BEHIND THE SCENES with Melanie Wilson

Where did the idea for "The View from Here" come from? What inspired you to make the piece? I was asked to make this piece around the theme All Day Everyday, which posed a challenge for me to begin with because I find I tend to make work that is idiosyncratic and peculiar. So I decided my chance to contribute something meaningful to this theme might reside in regarding the preciousness of everyday moments of tranquillity, beauty, or rarity from a position of remove. Where the everyday became something completely desirable and utterly unattainable. And I happened to be reading a lot about climate change at the time. At the time of making the piece, I was also writing a script for a new solo performance and was tying myself to my chair trying to make headway with it. Making "The View From Here" was meant to be a little treat, a pleasing diversion from the other business, but I think that those sensations of exile with the other script also got a bit of light in the theme of this one too. The sounds in this piece are beautiful in their subtlety. Did you have a sound design for the piece in mind before you started putting it together or was that something that developed organically as you created the piece? And could you talk about how you approached the narration

The sound really took its cue from the writing. I confess, my conjuring powers for sound effects were outstripped by the images on a number of occasions. I decided to narrate the piece by "performing" it, by which I mean I recorded it in bed with my DAT. I was keen on getting a slightly pathetic, querulous quality for the patient's voice, that voice one has when lying down. My choice to voice the other characters too though was more conceptual, partly as an attempt to push the piece down a more ambiguous, psychologically internal path, and partly because I like doing silly voices. A single voice entertains the possibility of an oddly schizophrenic wrangle in one person's head; a conversation between conflicting voices of surrender, exhortation, and exasperation

Was it difficult to imagine the world as a sightless person? How did you make that imaginative leap

I suppose that the narrative of the piece utilizes the predicament of a sightless person to engage with more universal impulses towards aspiration, fantasy and escapism. Which is a sightlessness of the present that everyone can be prone to from time to time, a sort of insight. I very much hope that that doesn't sound glib or cheap, but in truth it might be that imagining the world as a sightless person also functions as a metaphor for a person coping with a profoundly caged sense of powerlessness at their situation, but who has recourse to the stock of memory and the ameliorating effect of imagination

Do you approach a broadcast project differently than one that accompanies an installation or some other physical art project? Is there a different process in creating sound for different types of media? It's a more concentrated process I think, and there is an adjustment to be made in conceiving of time. In performance, it seems to me that sound hangs heavier in the air, but is often dispersed quicker, as it's never completely divorced from a visual or physical partner. I think this means that there is an intense precision attainable in creating sound for broadcast, which I find immensely pleasing. I often feel like the predominantly sound-based pieces I have made have been more successful in poking ideas or preoccupations I had when starting them. Or maybe it is that they open up to reveal something further underneath, rather than dealing out more cards, like performances can do. I think I am sort of obsessed by the notion of story being only a partly domesticated creature, which is as unpredictable as it is mesmerising. I find the clearer the edges of a story are, the wilder the creature gets. But I do apologise for such a ridiculously cliched metaphor. "The View From Here" comes from All Day Everyday , a series that aired on Resonance FM and offered weekly "reflections on the mundane and the miraculous." This piece itself evokes everyday sounds. Do you, personally, think in terms of sounds on a daily basis? If so, what sounds most stick out for you and why? Did your personal approach to everyday sounds affect this piece? Living in London, I find I often go about filtering sound out of my daily life, rather than factoring it in. I am very fond of sounds that creep in and out of audibility, that travel or exist at the very limit of consciousness. I enjoy walking towards a busker in the tunnels of the Underground and hearing their music echoing, drawing near and then fading away. I suppose it's the narrative in that scenario that appeals to me. And also the space, I very much like to hear sounds that indicate the drama of a space and one's context within it: eyelashes brushing against a pillow or timber dropped from height in a construction site. Lovely. There's dread in everyday sound too though. It can indicate routine and be unwelcome and oppressive. An inescapable reminder of discontentment and distance yet to travel, and this is what I was getting at with "The View From Here." There's nothing quite like quotidian sound for putting you in your place, and yet the magic of it also being that it can put you in other places too, and in a trice.