The Imperative Mood: Britain's Tannoys Are Being Retuned as Instruments

The pier at the end of the promenade is closed, but the tannoy doesn’t know that yet. It clears its throat with a crackle, then delivers the line it has delivered ten thousand times: “The pier will close in fifteen minutes. Please make your way to the exit.” The voice is a woman’s, probably recorded in the 1990s, and it has the flat, frictionless quality of a thing that has been compressed and re-compressed until only the instruction survives. There is no weather in it. No season. Just the imperative mood, pressed into a horn.

Standing beneath the speaker, a sound artist named Ruth is holding a handheld recorder. She has been here for three days. “I’m waiting for the fault,” she says. “There’s a loose connection somewhere in the line. Every so often the announcement stutters — it repeats the first syllable, then drops out. That’s the bit I want.”

The Voice That Tells You What to Do

Public address systems are not designed to be listened to. They are designed to be obeyed. The tannoy is a utility, a civic throat-clearing, and its aesthetic is almost entirely accidental: the boxy midrange, the sibilance that cuts through crowd noise, the brief silence before a recorded message begins. For most of us, it is background — the “see it, say it, sorted” of the station platform, the “mind the gap” that has somehow become folk poetry. But for a growing number of UK sound artists, the tannoy is a found instrument, a ready-made module of authority and imperfection.

“It’s the only voice in the building that nobody argues with,” says Ruth, who is preparing a piece for a small festival in the town’s former amusement arcade. “And yet it’s also completely fallible. It mispronounces things. It clips. It fades in halfway through a sentence. That’s where the music is.”

She plays me a snippet from her recorder: the closing call, looped and pitched down by an octave. The words become a low, rhythmic thrum — close, close, close — like a distant foghorn. “I’m not trying to make it say anything new,” she says. “I’m trying to hear what it’s been saying all along.”

Last Call at the Market

A hundred miles inland, in a Midlands market hall, the same idea is taking a different form. Every Saturday at half past four, as the stalls begin to pack away, the market’s tannoy announces the closing time in a thick local accent that has never been digitised. It is a live announcement, delivered by a man called Colin who has worked the market for thirty-one years.

“It’s not a performance,” Colin tells me, slightly defensive. “It’s just what I say.”

But a local choir has other ideas. For the past six months, a group of twelve singers has been gathering in the market’s upper gallery to learn Colin’s announcement by ear. They call themselves the Last Call Choir, and their repertoire consists of a single piece: a note-for-note transcription of the closing call, complete with its pauses, its rising inflection on “thank you”, and the faint smack of lips before the microphone.

At four twenty-five, the choir takes its position. They do not sing loudly. They do not need to. When Colin’s voice comes over the speakers, they follow it — a ghost chorus, half a second behind, filling the hall with a doubled authority. Shoppers stop. A man with a mop leans on his handle. It lasts forty seconds. Then it’s over, and the market returns to the sound of crates and trolleys.

From Horn to Drone

Later that week, in a former industrial unit in Sheffield, a workshop is turning old PA horns into something else entirely. The horns are the classic aluminium kind — the ones that look like megaphones bolted to a ceiling — and they have been salvaged from schools, factories and a demolished shopping centre. On a workbench, a artist named Dev is wiring one up to a small amplifier and a contact microphone.

“You can play them,” he says. “Not like a violin. More like a resonant chamber. You feed a signal in and the horn colours it. It adds this midrange bark, this compression. It’s the sound of someone telling you to move along.”

He taps the horn with a drumstick. The note that comes out is not a note but a shape: a flat, nasal honk that decays into a metallic hum. Then he patches in a low sine wave. The horn turns it into a drone — thick, buzzing, strangely warm. “There’s a whole set of pitches in here,” he says. “It’s just a matter of finding the right input.”

What the Tannoy Knows

The workshop’s output will be part of a performance next month, alongside Ruth’s pier recordings and a live feed from a railway station in the north. The artists are not trying to make a political point, or at least not a simple one. They are interested in the texture of authority — how it sounds when it is stretched, looped, and stripped of its message. A tannoy without an announcement is just a horn. A horn without a voice is just a shape. But between those two states, something happens: the ear starts to listen for meaning where there is only tone.

On the pier, the fifteen-minute call has come and gone. The light is fading. Ruth packs up her recorder and we walk back along the promenade, past the arcades and the fish and chip shops. Behind us, the tannoy clears its throat again. “The pier will close in five minutes.” But the fault is still there. The first syllable stutters, repeats. For a moment, the voice from the ceiling sounds almost uncertain — like it is asking a question rather than giving an order. Then it recovers, and the instruction lands, flat and final, as it always has.