Tapestry: Sounds of a 5G Orkney [5G RuralFirst]

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ROLE: Creative Producer, Lead, Photographer, R&D - Harvard

CLIENT: Cisco, Orkney City Council, CloudNet Solutions; 5G RuralFirst

5G RuralFirst is the most ambitious rural testbed within the UK government’s six 5G trials.

After successfully creating and launching the Me+Moo Connected Cow App on our test farm in South West England for phase 1, the government gave the project more money for a then unheard of phase 2 extension. We decided to look to our most remote use cases situated in the Orkney Islands as our challenge, an archipelago off the northeastern coast of Scotland that is one of the least connected places in the UK.

With a limited extension budget and the very high benchmark set with our phase 1 activation garnering shy of 1BN media impressions- we thought we’d turn to the islands themselves for inspiration. Working with Orkney-native composer Erland Cooper, we’ve brought together the core elements of our project and some of what makes this remote place so special through the power of sound and music. This is a sonic portrait of a connected Orkney, woven from the untapped potential of our rural areas: https://5gruralfirst.org/orkneysounds/

To achieve this, we came up with 5(G) elements: Land, Sea, Air, Connectivity, and Community as inspiration being we had use cases on the islands that matched up to each, and incorporated field recordings we collected at our test sites.

We also invited the local community to submit their own recorded sounds of Orkney not possible before through new connectivity capabilities, and developed first of their kind 5G-enabled remote microphones in house which we planted around the islands to live stream real-time back to Erland’s studio in London.

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Recording from the microphone at Skaill:

All of these combined, paired with his own recordings and passion for his hometown, informed Erland’s ambient masterpiece entitled ‘Tapestry’ in honor of George MacKay Brown’s “An Orkney Tapestry” poetry novel which was the first book that put Orkney on the literary map.

The track is hosted on our responsive campaign webpage using a native interactive audio player we built which marks where each element is present in the track and allows listeners to click each to find out more about that element/use case through video and copy we produced.

"Who created those videos? They're beautiful and so like our Orkney, nothing like the usual awful tourist stuff" -Local Orcadian at premier

The creative direction behind everything that ties it all together was inspired both by Erland’s own raw aesthetic, but also by the title of Tapestry- we went with a natural tone double-exposure theme weaving different film photographs visually as Erland did audibly. We felt this also strongly represented Orkney and its heritage.

The track was premiered locally via BBC Radio Orkney featuring an interview with Erland, where we hosted a community event at St Magnus Cathedral in Orkney showing the making of film, and an extended-cut video to accompany with the song premier. It was also premiered globally on BBC Radio 6:


Galen Driver