Our main news in the last six months has been that Helen Foster has re-joined EMOHA for the coming year while Colin Hyde runs the ‘Sounds for the Future’ project. We are delighted to have Helen back and look forward to blogging about her work over the coming months!

EMOHA has been out and about running training sessions and giving talks. The recent work in Leicester celebrating Uganda 50 has featured material from EMOHA’s collections and has resulted in an excellent exhibition in Leicester Museum. We have also contributed sound and images to the Museum’s Leicester Stories gallery.

There has been training for a new project at Leicester’s Hebrew Congregation, who are recording memories of the synagogue on Highfields Street. ‘Lockdown Landscapes‘ is a partnership between the National Arboretum, Westminster Abbey and ArtReach that will commemorate key workers who have served the nation throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and remember those who have lost their lives during this period of national crisis. We also did some training for Leicester Cathedral, who will be recording memories of parishioners and those who have helped at the cathedral over the years, including the Richard III events.

‘Mapping the City with Electric Paint’ was a project EMOHA ran with Focus Charity in Leicester, with funding from Leicester City Council and Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies. The project aimed to engage young people with Leicester’s High Street Heritage Action Zone (HAZ) by recording sound and interviews, and creating an interactive sound map of the HAZ. Electric paint and an interactive wall kit from Bare Conductive enabled us to create a fun map that plays sound when it is touched. You can read more about this on the University of Leicester’s blog pages.

In September, the ‘Sounds for the Future’ project opened up its playback equipment for the Heritage Open Day event at the University of Leicester. Visitors were able to have a play with the equipment, listen to archive recordings, and look at a large collection of photographs of Leicester during WW2 that we have recently acquired. Over 150 people visited us and Special Collections.

We have added two new collections to the EMOHA. Nichola Burton’s recordings made for her Phd at Nottingham Trent University are about women in the lace industry, and 60 Miles by Road or Rail is a project about Northampton and Corby’s New Town legacy. 

We were delighted to have the British & Irish Sound Archives (BISA) annual conference in Leicester in November. Helen Foster presented a paper about The Silent Archive: spoken testimonies of menopause, and has recently written a blog on this site that reflects on this project.

Finally, we would like to extend our festive greetings and wish you a happy and prosperous 2023.