Sound

View previous and next items

The National Gallery is collaborating with Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication on 'Transcriptions: Sound’, an innovative new project which involves sound design students producing a three-minute response to a painting of their choice in the Gallery's collection.

If this text remains on screen after the page has loaded, please install Adobe Flash and enable Javascript.

From the sound artist:

This is one of three paintings Gallen-Kallela made of Lake Keitele, north of Helsinki. He was inspired by the Finnish epic poem 'The Kalevala', which tells the story of the mythical hero Väinämöinen, the son of the wind, whose magical voice enchanted the forest and all he encountered on his journeys. The disturbed lines in the painting represent Väinämöinen rowing across the lake playing his kantele, a traditional Finnish stringed instrument, which he made from the jaws of a pike. The atmospheres recorded here are all original; the bird sounds are pheasants.

James Murray