Sonic Trail

Sonic Trail

Free Entry (12PM - 4PM Daily)

Step off the beaten track and into the Sonic Trail, the imaginative soul of the Ramsgate Festival of Sound. This curated, self-guided journey of site-specific sound installations invites you to explore some of Ramsgate's most unique locations through a single, well-tuned sense: your ears.

Running alongside the first weekend of English Heritage Open Days, this year's trail responds to the theme 'Everyday Histories', celebrating the meeting point of local history and sound art. Every piece is a new work, specially commissioned by the festival, crafted to dialogue with its environment and turn familiar historic corners into extraordinary sensory discoveries.

Grab your map, open your ears to the unexpected, and enjoy the Sonic Trail, open 12 to 4pm daily.

Sonic Trails:

Magz Hall  - Hellfire Radio Replay 
A Copper Web: Thanet Ether

In December 1928, Ramsgate became an experimental zone for Rediffusion. In the early days of wireless, radio sets were costly and the spectrum was volatile, with atmospheric static and constant chatter from RAF Manston's military aircraft drowning out over-the-air signals along the Thanet coast. Rediffusion sidestepped the problem entirely: a high-gain master aerial captured weak waves at a central hub, then cleaned, amplified and re-diffused them over a physical grid of wires into rented household loudspeakers, turning chaos into an affordable, noise-free sanctuary

Under Siege

During WWII, Thanet became the frontline known as Hellfire Corner, and this domestic listening network shifted from entertainment into vital civil defence infrastructure, carrying air-raid warnings shielded from enemy radio-direction finding. This era also gave rise to polyethylene, a polymer declassified from top-secret radar research and used to insulate the network's cables. Physical traces remain in older Thanet properties today, though the material's petrochemical legacy, persisting for centuries as toxic microplastic, is now pushing the electronics industry towards bio-based alternatives.

Re-Diffused Warfare Today

A century on, Rediffusion's architecture still shapes modern electronic warfare, where long-range transmissions are quickly jammed or intercepted. Today's tactical networks rely instead on mobile strategic hubs, airborne drone mesh networks and self-healing Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET) of infantry radios, vehicles and balloons. Meanwhile, war's sonic and visual fallout is re-diffused globally through social media, smartphones replacing loudspeakers to relay drone footage and frontline clips within seconds, a paradox in which hidden coordinates and viral trauma exist side by side.

In the Gallery: Signals Over Silence

Inside the gallery, invisible frequencies take on sculptural weight. The room is webbed with recycled polyethylene cables, highlighting petrochemical persistence, these synthetic vines mapping out the 'Thanet Broadcasting System'. A set of red radios relays the work as a looping meditation on transmission and human resistance from the home front. The sonic composition features narrated teen accounts of survival during the Ramsgate bomb strikes of WWII, bridging past and present by weaving modern jamming techniques, sustained drones and electronic textures through electromagnetic frequencies.

Thanks

Produced by Magz Hall and mixed with recordings from her recent 101 Arts Base Frequency Residency, with huge thanks to the artists who joined her for a collective jam at the Greenham Peace Garden in the summer, plus recordings made during a residency in the Pyrenees and composed material on the Colossus Synth at the University of West London's Townsend Studio, drone, radio and war sounds.

Narrator: Ewart Backhouse-Hall. War accounts based on the written accounts of John Side and Thomas Solly.

Excerpts from Magz's 101 Arts Greenham Peace Garden Jam with @annaweatherston, @aswarm_works, @awoodheadmusic, @chrislittleboat, @a.city.of.dreams, @doska.animation, @empeasgood, @ezra_gray_audio, @graeme_leak, @hallmagz, @ideasofnoise, @invisibleray, @jamesfozfoster, @jon_somerscales, @katkatmusic, @linett_kamala, Lorna Rees of @gobbledegooktheatre, @_mark__anderson, @martinwest789, @margaretfiedlermcginnis, @niwidmusic, @noisytoys, @richiesmith3602, @shlinga_makes_sounds, @soundinterventn, Paul Streetly, Tim Hill and Sam Chappell.

About Magz Hall

Magz Hall at 101

Magz Hall is an award-winning sound artist, radio pioneer and practice-based researcher working in expanded radio and sound art, embedding wireless technology into everyday objects and environments to explore spectrum, climate change and airspace.

Socials:

Instagram: @hallmagz

https://magzhall.com/

https://magzhall.com/2026/07/23/hellfire-rediffusion-radio-relay-redux/

Carson Parkin-Fairley - Happy Mondays Model Village

Happy Mondays is an inclusive weekly wellbeing and social lounge on Ramsgate High Street, attended by vulnerable adults, people living with mental and physical health challenges, individuals with SEN, families and local residents. Creative sessions for the Model Village are led by artists Ellen Russell and Elinor Seath.

First exhibited at Arts in Ramsgate in March 2026, the Happy Mondays Model Village is transformed for the Sonic Trail into an interactive sound installation combining sculpture, storytelling and sound. It builds an accessible archive of local memory, celebrating personal connections to everyday places, from beloved local businesses like the Village Grill and the Haberdashery to the ordinary spaces that have shaped community life, stories rarely captured in official histories.

Socials:

Instagram: @carsonparkinfairley

https://www.carsonparkinfairley.com/

Sadie Hennessy - Museum of Unrealistic Beauty Standards

The Museum of Unrealistic Beauty Standards (Sadie Hennessy)

“I only have to open my phone to be bombarded with endless posts, ads and reels suggesting the myriad ways I could improve my unruly face and body. The procedures on offer grow more extreme, and yet have become increasingly mainstream. Botox, facial peels, fillers, liposuction, waxing, dermaplaning, Brazilian butt-lift, there is a whole new vocabulary to be learnt in the quest to defy time. THE MUSEUM OF UNREALISTIC BEAUTY STANDARDS reflects, literally, on the absurdity of this. Visitors wander through a hall of mirrors, perusing displays of beauty equipment as though they were artefacts from a far distant and less evolved age.”

About the artist

Sadie Hennessy

Sadie Hennessy is a multidisciplinary artist whose roots lie in collage, expanded into immersive environments and events reflecting the zeitgeist and everyday life, approached through metaphor, melancholic humour and, increasingly, performance. She won the Jealous Graduate Art Prize in 2010 for her Central Saint Martins MA show, was Screen Print Fellow at the Royal Academy from 2016 to 2019, and is held in the UAL and Victoria & Albert print collections. Her Sonic Trail history includes the now-legendary Fat Balls installation in Vale Square (2020)

Socials:

Instagram: @memphishennessy

www.sadiehennessy.co.uk

Rod Stewart Bird Table (Fat Balls): https://sadiehennessy.co.uk/projects/5803134#17

Andrew Dennis - The Postal Museum

The Postal Museum (Andrew Dennis)

Details to be announced.

About the artist

Andrew Dennis co-created the Mixtape 88/00 exhibition for the 2024 Festival of Sound, also shown at Hold Creative Spaces and Medway Open Studios. He co-designed Teenage Kicks, a one-day music festival for 13-19 year old musicians and photographers held in Ramsgate in 2024 and 2025, and delivered the Vincent in Ramsgate arts and history project in 2026. Andrew moved to Ramsgate in early 2025 and works as a self-employed Careers Adviser across Kent schools, alongside delivering the award-winning Love Where You Live photography project for young people across Kent and the South East.

Socials:

Instagram: @TeenageKicks88 @Mixtape88_00 @LoveWhereYouLive2026

Michael Isaacs - SEEN Presents BAHA

An immersive sonic trail installation by deaf slam poet Michael Isaacs, located inside the historic Ramsgate Train Station. This listening piece explores Michael's personal journey with progressive hearing loss and his Bone Anchored Hearing Aid (BAHA), navigating the world through vibration using the station's natural acoustics and reverberation.

Katie Blythe & Henry Collins - Montefiore: Within Earshot

Henry Collins

Presented inside the Italianate Greenhouse once owned by Sir Moses and Lady Judith Montefiore, this immersive sound installation explores the sounds that may have shaped their travels, their Jewish faith and their relationship with Ramsgate. It takes inspiration from a perhaps apocryphal story that Sir Moses, whose hearing declined in later life, considered installing a listening tube connecting East Cliff Lodge to the nearby Montefiore Synagogue; real or not, the idea becomes the starting point for imagining what may have existed within Montefiore's earshot.

Visitors listen through sculptural tubes inspired by Victorian assistive listening technology, ear trumpets and speaking tubes, each carrying a different fragment of sound: a Sephardi synagogue service, the machinery of the Kentish Montefiore windmill in Jerusalem, the seaside bustle of Ramsgate, and traces of the places the Montefiores visited, including Jaffa, Marrakesh and Odesa. Combining archival research, field recordings, oral history and imaginative reconstruction, the work creates a layered portrait of Jewish life, memory, travel, ageing and listening, inviting visitors to encounter history as something still resonating through place.

Katie Blythe

Ren - Spore Listening

A continuous, drop-in sound work built from field recordings of the Margate Mushrooms Farm: a 20-minute loop you can join at any point and stay with as long as you like. What you hear is a living system most of us never pause for: the hum of growing rooms, moisture in the air, substrate settling and the barely perceptible sound of fungal growth. Not all everyday histories are human, some are being written in substrate and spores, just beneath hearing.

Artist bio

Ren Kainth

Ren Kainth is a climate sound artist based in Margate, working at the intersection of ecology, deep listening and the more-than-human world. Recording only with contact, induction and hydrophone microphones, Ren listens through surfaces and into liquid rather than across a room, making audible what usually sits beneath hearing: substrate settling, water moving, fungal growth. Trained with the Center for Deep Listening and School of Machines.

Socials

Instagram: @renizhii

Matthew Smyth - Process & Reality

The geometry of Ramsgate under a microscope, dubbed up and spaced out under the watchful eye of mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (born in Ramsgate, 1861).

INPC creates unnerving textures with drum machines pulsing alongside the local seagulls, flashes of reverberation, heavy bass, and the ambience of Ramsgate, cut and paste to create an unsettling yet hypnotic atmosphere.

Process and Reality sees Ramsgate in a state of tension, magnified and distorted, rendered in vivid colour. The beautiful becomes the absurd, encapsulated in a sea of paranoid noise.

About the artist

Matthew Smyth

Matthew Smyth, aka INPC, began using turntables to manipulate sound in 1990, performing in numerous bands and ensembles in forms ranging from hip hop to dub to free jazz. He was also one of the original team that set up Ramsgate’s own Pie Factory Music in 2001.

Primarily working with electronics, computers, and found sounds, he produces music as INPC and as one half of the Folktronica duo Liotia. He is also the engineer/programmer at the long-established indie label On U Sound.

Recently, Matthew has begun distributing his own music via the RSS protocol (a digital technology that underpins much of the internet) in an effort to promote a more independent way of distributing music.

Matthew shuns corporate social media in favour of the Indie Web, self-hosting his own tech stack on a tiny computer. He uses infrastructure that bypasses the vampires of Big Tech, taking the DIY ethic of punk back to the internet.

Sonic Trails - Sunday Specials:

Sunday only

Julia Jane Heckles - The Tea Break: A British everyday history (One-off Sonic Trail)

Step into the Tea Break! Britain's daily ritual comes to life through a one-off sound and visual art installation. Join art historian Julia Jane Heckles for an interactive journey down tea-break memory lane, exploring the visual art, design history and political story behind the British workplace tea break, set to a soundscape of tea-inspired music, remembered voices and familiar tea-time sounds. Share your own workplace memories on the community story wall and slow down over a cup of tea: a celebration of shared history as much as an art talk.

About Julia Jane Heckles, contemporary Flâneur who probes societal norms

Julia Jane Heckles

Julia Jane is a Ramsgate-based fine artist and art historian originally from East London, whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, conceptual art, sound and audience engagement, with a research background in Victorian to Modern art history (1848-1939). She holds a BA in History of Art and an MA in Fine Art by Research, and is the creator and speaker behind the VOICES on ART talks.

Socials
Instagram: @VOICES_on_ART

Chase Coley - The Long Stringed Instrument

Performance times 12:30, 13:30 & 14:30

Details to be announced.

Bob & Roberta Smith visits Vincent van Gogh

Bob & Roberta Smith

150 years ago, Vincent van Gogh made Ramsgate his home, and we are delighted to have access to the house and the room he lodged in. Ramsgate-based Bob and Roberta Smith OBE RA, a devoted van Gogh admirer, brings his own artwork 'Van Gogh's View of Ramsgate' to the artist's former bedroom, a rare chance to connect with two artists who found inspiration in Ramsgate's skies and seas 150 years apart.

Please note that the bedroom is on the 4th floor of a private home.

Only 6 people at a time will be able to be in the room so if its busy please be patient while you wait to enter.

Locations:

Accessibility:

SEEN Presents BAHA - A Sonic Trail by Michael Isaacs

Artist Presence:

Michael aims to be present throughout the Sonic Trail, though due to his health conditions specific hours with the artist cannot be guaranteed. The installation remains fully active and accessible throughout opening hours.

The Listening Experience:

• Format: a focused, headphone-based listening experience; headphones provided on site.
• Duration: approximately 15 minutes.
• Movement & comfort: sit on the station seats to relax while listening, or wander to feel how sound interacts with the building.
• Staffing: looked after by Festival of Sound staff at all times, in a safe, supportive and well-managed environment.

Venue & Transport:

•  Step-free access: Ramsgate is a Category A accessible station, with level access from the car park into the booking hall, and lifts and ramps to all platforms via the station subway.
• Station audio: induction loop systems throughout.
• Parking & taxis: 3 dedicated accessible parking spaces, plus a taxi rank and bus connections directly outside.

Toilets & Amenities:

• Toilets: fully accessible, stoma-friendly toilets in the main Booking Hall, open during staffed hours.
• Food & drink: an on-site buffet/cafe kiosk and Selecta vending machines.
• Water: bring your own refillable bottle, free accessible drinking water fountains are available across the station.

Sensory & Digital Accessibility:

• Hearing aid integration: compatible hearing aids or cochlear implants can stream the audio directly, with a 3-step guide available on site.
• British Sign Language: a dedicated BSL performance of the poem ECHO is available alongside the audio.
• Tactile experience: replicas of the hearing aid headbands Michael wore before his BAHA operation are available to handle, conveying the sensation of bone conduction.
• Printed matter: RNID leaflets, an exclusive zine on the making of the Sonic Trail, and Michael's poetry anthology are available for purchase.