This app is produced by Unlimited Theatre in collaboration with Storythings and the Product Research Studio at the University of Dundee. It is made possible with funding from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts (NESTA, ACE and AHRC).
The app is best experienced using headphones.
Scroll upwards and down to read the text.
Tap/click the screen once to dismiss character names, and once again to show them.
Tap/click a character name to show a short character description.
Tap/click the marker on the left of the screen to show a navigation pane, which allows you to jump to different sections in the text.
Tap/click the menu marker at the bottom of the reading screen for text, colour and sound options.
Tap/click on the markers on the right of the reading screen to view relevant notes.
A remote island in the Southern Ocean.
A noise that never stops.
A massive iceberg in the harbour.
A body in the water.
And an 17-year girl who is the only one asking any questions.
The island of Whitley (nr Antarctica, population 600) is home to 'The Noise' – a weird, ever changing, always present sound that makes the islanders … different. Nobody knows what causes it and, because it's all they've ever known, everyone has stopped asking. Only 18-year-old Charlie and her best friend Harry, a local scientist, are still looking for the answers.
When a massive iceberg drifts impossibly into the harbour one night and a body washes up soon after, Charlie finds there is no one left she can trust and sets out on her own to uncover the truth and the source of ‘The Noise’.
The 'Make Some More Noise' project is among the first generation of the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts supported projects. Its aim is to test how emerging behaviours around mobile reading devices and technologies can help the performing/live arts to create new forms of digital storytelling based on the live experience.
For our research process, we recruited a 'Community Lab': a group of 20 participants from West Yorkshire, who worked with us through a series of open- source ‘co-design’ workshops between June and October 2013. These workshops allowed the potential users of the product to see the technology involved at every step of the design process. Together we explored the opportunities that tablet devices and digital publishing can offer artists and audiences in creating immersive and theatrical reading experiences.
Read more about the experience of our Community Lab sessions here and here and here, as well as in this article published in NESTA’s digital magazine Native.
The result of this process is this digital version of The Noise, which uses elements of light, sound, atmosphere and pace to bring audiences closer to the immersive, theatrical experience of the core work. Concurrently, it is the launch of a tool that allows other artists, writers and theatre companies to publish and distribute their work in this new format.