare (that for the last 300 hundred years has been known only for the disruptive sound of vehicles) into a continuously evolving auditory world with immersive sounds of voices nature and music. I hope the unique sound instrument I’ve created will identify Strand once again as an iconic destination for listening. The VoiceLine celebrates the histories of radio and listening that began on Strand 100 years ago and changed the world.

Nick Ryan, composer, sound designer, audio specialist, and the artist behind The VoiceLine

Over three months The Voiceline will fill The Strand with a programme of immersive audio drawn from 100 years of BBC broadcasting and specially composed sound and music, marking this location, once again, as an iconic destination for listening.