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Submerged beneath the waterline, mariners and salts rest below deck between watches – their cradle song is the aching sounds of a ship against water. Unconnected to the passing trade, the nautical soundtrack transports wayfarers to an acoustic landscape of a vast and veiled world – a subaquatic acoustical mirage.

Reclined in the original cramped crew cabins, By the Sound of Things passengers can enter this subaqueous sonic reality – with deep ocean hydrophone recordings and man-made ocean noise streamed binaurally through headsets. This hypnotic 3D sound work was constructed by Davies inside an empty shipping container in North London. Made by layering analogue sounds from a range of sources – playing, recording, and replaying them into the reverberation chamber of this ubiquitous steel box.

As a prologue to the sonic voyage below, venture further into the bowels of the lower deck and view Davies’s observational film focussing on the world upon the surface where the machinations of the global shipping industry forge sonic trails across oceans to bring us our things; the necessary and frivolous, the coveted and the disposable.

The film presents a collision of the extraordinary and the banal that defines global sea trade – an absurd narrative of ordinary things. Containers loaded and unloaded, the rhythmic motions of the cranes performing an industrial scale ballet – nautical conventions, transactions and inhuman interactions

From artist and architect Kate Davies, By the Sound of Things is a 3-hour immersive audiovisual experience onboard the unique steam-powered Mersey-built, Daniel Adamson (The Danny), which worked the Manchester Ship Canal for many years, initially as a tug and then a pleasure cruiser. Juxtaposing the charm and character of one of the last surviving ship canal tugs with the epic scale of the modern shipping industry, Davies invites us to consider the extent and impact of both our insatiable consumerism and resulting global shipping industry, on our air and ocean environment.