Sweet Long Sighs is an audiovisual composition made using composition, field recordings and archival recordings of Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic speakers collected by the Irish Folklore Commission between 1935 and 1971.

The commission’s archive, now held within the National Folklore Collection, played a vital role in the preservation of Goidelic folklore, heritage and language, with the collection now an important resource in cultural revival. This audio-visual composition uses the sound theories of Brandon LaBelle and François Bonnet to think about how the mediation of the archival voice across space, technology and time enables and disrupts connection and memory.

Using ambisonics to place the listener inside an acoustic space to revoice and recontextualise the voice recordings of the archive. By placing and treating the archival voice recordings according to their non-semantic register, we can explore how the content the Commission didn’t intend to capture such sighs, laughter, clicks and hisses can allow us to connect with a body, place and time we no longer have access to.

The project takes its title from T.E. Brown’s poem ‘To the future Manx Poet’:

“Old Manx is waning,

She’s dying in the tholthan. Lift the latch,

Enter, and kneel beside the bed, and catch

The sweet long sighs”