Thoughts on classifying field recordings

Posted by IMR on 06 February 2012

RECENTLY AN EMAIL arrived from Eric Leonardson of the World Listening Project, the motivating force behind World Listening Day, which is due to be marked again on July the 18th this year.

Eric kindly asked what categories I’d recommend for classifying field recordings. This is a subject which has been nagging at me intermittently over the past couple of years. For example, the ‘Social’ high-level category in the Sound Actions section here might as well be titled ‘Miscellaneous’.

It’s little more than a ragbag collection of recordings linked only by the common feature of having several or many people making a noise at once. Eric’s question prompted me to try to think things through again, and here’s the reply I sent him (plus a bit of tidying up):

You asked what categories might be considered for the classification of field recordings. The reply could well be titled ‘Problems of classification’.

The question is more easily answered if one assumes that you are classifying recordings made by yourself, by close associates, or by recordists who have provided detailed metadata.

In such cases the intentions behind any recording will be understood and one will know which elements of the auditory scene should be attended to in order to derive a classification. This is a point which will be visited again later.

It is worth considering what the overall sorting or classification strategy might be, since this will need to be taken into account when devising metadata fields for the individual recordings.

If the recordings are intended for internal organisational use, for dedicated scholarship, or where the collection is not very large, then a hierarchical taxonomy may be sufficient without even a search function, and presumably there will be metadata fields corresponding to each taxonomic level.

But you may intend to make recordings publicly available through a website. In that case you could consider a tag-driven folksonomy, such as the one used on Soundcloud. Then the metadata scheme may need to include a tag field.

There is a good case for having a hybrid of taxonomic and folksonomic approaches. Further questions and possibilities arise from such a model, including whether tags should influence taxonomic categories, or whether taxonomic categories should influence the range of available tags, or whether the two should co-exist independently.

On the subject of a taxonomy, it perhaps best to start with some thoughts on a fairly simple and pragmatic approach. However I can only guess at what intentions you have, and it is these which must drive the classification system.

I will assume that you are not looking to create a sound effects library, nor will you necessarily be seeking to replicate the curatorial divisions of labour found in museums and other instititions.

If one is instead looking at how to organise a collection of field recordings, then the taxonomy might reflect differences in the salience of the three basic factors of agency, place and time or, if you prefer, what, where and when.

Agency will tend to be most salient with recordings in which either a single sound source dominates the auditory scene, or in which many sound sources of the same kind are present.

Obvious sub-divisions of agency are human, animal, and inanimate. Human and animal sounds often share the quality of being directed towards some goal, whereas inanimate agents, better thought of simply as causes, have no goal and are epiphenomenal, such as the sounds of the wind or of water.

Animal sounds lend themselves to further sub-division along biological taxonomic lines, with the functions of particular vocalisations, such as contact calls or warning sounds, perhaps left to a level of categorisation below that of an individual species.

Human sounds, more so than animal sounds, can be considered as both functional, in the sense of verbal and non-verbal sound signals, and also as the epiphenomenal by-products of many human activities, such as traffic, noises from building sites and so on.

It is not easy to think of a good way of classifying all functional human sound signals according to a single scheme. Perhaps a distinction between their proximate and ultimate goals would be easier. But it will be hard to make it work in practice, since it is not clear which, on balance, yields the greater number of useful categories.

For example, both the proximate goal of causing the listener to move somewhere, and the ultimate goal of relieving the listener of their money, can both be applied to so many disparate sound signals that they cease to have much discriminative power.

A good classification system will be one in which each individual recording is well described simply by the category labels applying to it, without having to read the description field in the recording’s metadata.

In practice, some kind of fudge between proximate goals, ultimate goals and context is the likely outcome, and will be justified in retrospect by an appeal to how an idealised average listener tends to think about the world.

Intellectual fields of enquiry such as linguistics, musicology and the philosophy of language have fared rather better in sorting the phenomena they study.

For example, the distinctions in the speech act theory of John L Austin and John Searle are useful in thinking of utterances as ways of doing things with words, but it is not obvious how they can be developed to describe all possible sound signals.

Despite these problems, agency as a factor in classification allows for a high level of concordance between the perceptions of the recordist, classifier and listener.

Categorising according to place may often reflect the recordist’s goal in representing a soundscape. It is also a useful way of organising recordings in which there are many independent sound sources, to the extent that no single sound source or type of sound source can be considered the recording’s definitive subject.

Categorising according to time will be most relevant with historical recordings, in which the era they are from is judged to be as interesting as their subject matter or, rather, hard to distinguish from it, a factor that increases as they get older.

A taxonomy has the advantage of matching how sound files may be organised into folders and sub-folders on a hard drive. It demands some precision in thinking about the contents of the recordings. It can also be the same structure presented to the end-user, who can then search by scrutinising collapsible lists, categories or sound maps (which are a form of unstructured list) and so make serendipitous discoveries.

Folksonomies and tag-driven searches have the advantages of finding similarities across domains, for example by identifying particular acoustic qualities, such as droning, buzzing or echoes. Or they could allow a comparison of recordings across animal and human categories, such as sound signals which work to elicit parental care or raise the alarm.

If multiple users provide input then the aggregate weighting of shared features between recordings can be measured through multivariate statistics or subjected to sorting techniques such as cluster analysis. There’s usually a nice graph in there somewhere.

It is quite possible to combine both taxonomy and folksonomy within a single interface. On the subject of interfaces, I would like to express dismay at the prevalence of lists compiled by popularity, since the display of these is likely to cause feedback effects which canalise the choices made by site visitors when exploring. A decent interface should not need such gimmicks.

Building a field recording system 3: recorder accessories

Posted by IMR on 21 January 2012

THE PREVIOUS POST in the field recording system series looked at the Sony PCM M10 recorder and introduced a few technical concepts which are good to know about.

There’s a YouTube genre in which new electronic products are unwrapped by their purchasers. The excitement is all in the slow revealing, consumerism’s striptease glimpse of paradise, like some old sultan taking delivery of his latest wife.

On the plus side the videos show you what accessories are in the box. The PCM M10 comes with an AC adaptor, a wired remote control which will be useful for recording interviews, a wrist strap, a USB cable, and a CD with a basic version of Sony’s Sound Forge audio editing program.

What’s not included are decent rechargeable batteries, a case and, most important of all, a windshield.

TROUBLED BY WIND

Photography can draw on glamour and urgency: paparazzis chasing celebrities, nocturnal mementos from the fleshpots of the Balearic islands. Field recording is more about patience and stillness. You can’t imagine a film like Blow Up being made about a field recordist.

Handling noise caused by fidgeting with the recorder while it’s doing its job, or other self-made sounds like loud breathing and rustling clothes, are the equivalent of taking a photo with your finger over the lens. They’re distracting and should be avoided. Another common problem is wind noise and to deal with it you’ll need to buy or make a fake-fur windshield for your recorder.

Wind noise is caused by turbulence in the airstream buffeting the microphone’s delicate diaphragm. It’s recorded as an intrusive low-frequency rumbling noise which is very hard to remove in post-production. The long fibres of a fake-fur windshield work to dissipate some of the energy of that turbulence. At the same time, the open weave of the fur’s base material allows air molecules to carry their bump-my-neighbour propagation of sound waves through to the recorder’s mics.

I was going to record a before-and-after demonstration of how effective a furry windshield can be. But Vimeo contributor Joshua Denny has already made one involving a PCM M10:

Note how the windshield can cope with a draught of whatever velocity a fan produces, but don’t expect miracles in a Force 8 gale. The breezy conditions common in our maritime climate or the gusts deflected downwards to street level by tall buildings are what a fake-fur windshield can usually handle.

Sony make one for their little recorder, but it costs at least £50. This is a ridiculous sum to pay for a scaled-down version of the fluffy pencil case with wobbling eye-buttons that you had as a kid. Three other firms also make furry windshields for the PCM M10. They’re all cheaper, but they’re not all as good as one another.

The one at the top made by British firm Rycote seems to take its inspiration from Dennis the Menace and his doggy pal Gnasher. The fur is quite short, and the whole windshield maintains a tenuous grip on the top of the recorder. It falls off quite easily and for that reason it’s not recommended.

Redhead are based in Hawaii and their windshields have longer fur and an elasticated, um, sphincter-like opening which grips the recorder firmly. They work well, as you can see and hear in the video above. Mine took just under two weeks to arrive in the post.

Redhead’s products are made in a range of sober and manic shades. If you want to record birdsong it’s a good idea to resist the urge to buy a red windshield, as birds spot red very easily with their excellent colour vision. Troll dolls are one of Denmark’s gifts to the world, not Hawaii’s, so the local culture theory falls down here.

Furryhead windshields come from Michigan. Although much of the best music has emanated from Detroit, the state capital, Alice Cooper and Ted Nugent are also Michiganites. It’s obvious that Furryhead’s products are rock-influenced and pay homage to 1980s hair-metal bands like Tigertailz.

BATTERIES AND CASES

Batteries last a long time in the PCM M10, but the two AA alkalines supplied by Sony aren’t immortal. Standard rechargeable nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries might seem the obvious way forward, but they lose much of their charge over a few weeks when left lying around unused. Sod’s Law dictates you’ll want your recorder in a hurry only to find the batteries have gone flat.

Sanyo developed low self-discharge NiMH batteries a few years ago and marketed them under the title of eneloop. These hold most of their charge for at least a year when left alone. You never see them in the shops in Britain. Instead, a brand with the slightly unfortunate name of ReCyKo uses the same technology and these can be found in high street and retail park stores like Currys.

They need a special charger which you can buy in a blister-pack along with four AA-sized ReCyKo batteries. It’s a good investment.

If you want a little case for your PCM M10, then ones made for Tom Tom-style satnav devices should fit just fine. They’re about £20 from PC World, or else around £10 from street market stalls.

The next post in the field recording system series examines how you can capture vivid and realistic stereo soundscapes with your compact recorder by using binaural or headworn mics.

Building a field recording system 2: the compact recorder

Posted by IMR on 19 January 2012

THE COMPACT DIGITAL recorder is a device small enough to stuff into a trouser or jacket pocket. It’s a minor miracle of convenience and versatility compared to bulkier analogue ancestors like the Sony Professional Walkman. Prices have fallen as more manufacturers have entered the contest and current makes include Marantz, Tascam, Roland, Sony, Olympus, Korg and Zoom.

All these recorders are self-contained devices with built-in microphones for recording in stereo. Even basic models can produce uncompressed WAV files at high sample rates, as well as MP3 files. They’ll store the recordings either in a fixed internal memory, or onto removeable SD cards, or both. They’ll also have a USB port so you can easily transfer the recordings to your computer.

The Zoom H1 is the cheapest at around £80. The most expensive is the exotic Korg MR-2 at £550 and I don’t know anyone who’s got one. Both the Zoom H1 and the Korg are outliers which aren’t worth considering. This leaves a range beginning with the Tascam DR-07 at around £120 and extending to the Olympus LS-11 and the Sony PCM M10, both at around £230.

Because the price gap across that range of devices is only just above £100, it really is worth getting either the Sony PCM M10 or the Olympus LS-11. They have better build quality and make cleaner-sounding recordings because they have higher-quality components. You get what you pay for.

Some online comparisons pit the Olympus LS-11 against the Sony PCM M10. By far the best is on Robin Parmar’s Theatre of Noise website. The Sony machine may be a tiny bit better than the Olympus for the field recording system we’re going to build up, so that’s the one that’s going to be looked at here.

CLOSE-UP ON THE SONY PCM M10

As you’d expect from Sony, the build quality is good. The front of the M10 is mostly made of aluminium. The sides and back are plastic. The machine fits quite well into the hand and if you squeeze it you don’t hear nearly so many of the little creaking noises that you get with cheaper recorders.

All the M10’s buttons on the front require a fair amount of pressure to work them, thus reducing the chances of accidentally stopping or starting a recording. The familiar transport buttons of record, play and pause light up from behind to help show what’s going on. The menu system is easy to use, although there are a couple of functions which could do with being brought forward rather than listed inside the ‘detail menu’ option.

The M10 comes with a generous 4-gigabyte internal memory and that’s enough to capture around 3 hours 40 minutes of audio at a decent archival quality setting of 24bit/48kHz. Battery life is superb and you may start to wonder whether the two AAs you put in at the start will ever exhaust themselves. It’s also got a screw fitting on the back so you can mount it on a camera tripod.

AN EYE ON THE LEVELS

Like all compact recorders, the Sony’s backlit display tells you how much time has elapsed, the current filename, the recording mode selected, as well as giving a rough idea of how much battery life is left. One of the more significant parts of the display is the levels meter marked in decibels.

Anyone new to sound recording might reasonably be baffled by the decibel or ‘dB’ markings on the levels meter. If the loudness of normal conversation is reckoned to be around 65dB when heard from a few feet away while virtual silence is 0dB, how can there be such a level as minus 6 or minus 12dB? Why doesn’t the levels meter begin at 0dB and go up to, say, 120dB?

The simplest answer is that although it’s using decibels, the meter’s telling you about audio signal levels inside the machine, which you control, rather than the actual sound pressure levels in the air, which you don’t unless you’re recording yourself singing in the bath.

Decibels are unlike the measurement units we’re most familiar with, such as inches or litres.  Each increase of 10dB over some lower value means a ten times increase in the power or intensity of the sound: 20dB is ten times more powerful than 10dB, and 30dB is a hundred times more powerful than 10dB. This is a good way of condensing into manageable units the huge range of differences in sound pressure levels detected by our sense of hearing.

Decibels can also express the differences in the strength of audio signals in an amplifier or other electronic circuit. In the case of the M10’s levels meter, 0db signifies maximum power or gain, and as they grow larger the minus decibel values represent an ever-greater attenuation of gain. Minus 3dB is 50% of maximum gain, minus 6dB is 25%, minus 12dB is 6% and minus 24dB is just 0.4%.

It’s important to get the levels right while recording. The M10 has two coloured lights by each microphone which can help. A green light comes on when the level on that particular channel, left or right, reaches minus 12dB. That’s a desirable level for at least some situations or subjects. A red light comes on when the gain for that channel has reached maximum: time to move away or turn the recording level wheel down a notch or two.

Over time you’ll develop an intuitive feel for how to set your levels depending on where you are and what you’re recording. Don’t ever rely on the M10’s automatic gain control, or indeed that of any other recorder. The results often sound artificial and unattractive. It’s much better to learn about levels through practice.

BUT HOW DOES IT SOUND?

Many reviews of the M10 have praised how quiet or clean its mics sound, meaning they don’t have as much of the hiss and sound colouration that’s noticeable with really cheap kit. Two little mics built into a £230 recorder aren’t going to sound as good as a £450 stereo mic like the Audio Technica BP4025 or a couple of DPA 2006C mics at £1,200 a pair. But they’re not bad and, as stated in the first post in the series, the best recording equipment is always what you’ve got on you at the time.

Here’s a couple of admittedly lazy, opportunistic tests edited together. The first part was made in a lift at work and the second at St Pancras station while waiting for the train home:

The lift recording isn’t particularly useful although there’s no apparent hiss in what was a fairly quiet environment, and the sound of someone jingling keys close by is reasonably well localised. The train station recording is lacking in drama and oomph – in reality people on the platforms at St Pancras often wince at the sharp squealing sounds of the wheels. It’s also hard to work out from the recording in what directions the trains were moving. The M10’s mics produced a poor stereo image in those surroundings.

The Wingfield Audio website has a very useful page of recording samples made with a range of recorders. The M10’s internal mics do well with the isolated, clearly-defined sound sources of a cello and someone talking.

GOING FOR GROWTH: MIC AND LINE INPUTS

One of the goals of the field recording system is to work towards bypassing the recorder’s internal mics and preamplifier in favour of higher-quality external devices made for doing those particular jobs and nothing else. The recorder will then be used for its handy display, analogue-to-digital converter, and file storage only.

On the top of the M10 are the mic and line sockets which will make this possible. It’s a convenient enough place to put them, too.

The bottom of the M10 has a tiny loudspeaker which isn’t useful for much, except perhaps to reassure you that you have actually managed to record something other than silence.

The mic socket is the one on the left in the picture and it has two functions. First, it’s designed to deal with audio signals of mic level strength coming straight from an external microphone and hence relatively weak. The M10’s preamplifier, the same one used to increase the gain of its internal mics, will also increase the gain of a signal reaching it through the mic socket to line level.

The mic socket’s second purpose is to provide plug-in power for any external microphone which needs it. Plug-in power is a low-current supply of around 4 volts and it’s used to drive small microphones called electret condensers or just electrets for short. They’re commonly used as pairs for binaural recording, which we’ll examine in a later post. (The leads from a binaural pair will converge at a single 3.5 mm (1/8”) jack, so you don’t need two mic sockets.)

The line-in socket is a much simpler affair. It can’t provide plug-in power and it’s designed for audio signals which have already been raised by an external preamplifier to line level. A signal reaching the line-in socket therefore bypasses the M10’s preamp because it’s assumed that it doesn’t need to have its gain increased by a large amount.

Yet if you turn the recording level wheel while the M10 is recording an audio source connected to its line-in socket, the levels meter will show the gain increasing or decreasing accordingly. If the M10’s preamp has supposedly been bypassed, what’s causing this to happen? It may be that a different circuit is involved, and if so it’ll be simpler than the preamp because it isn’t designed to increase the gain nearly as much.

This post has touched on technical concepts such as decibels, gain, line level and mic level. It’s useful to have some idea at the outset of what they mean. Next up is a look at the most basic and essential accessories you’ll need to get the best out of your compact recorder.

Building a field recording system 1: introduction

Posted by IMR on 12 January 2012

THIS IS THE first in a short series of blog posts in which I’ll present some thoughts on how to build a system of field recording equipment.

System, along with dynamic and terrain, is one of those decisive-looking words which is often used to prop up vague ideas. So why not talk about assembling a collection of field recording equipment?

A collection can be built up haphazardly without any forward planning. If you collect say, cigarette cards, you’ll often buy them as sets, which can lead to you owning duplicates. The loss from buying something which becomes a duplicate is the price of uncertainty. You can’t be sure what will turn up at the next auction or car boot sale.

Someone who wants to get into field recording faces the uncertainty of not knowing how far their interest is likely to develop. Perhaps the low-cost compact recorder they buy today will stop being satisfying to use after only a few months. It may even be that it isn’t equal to some specific recording goal from the very outset.

SIX BASIC GUIDELINES

The system of field recording equipment I’m going to describe over the next few posts is based on these rules of thumb:

1. The best field recording equipment is always that which you have on you at the time. The more bulky the equipment, the more reluctant you’ll be to use it regularly.

2. The cost of field recording equipment is generally a good predictor of the quality of the sound recordings it can produce . . .

3. . . . but there are situations and environments where this makes little perceptible difference, and where smaller and usually cheaper equipment will be more practical.

4. Building a system of field recording equipment means keeping an eye on future possibilities so you don’t waste money by making your early purchases redundant.

5. The foundation of the system is the compact recorder. With this alone you’ll be able to make enjoyable recordings. By adding new components you’ll expand the range of situations and environments in which you can make such recordings.

6. In its later stages the system involves spending the most money in total on the most important part of the recording chain, the microphone.

WHAT THIS ISN’T GOOD FOR

All this is based on my own experience as someone who enjoys field recording as a hobby. The work of professional field recordists in TV, radio or film can be very different and much more demanding than what I’m used to doing. So if you’re looking to earn a living from field recording, you’re better off seeking advice on something like the Social Sound Design website.

Gadgets are marketed by appealing to our desire to be thought of as competent by others. The success of that approach can be seen in the intense online arguments over the merits of different devices which are almost identical in function and quality.

But even the very best recording equipment cannot begin to fill in the gaps left by an indifference to sound, or where the urge to learn and experiment is lacking.

The next post in the series looks at the compact recorder, the seed from which the rest of the system will grow.

Where Londoners come from

Posted by IMR on 11 January 2012

HERE’S ANOTHER RECORDING from the Waterways sound map made last Friday by the river Lea. The Lea remains London’s most industrialised minor river, even though most of the valley’s factories and paper mills have now disappeared.

Just north of the Cooks Ferry roundabout the Lea passes a collection of large waste recycling plants. A row of trees stands between them and the west bank of the Lea. Dozens of rooks had convened on the branches.

The rook’s efficient respiratory system absorbs atmospheric pollutants at a high rate. It expels them by hacking up rich gobbets of phlegm, accompanied by the rattling vocalisations you can hear in the recording.

On reaching the ground each phlegm-clot begins forcing a network of fine roots into the soil to extract trace nutrients such as cadmium and mercury. Meanwhile the clot becomes cold and firm to the touch as it swells into a puffball-like mass known as the sacculus. In time this ruptures and out crawls a new baby Londoner.

Nice to meet you, London Historians

Posted by IMR on 05 January 2012

THE BAD WEATHER had stopped me finishing off the London Sound Survey’s Waterways soundmap. Instead, the week I’d booked off work was starting to feel more like living la vida doley. Hours spent indoors were broken only by raiding trips to the corner shop for biscuits and teabags.

High winds are usually the enemy of field recordists. Turbulence in the airstream moves chaotically over the microphone diaphragm and makes a low-frequency rumbling which is very hard to get rid of in post-production. Even the standard fake-fur-covered microphone windshield isn’t always of much use.

Away from built-up areas there are often trees and bushes nearby and their leaves make a featureless hissing when the wind agitates them. It’s one of those sounds which somehow doesn’t lend itself well to recording, like the way the iridescence is lost from an insect’s eyes when it’s dead and pinned as a museum specimen.

Instead of going stir-crazy though, I had last night’s London Historians pub meeting in Victoria to look forward to. Matt Brown of the mighty Londonist had told me all about it, and I was really glad I went. Not only was it in one of my favourite central London pubs, the Windsor Castle, but the people there were friendly, welcoming and interesting. It was a very pleasant evening and I’m already looking forward to the next London Historians pow-wow.

Thanks, Londonist

Posted by IMR on 22 December 2011

DURING THE SECOND half of this year the London Sound Survey has been getting between eight and nine thousand different visitors a month. At least AW Stats says so, and it has the advantage of excluding visits by webcrawlers and bots from the totals.

As of today, there have been around thirteen thousand different visitors since the start of December. Each visitor or, strictly speaking, each one coming from a unique IP address, has been looking at an average of seven pages and listening to two sound files. The most popular blogs will likely get that amount of visitors in a day, but for a niche interest website like this one, it’s encouraging.

Thanks for this recent surge in interest must go to Matt Brown of the Londonist website. It’s like an online version of how Time Out used to be when it was aimed at people who actually live, work and enjoy themselves in London, rather than chasing the tourist market as it seems to do now. Every day there’s something useful, interesting or entertaining to read in the Londonist.

I was really bowled over by the enthusiastic write-up Matt gave to the London Waterways soundmap in this article. Thanks Matt, and thanks to everyone else who’s been talking about it on Twitter, visiting the site, and sending messages via the Say Hello page.

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

James Greenwood's 'The Wilds of London' from 1874

Posted by IMR on 20 December 2011

IN MORE PRUDISH times, books setting out to titillate often justify themselves with a solemn preface. This was a stock feature of the sub-Olympia Press soft porn titles of the 1960s: “The Jet Age has seen the rise of a new phenomenon, that of ‘the swinger’, and it is one which society must begin to understand.”

James Greenwood’s The Wilds of London was published in 1874. In the preface Greenwood lays out his book’s noble aims:

A nod’s as good as a wink, and with that Greenwood sets out on an entertaining and occasionally prurient odyssey across the seedy sides of London life which his readers will be very interested in, but perhaps too nervous to visit in person. This follows a London literary tradition with its origins in Ned Ward’s The London Spy published at the close of the 17th century.

The first chapter is titled A Visit to ‘Tiger Bay’, and Greenwood wastes no time explaining how dangerous and exotic this part of Wapping is:

Greenwood dutifully searches for tigresses and soon finds himself within a warren of brothels and drinking dens. First stop is the ‘Globe and Pigeons’, where music and dancing are heard:

He buys a half-ounce of tobacco from a ‘tigress’ dressed as a fairy, then makes his excuses and leaves. Greenwood decides to follow a sailor stumbling towards the ‘Gunboat’:

Next is a description of the Gunboat’s comic singer:

Paddy don’t care seems to have been a popular song performed in different places and times throughout the English-speaking world. There’s a brief reference to it as part of a fundraising drive in New Zealand in 1890, and in 1949 the famous ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded Clayton McMichen playing it on the fiddle.

It’d be interesting to know if there was any similarity between Paddy don’t care, with the raucous inter-verse laughter described by Greenwood, and George W. Johnson’s The Laughing Song from the 1890s, which in turn inspired Charles Jolly to write the music-hall song The Laughing Policeman in 1922. The latter is still quite widely known, and it went through some curious developments. In Denmark it became The Laughing Eskimo, and in Britain coin-operated ‘Laughing Policeman’ and ‘Laughing Sailor’ automata were once a familiar sight at seaside resorts.

There are a lot of good auditory descriptions in The Wilds of London, and I’ll be posting some more soon. I’ve been working from an original Chatto and Windus edition, but Lee Jackson’s fantastic The Victorian Dictionary website has it all online here.

Our synthetic sound environment

Posted by IMR on 12 December 2011

IN 1962 THE American anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin wrote an ecological critique of contemporary urban life titled Our Synthetic Environment. The book lacks the tight focus of Rachel Carson’s landmark work on the effects of pesticide use, The Silent Spring, which was published in the US a few months later that year, and it’s not been reprinted since perhaps the 1970s.

Nonetheless Our Synthetic Environment is a minor classic of ecological writing and its roots go back at least as far as Peter Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops.

In Our Synthetic Environment, Bookchin begins by challenging the belief that living conditions in cities have improved in every way:

In Chapter Three (you can read the whole book as a PDF file here) he describes what would now be called noise pollution:

Bookchin contrasts this with medieval city life as imagined by the historian Lewis Mumford in his book The City in History, which was published the year before in 1961:

Sources such as Fitz Stephens’ twelfth-century panegyric A Description of London have to be read with caution. Bookchin uncritically accepts Mumford’s upbeat account, but you can read a necessary counterbalance in Emily Cockayne’s recent Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England: 1600–1770.

It’s not easy to give a concise answer when asked ‘How has the urban sound environment changed?’ Here are some trends or processes which might inform it:

1. Increasing extent of urban sprawl together with decreases in local population density.

2. Greater levels of social and technical organisation meaning fewer riots, stampedes, fires, collapsing buildings, or other mishaps.

3. Limits placed on street life through policing, traders’ permits, licensing, building control, and volume of traffic.

4. Fewer percussive sounds, including those of horses’ hooves, workshop-level craft industry, heavy industry, and goods being manhandled.

5. Homogenisation of the urban sound environment with fewer differences heard between parts of the city, between weekdays and weekends, and between day and night.

6. The rise of pervasive broadband noise from road and air traffic, and air conditioning.

7. A decline in public broadcast speech in all spheres of activity except transport, due to increasing literacy, social atomisation, and the near-removal of absolute poverty by welfare systems.

All kinds of other factors could be added and there are inevitably exceptions. A compressed and lossy formulation might be: The urban sound environment grows more monotonous as the city becomes more organised.

Making engine noises with a jam jar

Posted by IMR on 12 December 2011

WHILE READING UP on jet engine noise I came across a reference to a Make Magazine article on building your own pulse jet from a jam jar.

How could you not want to make one? The article itself is only available to subscribers, but fortunately there’s this video on YouTube:

The jam jar jet makes a surprisingly loud noise like the revving of an internal combustion engine. Something to do for Boxing Day, perhaps.

Spam attack!

Posted by IMR on 07 December 2011

HORDES OF SPAMMERS have been trying to post comments telling you all about cheap Ugg boots and erection pills. Together those might solve someone’s Christmas prezzie dilemma, but spam comments aren’t going to be displayed here, and it’s really boring deleting them one after another.

Comments are now suspended for a short while so this site will hopefully slip off whatever list spammers work from. Hardly anyone comments here anyway, so you might as well drop me a line via the Say hello page. I’m always glad to hear from people, even conspiracy theorists. But not spammers, ta very much.

Five compact XLR-enabled audio recorders

Posted by IMR on 29 November 2011

YOU’VE HAD YOUR handy little digital recorder for a while now, and you’ve already moved beyond its internal mics to using an inexpensive set of binaural mics. Practice has revealed how they’re good for some situations and not others.

The next step might be a single-point stereo mic such as the Audio Technica BP4025 or a pair of Rode NT-55s with omnidirectional capsules.

Professional-quality condenser mics like those typically need 48 volts of phantom power to work and their leads have chunky XLR connectors at the ends. A new recorder is on the cards.

It’d be nice if that recorder left change from £400 or less, and had half-decent mic preamps. Even better if it could be shoved into a coat pocket and had internal mics of its own, just to allow for greater flexibility of use.

Two manufacturers, Zoom and Marantz, identified possible markets for such a device several years ago. Marantz launched the PMD-660 in 2005 and Zoom followed with its H4 Handy Recorder in 2006.

Neither recorder was blessed with particularly good mic pre-amps, and the Zoom H4 was widely criticised for its cheap build quality. Revamped versions of both, the PMD-661 and the Zoom H4n, were put on the market in 2009.

During the same year Tascam muscled in on the compact XLR recorder scene with its butch-looking DR-100. This autumn two other recorders have come along: the more svelte Tascam DR-40 and the R-26 from Roland.

In total, five different makes and models are now available for examination, arguing about on forums, and purchase. Four are really aimed at musicians, with the more sober-looking Marantz PMD-661 targeting the expenses accounts of journalists. This post provides a brief overview and comparison.

ZOOM H4N HANDY RECORDER

When it was launched in 2009, the Zoom H4n offered an alluring range of features for its low price. It allowed four-channel recording and was the first compact XLR recorder to be compatible with mid-side microphones and arrays. The Zoom website claims that this is ‘only found on the H4n’ but that’s no longer true.

It comes bundled with several cheap but useful accessories which other manufacturers don’t always provide, including a foam windshield, a case, an AC adapter, and a 1GB SD card.

Internal mics: 2 x cardioids set in a coincident X-Y pattern, with an angle of convergence that can be set at either 90° or, for a wider stereo image, 120°.

Channels and inputs: 4 channels, 2 x combination XLR/quarter-inch TRS connectors, 1 x stereo minijack with plug-in power (suitable for external electret mics, such as used in binaural pairs).

Special features: Two-second pre-record, mixer, mid-side decoding, ‘stamina mode’ for extended battery life, good range of accessories, optional wired remote control.

Size, volume, mass: 70mm wide x 156mm high x 35mm thick; approx 382cc; 280g without batteries. Takes 2 x AA batteries.

Price: £250.

MARANTZ PMD-661

The PMD-661 has fewer features than any other recorder. It has only two channels, and no plug-in power or input for external electret-type mics. There are two internal mics, but their position is fixed.

What the PMD-661 does offer is a pair of good quality, low-noise mic preamps and the kind of subdued appearance which makes it suitable for journalism and interviews. Most of the other recorders here look like they’re for administering electric shocks.

Mics: 2 x fixed condenser mics, polar pattern unknown.

Channels and inputs: 2 channels; 2 x XLR connectors; 1 x S/PDIF digital input; 1 x stereo minijack – line-in only, no plug-in power.

Special features: Transcription-friendly functions including one-touch transport and skipback.

Size, volume, mass: 93mm wide x 165mm high x 36mm thick; approx 552cc; 410g without batteries. Takes 4 x AA batteries.

Price: £410.

TASCAM DR-100

The Tascam DR-100’s marketing video showed it being left carelessly on a beach to emphasise its ruggedness, presumably a sideswipe at Zoom’s reputation for making things from thin, creaking plastic.

The DR-100 has two sets of mics, one cardioid and one omnidirectional, but only two channels, so they can’t be mixed. The sales bumph mentions the ‘high-performance microphone preamp with 60dB of gain’.

Mics: 2 x cardioid, 2 x omni. Their use is switchable, but they can’t be used simultaneously and mixed.

Channels and inputs: 2 channels; 2 x XLR connectors; 1 x stereo minijack – line-in only, no plug-in power.

Special features: Comes with a remote control that can be used in either wired or wireless mode.

Size, volume, mass: 80mm wide x 153mm high x 35mm thick; approx 428cc; 290g without batteries. Uses rechargeable lithium ion battery with 2 x AA batteries as backup.

Price: £295.

TASCAM DR-40

The DR-40 seems to be a renewed attempt by Tascam to compete with the Zoom H4n. It matches many of the Zoom’s features closely, with the notable exception of not providing an input suitable for external electret mics.

The DR-40 has four channels, allowing you to mix signals from its two internal mics with those from external phantom-powered mics. It’s the lightest machine of all five and, by a tiny margin, the least bulky.

Mics: 2 x cardioid, adjustable to X-Y (though not quite coincident) and AB positions.

Channels and inputs: 4 channels; 2 x XLR/TRS combination connectors.

Special features: Two-second pre-record, on-board mixing, mid-side decoding, dual recording mode which ‘captures a safety track at a lower level to avoid distortion’.

Size, volume, mass: 70mm wide x 156mm high x 35mm thick; approx 380cc; 213g without batteries. Takes 3 x AA batteries.

Price: £225.

ROLAND R-26

Anyone who’s used the Edirol R09-HR will expect good sound quality from its new and bigger sibling the R-26.

It’s not the heaviest but it is the bulkiest. That’s not surprising given how Roland have tried to cram inside just about all the functions offered by every other recorder, and then added two extra channels on top, making six in all.

Mics: 2 x cardioid in X-Y configuration, 2 x omnidirectional. Can be used simultaneously and mixed with external mic inputs.

Channels and inputs: 6 channels; 2 x XLR/TRS combination connectors; 1 x stereo minijack with plug-in power.

Special features: Touchscreen display, on-board mixing, two-second pre-record, mid-side decoding.

Size, volume, mass: 82mm wide x 180mm high x 41mm thick; approx 605cc; 370g without batteries. Takes 4 x AA batteries.

Price: £350.

CONCLUSIONS

The Roland R-26 offers the most extensive feature set of all the machines described. According to Raimund Specht, who posts on the naturerecordists email list, the R-26 has a self-noise level only very slightly less than the well-rated PDM-661: ‘quite good for such a relatively small and inexpensive recorder’. His Avisoft website has a useful comparison table which can be inspected here.

If you’ve got £350, and you’re not a journalist or researcher who needs to record and transcribe a lot of interviews, the R-26 looks like the best all-round choice. Its six channels offer plenty of scope for experimentation, particularly with indoor environments like rehearsal rooms, concert halls and studios.

The machine that can do it all, like a Swiss army penknife, is a familiar marketing claim. A musician is likely to use more of the R-26’s functions than a field recordist would. Its size and aggressive, eye-catching design means it can’t go everywhere that a smaller, more discrete recorder can. But there are still plenty of roles which it might suit.

Next month I’ll describe a plan for building an array of field recording equipment which allows you to increase its scope and quality, but without wasting money by making any of its components redundant.

Some recordings from the Waterways sound map

Posted by IMR on 28 November 2011

SOMETIMES I’VE WONDERED how much more quickly this site could develop if Larkin’s toad of work was sent packing. Those fantasies don’t live very long once they’re dragged onto dry land.

There’s a queue of people in my cramped local newsagent with similar hopes of escape. Some spend £30 at a time on the National Lottery for a week’s worth of daydreams. Well, it’s their money.

Work constrains this site but it’s also what makes it possible. Better to get something like the Waterways sound map done slowly than not at all and, anyway, it only needs about another four days of walking and recording to complete it.

Of all the rivers and canals that have been covered so far, the Wandle is probably my favourite. Very little of it before Wandsworth is entombed in culverts like the Edgware Brook pictured above. The Wandle drops, I don’t know, a couple of hundred feet on the way to the Thames, so it often flows quite quickly and audibly through south London.

The Wandle was also once a working river. Watercress was cultivated in its uipper reaches, and several street names along its course include the word ‘mill’. Here is the crackle of the electricity sub-station in Copper Mill Lane:

Canal waters are silent unless strained through a lock or paddled by ducks before take-off. The waterway becomes a thread to draw you through London’s maze. By the Grand Union Canal in Southall, the music of a distant marching band boomed and faded with the wind:

Bathwater gurgles as it goes down the plughole and in poetry brooks babble and chatter. Lethe was one of the rivers of the Underworld and drinking it brought forgetfulness or ‘unmindfulness’. The ear is drawn to the sound of water as if it held a secret, but there’s nothing there except this moment, then the next, and the next.

Forthcoming talk at the Sonic Art Research Unit in Oxford

Posted by IMR on 15 November 2011

THIS COMING FRIDAY the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University are holding a seminar titled Writing Sound and I’m up as one of the speakers.

The seminar’s aims are to:

Fortunately, compiling the London Sound Survey’s little database of historical sound references means I have some knowledge to fall back on.

I’ll be focusing on Charles Dickens as he provides lively and detailed descriptions of London sounds. He’s also one of the few writers to have developed an approach to sound informed by contemporary theories of how sound might work.

There are also a few blog posts in the pipeline examining other London writers, including the 20th-century Caribbean author Sam Selvon, the Grub Street hack Ned Ward, and the Regency-era skaghead Thomas de Quincey.

Echoes under the Thames

Posted by IMR on 10 November 2011

ANOTHER RECORDING HAS been gratefully received via the London Sound Survey drop box. It was made by sound designer Matthew ‘Wills’ Williams inside the Greenwich foot tunnel:

Layer upon layer of echoes builds up and it’s nice to hear people enjoying the acoustics along the tunnel’s 1,200 length as it passes beneath the Thames. Many thanks indeed for this, Matthew.

Here’s a Wikipedia picture of the tunnel by C.G.P. Grey:

Many years ago a friend recounted how he’d slept in the tunnel after a heavy drinking session. He woke up to find himself in a shallow puddle of river-water which had seeped in overnight, or so he claimed.

Another pedestrian tunnel which provides good echoes is the one running from South Kensington tube station under the Brompton Road. You can hear a recording from there on this sound map page – scroll down to the first recording.

Victoria coach station in 1935 and 2011

Posted by IMR on 07 November 2011

VICTORIA COACH STATION is one of London’s larger surviving Art Deco buildings, but it isn’t ranked alongside the Oxo Tower, the Hoover Building in Perivale, Senate House Library with its creaking lifts or the London Underground headquarters at St James’s.

Perhaps it suffers from being associated with the mild discomforts of coach travel, or how a good hour of the coach journey is spent creeping through London traffic. The inside of the station feels cramped for the number of people using it.

In the early 1930s, when an operators’ consortium had Victoria coach station built, going by coach was becoming the more modern, fun and democratic alternative to rail. Recently BBC4 had an excellent Time Shift documentary on the history of coach travel, and you can watch a few clips here.

In this site’s new Radio actuality section there’s an entry for this 1935 Victoria coach station recording:

How have the sounds of the coach station changed between then and now? Recently I made this recording on a Friday evening:

Gone are the singsong invocations of town-names and the coaches no longer have multitone horns – outlawed in 1973 for all but emergency service vehicles. There are in fact two clearly-delineated soundworlds at Victoria coach station nowadays, made so by the addition of a floor-to-ceiling glass partition which separates the coach bays from where the public sit, stand and wait.

Doors are set into the partition. Sometimes staff leave them open and sometimes they’re locked, which suggests that the vehicles’ domain is seen as hazardous. A stream of passengers will walk quickly across a few yards of tarmac to their coach and huddle around it for a short while as tickets are checked and suitcases and backpacks are stowed away. Their voices are faint compared to the sound of intercooled diesel engines.

On the passengers’ side of the partition are occasional announcements over a tannoy, the rattle of wheeled luggage, coughs, and voices. Unlike the the station of 1935, those voices will speak many different languages. London is now completely cosmopolitan, an aggregate of people from everywhere.

London sounds from 1930s and 1940s BBC radio

Posted by IMR on 26 October 2011

A NEW SITE section has just been added which features original 1930s and 1940s actuality recordings from BBC radio. I’ve been wanting to include historical sound recordings for ages.

It’s simply called Radio Actuality, ‘actuality’ being the term for real-life location recording in radio. It’s badly lacking some photographs but there’s a seed collection of twenty recordings there right now and more will be added regularly.

Here’s one example featuring Tiny Tim the busker from 1935:

How far removed this is from the practice of much modern-day busking: fresh-faced cellists in the shopping mall, committee-approved sax players on the London Underground, or the consolations of The Deer Hunter theme rendered on pan pipes, the soundtrack to a roadside shrine of wilting flowers.

The recordings have been digitised for the first time from their original 78 rpm BBC transcription discs. No attempt has been made at any reconstructive techniques to remove surface noise. Hiss and crackle are Time made audible.

Your recordings from Embankment and Dalston

Posted by IMR on 04 October 2011

TWO MORE RECORDINGS have arrived via the London Sound Survey dropbox.

Chris, who’s already shared three recordings from last year’s volcanic curfew on flights over London, has captured the sounds of a tube train arriving at and departing from Embankment station, plus platform announcements. Many Londoners are fascinated by the Underground system and it works its way into our dreams and earliest memories.

To a child, the train’s approach might be imagined with pleasureable fear as like a dragon rushing from the sooty blackness of its den. But it doesn’t last long. Doors open and familiar announcements are played; the regularity of city life can’t be escaped.

Shane, a.k.a. thehandthatclaps on SoundCloud, recorded an 11-minute slice of street life while hanging around one lunchtime outside Dalston Kingsland station in east London. It’s only the second smartphone recording to make its way onto this site. The clarity’s good and there’s plenty of activity going on.

Londoners must give up more of their lives to enforced loitering than anyone else in the country. If you’ve got a recorder, you can put some of that time to good use. Shane’s got more recordings from London and India on his SoundCloud page at the thehandthatclaps – check ‘em out.

When the planes stopped flying

Posted by IMR on 29 September 2011

FIELD RECORDISTS ACROSS Europe rejoiced last year when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted and lobbed a cubic kilometer of ash into the sky. At last we were given a brief rest from the whine of jet engines.

A propeller-driven aircraft can make an evocative sound, somehow redolent of clear summer skies. But jet airliners only produce the most banal noise.

Here’s the Wikipedia graphic showing the extent of the ash cloud. Note how it’s made to look ominous, when it would be better represented by a cheerful shade of fuchsia or sunflower yellow:

Among the recordists to respond was the London-based SoundClouder dashanna (a.k.a. Chris), who’s very kindly shared three recordings made in London during the volcanic hiatus.

First is a recording made at Limehouse with the bell of St Anne’s church near the beginning. There’s still plenty of traffic noise, but no aircraft racket from nearby London City Airport:

Next is Highgate Cemetery in north London:

The third recording is a mighty half-hour in length and was made in Catford in southeast London from 5am onwards. Server space costs me money so at first I balked at including the whole recording. But a half-hour recording can show changes in the dawn chorus and the general sounds of the city waking up in a way that a three-minute effort can’t.

Many thanks for sharing these with the London Sound Survey, Chris. It’s always good hearing what other people have recorded around town. If you want to share some sounds too, then visit the Survey’s SoundCloud dropbox.

Sound and health

Posted by IMR on 20 September 2011

AN EMAIL ARRIVES from Vital Arts, a charity associated with Barts hospital and the London NHS Trust. They commission music and art for hospitals to act as a form of complementary medicine and they’re looking for sound artists to get involved with a new project.

Not being a sound artist and having no experience of installations there’s not a lot I can contribute to this. But anyone with the experience and sense of responsibility needed for such work might want to get in touch with Vital Arts through their website.

In 2007 Britain’s foremost field recordist Chris Watson helped Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool by working alongside patients and staff to record the local dawn chorus. The edited sounds were then made available to patients on the wards to listen to.

Healing sounds are more commonly relegated to the modest therapeutic goals of relaxation CDs or the drippy Enya-type music sometimes laid on by non-NHS dentists. I got that and liquid Temazepam to drink when I last had a wisdom tooth pulled out. The effects of both music and drug went together eerily well.

Last week some newspapers reported the revival of a much older and non-Western tradition of medicinal music. The Metro carried a story about two doctors at Istanbul’s Memorial hospital using classical Turkish and Arabic music originally composed to help sick people get better.

There was a longer piece in the Guardian with some linked audio files of the music and this picture of the doctor-musicians Erol Can and Bingur Sönmez at work:

For more on classical Islamic music therapy, the Turkish Music Portal has this article. There’s an engaging list of some of the different musical modes or makams and the ailments they’re meant to relieve:

Irak Makam: effective in the treatment of childhood meningitis.
Isfahan Makam: clears the mind and protects from colds and fevers.
Zirefkend Makam: effective in the treatment of stroke and backache, fosters a sense of strength.
Rehavi Makam: effective in the treatment of all headaches, nosebleed, wry mouth, paralysis and phlegmatic diseases.
Büzürk Makam: effective in the treatment of the brain and of cramps, and eliminates fatigue.
Zirgüle Makam: effective in the treatment of heart and brain disease, meningitis, heartburn and fevers of the liver.
Hicaz Makam: effective in the treatment of diseases of the urinary tract.
Buselik Makam: effective in the treatment of pains in the hips and head, and of eye diseases.
Uşşak Makam: effective in the treatment of foot pain and insomnia.
Hüseyni Makam: effective in the treatment of liver and heart disease, siezures and hidden fevers.
Neva Makam: effective in the treatment of children who have reached puberty, pains of the hips, and brings joy to the heart.

The specificity of the effects seems doubtful, although few could disagree with what the 11th-century philosopher Ibn Sina defined as a good healing environment:

“One of the best and most effective of treatments is to strengthen the mental and spiritual strengths of the patient, to give him more courage to fight illness, create a loving, pleasant environment for the patient, play the best music for him and surround him with people that he loves.”

It’s a nice exception to Betrand Russell’s claim that, in the absence of modern medical knowledge, people always default to doing unpleasant things to the sick and the mad.

New recordings in from Sam Appleby and Craig Barrett

Posted by IMR on 10 September 2011

A COUPLE OF good recordings were recently shared with this site via the easy-to-use SoundCloud DropBox. It never sleeps and it’s always hungry for more, just like Ryan Giggs.

Sound designer Craig Barrett made this wonderful recording of the dawn chorus last May in Marble Hill, Twickenham:

Craig recorded it at four in the morning, which shows what rewards are in store for soundhunters who can either get up that early or stay up that late. Allow me to draw your attention to his Tumblr Soundblog while we’re about it.

Sam Appleby, who earlier shared a recording from Battersea Park, uploaded this busy industrial scene. It was captured along the Grand Union Canal by the railway yards at Old Oak Common, west London:

Many thanks Sam and Craig, those are both very welcome additions to the Survey.

Thanks for saying hello

Posted by IMR on 09 September 2011

LAST MONTH SAW a rise in the number of site visitors and this was probably down to the recording of post-riot looting in Peckham. Everyone likes a bit of drama.

Around the same time I’d added an email/message form for the site, which you can find (and hopefully use) on the Say hello page. This has made a big improvement to the amount of correspondence coming in.

Among other things, there was a query about what pocket recorder to buy for £160 or less – the Roland R05 is probably a good choice – and another one about mic setups for video, which I know nothing about.

Within a month of the London Sound Survey going online back in 2009 every single recording was downloaded by someone operating from an IP address in China. What use they put all those sounds to remains enigmatic. But it’s nice when someone asks if they can use part of a recording for a track or radio show they’re putting together.

No problem if it’s for non-commercial purposes and the site gets a little plug. Those are the terms of the London Sound Survey’s Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Noncommercial licence.

Elizabeth Veldon got in touch to ask about using some recordings in a project she’s constructing around the theme of London’s lost rivers. Here’s the first completed piece of hers:

  The Wallbrook delineates Londinium by elizabethveldon

During one of the Reclaim the Streets demonstrations around 1999 or 2000 the Walbrook river was briefly liberated from its underground confines near Cannon Street station. A bunch of crusties had done their research and prised open a manhole cover. The waters, which looked surprisingly clean, gushed out to whoops of glee at the symbolism of the act.

Matt Dixon very kindly shared a sound reference from a 1951 Royal Festival Hall publication by Max Parrish and it’s now been added to the historical section here:

The description reflects an optimistic view of London repairing and rebuilding itself after the war years, with the now-vanished noises of steam engines’ whistles and the sirens of ships on the Thames, then very much a working river.

Making soundmaps with iframes and image maps

Posted by IMR on 04 September 2011

THE NEW SOUNDMAP for London's waterways is now online and it's the second site section to use a combination of iframes and image maps.

Here's a screen-grab of its northwest corner:

An earlier post looked at two easy ways to make a sound map using Google and Bing maps. But a sound map doesn't need to have anything to do with geography. Distances between clickable areas or hotspots could represent measures of time, relatedness, similarity, and much else.

You might also want the freedom simply to draw a map the way you want. The more alternatives you devise in place of convenient third-party elements such as Google Maps, the more your website carries the imprint of your own thoughts and tastes.

IMAGE MAP BASICS

An image map consists of a picture, which can be in JPG, GIF or PNG format, and lines of HTML code to define the exact size and location of each hotspot. The code also specifies the URL of the webpage each hotspot is linked to. Clicking on a hotspot makes the browser open the webpage and the instruction target determines how this is done.

If the new webpage contains an audio player to go with a particular hotspot, then it's a good idea to make it appear within the existing soundmap page. This can be done by including an inline frame or iframe as the hotspot's target. Here's an example of the code for an image map with a single rectangular hotspot:

An iframe is easy to set up as this W3Schools tutorial shows. But with image maps there's time and tedium involved in working out the pixel-perfect co-ordinates for all your map's hotspots.

DEAR, CHEAP AND FREE SOFTWARE

There are several graphics programs which allow you to make image maps by importing the picture, selecting areas on it to turn into hotspots, and then typing the URLs and other details into dialogue boxes. They then work out the co-ordinates and produce finished code ready to paste into your webpage. Examples include the fairly expensive Adobe Fireworks and, at a more affordable £69, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. Xara has an awkward interface compared to Fireworks, but it's still a versatile choice for the money.

Boutell.com's MapEdit has been around since 1994 and its makers claim modestly that "there is no easier way to make an imagemap". MapEdit certainly is straightforward if you exclude the option to add Javascript mouseover functions to your hotspots, of which more later. The program has a 30-day evaluation period and costs $15 to register.

The last option considered here won't cost you anything. It's the open-source GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program. Its imagemap-building plugin can be found under Filters > Web. Once you've drawn all the hotspots and typed in their details you can cut and paste the code from View > Source.

ADDING ROLLOVER EFFECTS

A drawback of image maps is that when a site visitor moves their cursor over a hotspot, not much happens until they click on it. By default, the cursor will change from an arrow into a hand, and any alt text will appear after a slight delay, but the effect is underwhelming. Wouldn't it be better to have a rollover effect where the part of the map covered by the hotspot changes colour?

Many tutorials and examples exist online where people have attemped to do that using Javascript. But all the ones I've looked at seem potentially very time-consuming to use for a soundmap that might end up with dozens of hotspots. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer makes a good go of automating the task, but you'll still have to draw and position all the hotspot rollover states, each in their own layer.

To avoid all this extra work, a different approach was used for the London Map section. When you move the cursor over one of the orange rectangles, a little bubble appears above it containing some descriptive text. Such an approach is redundant for the Waterways soundmap, where there's already something to read at each hotspot's position, but it seems to work well enough on the London Map.

The effect was made possible with Craig Thompson's jQuery-based qTip tooltip plugin. qTip is fairly simple to set up and with experimentation you'll get better results than the examples on the image map demo page. Craig is an altruist who provides qTip free of charge but he wouldn't say no to a small donation if you find it useful.

Sound maps and SoundCloud

Posted by IMR on 19 August 2011

A MESSAGE ARRIVED recently from one of the SoundCloud team with a link to a sound map of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

For anyone who’s been sharing Grizzly Adams’s log cabin, SoundCloud has surged ahead as one of the internet’s leading audio-only platforms. It’s not hard to see why with its neat site design, clever pricing structure and array of sharing and messaging features.

You can find the Fringe Festival sound map here with a smaller version embedded below as well:

Two points of interest stand out. First, the appearance on the map of recordings uploaded by Time Out London and BBC Radio 1. These are the kind of media organisations that Audioboo look towards as potential customers for their paid-for channel services. Yet these channels don’t seem to attract large numbers of followers.

Christian O’Connell’s Breakfast Show on Absolute Radio, with a RAJAR-estimated listener base of 1.3 million, had 68 followers today for its Audioboo channel. Meanwhile on SoundCloud, the London Sound Survey has gathered about 12,000 followers, all drawn irresistibly towards its celebrity-free mix of cawing crows, buzzing telephone junction boxes and foul-mouthed street traders.

It also shows that SoundCloud can implement sound maps, but perhaps they haven’t yet decided if such a feature could or should be rolled out to their users in general. You can add a non-smartphone recording to the Fringe Festival map by retrospectively including latitude and longitude co-ordinates as tags.

But a more user-friendly method of adding geodata is already in use by Audioboo and Ipadio and is worth following. All it involves is plonking an icon down at the right spot on a small Google map and then saving.

Allowing SoundCloud users to make their own maps might appear pointless since most of them are musicians and DJs working from studios or at home. But there are others who might be more receptive.

SoundCloud has a small but growing number of field recordists, sound artists and radio producers who roam around and for whom there’s relevance in depicting the geographical context of their work. There are also moderated groups with contributions from different users in different places. Moderators might like to bundle all those tracks together in a map which they can display on SoundCloud or embed elsewhere.

Finally, there are the big state and commercial media organisations who may be keen to promote collaborative campaigns. For example, a couple of years ago BBC World Service ran a project called Save Our Sounds, which seemingly had to be built from scratch. And, yes, the map itself isn’t there any more, suggesting it was a hassle to maintain. An off-the-shelf mapping function from SoundCloud might prove more appealing in future.

Time will tell whether a double-dip recession leaves any room for such experiments.

Sound-mapping London's waterways

Posted by IMR on 10 August 2011

A NEW SOUND map is on the way consisting of auditory scenes recorded along London’s canals and lesser rivers. It’s very pleasant wandering the paths of the Dollis Stream, Ravensbourne, Brent and other waterways, and now’s a good time of year to be doing it.

So far I’ve followed the length of the Wandle, the Ravensbourne as far as Bromley, part of the Lea and its furtive tributaries in Stratford, all of the river Brent, the Dollis Stream as far as Totteridge, all of the Regent’s Canal and a small part of the Grand Union Canal.

This leaves plenty more including Beverley Brook, the Roding, the Crane, the New River, the Darent and more obscure watercourses such as Salmon’s Brook, the Silk Stream and (best name of all) the Quaggy. Doing all this is a way to evade the worst of the traffic noise and also to venture into parts of London I’d never visit otherwise.

The new set-up using the DPA 2006C mics mounted on a Beyerdynamic headphone band is really working out well. It’s very portable and convenient. The mics, Sound Devices MixPre-D preamp and Sony PCM M10 recorder all fit into a modest-sized canvas manbag bought for a tenner from an army surplus store. The cabling is just the right length and the whole lot can be pulled out of the bag, put in place and switched on in under a minute.

Here are a couple of sample recordings. The first was made in a derelict barge shed on the river Brent in west London. It goes back to when waterways like the Brent and the Lea were working rivers with barges carrying cement, timber and other heavy cargo well into the 1950s. Now the shed provides an echoing shelter for ducks and pigeons:

One of the pleasures of London’s minor rivers are the neglected patches of land adjoining them for which no purpose has been found, not even as managed nature reserves. An overgrown path like a green tunnel branched off the river Wandle as it neared its source west of Croydon. There were the promiscuous smells of damp earth and foliage before the path opened out onto a clearing covered in tall grass.

In the middle was a weathered concrete plinth and on that a black cat was playing with a captured vole; the rites of an old religion. I shooed the cat away and the vole lay still for a short while before creeping off into the grass. Crickets and grasshoppers dried the air with their stridulation:

The beginnings of the waterways sound map should be up within the next week or two.

Looting the Iceland store in Rye Lane, Peckham

Posted by IMR on 08 August 2011

THE SMELL OF burning plastic drifted a mile east from Rye Lane. Peckham had just spawned its own crop of rioters to add to what was flickering across London like stirred embers.

I set off at 8pm to see and hear what was going on. The park end of Rye Lane was sealed by riot police:

A devious route by backstreets and alleyways emerged not far south of the train station. The Lane was empty of traffic. A crowd of people had formed under the railway bridge, their excited voices echoing.

The Iceland frozen food store had had its windows smashed in and a knot of girls and young women milled around outside. Now and then one would dart into the unlit and dank-looking shop interior, egged on by her companions, while another would emerge clutching a carrier bag bulging with stolen food. Signs in what was left of the windows read £1! £2!

A larger group of all ages had adopted the role of spectators and formed a ragged line a few yards in front of the shop. I joined them and made this recording:

Some politely affected looks of shock, others were openly enthusiastic. The atmosphere there and nearby was strangely nonchalant in the riot’s afterglow. A few other shop windows had been stoved in by energetically-hurled street furniture and the rest had their steel shutters down. Further along Rye Lane a fire engine sprayed water inside a building. The smouldering interior boiled it into dirty steam.

The police stood silently, bulked out in their flameproof overalls, knowing the real action had moved on.

East London Line recorded by John Bingham Hall

Posted by IMR on 02 August 2011

ANOTHER SOUND RECORDING arrives at the London Sound Survey DropBox and it’s a cracker. Simply entitled East London Line, this twenty-minute piece by John Bingham Hall is a kind of audio lyric documentary.

A series of field recordings made both above and below ground are woven together to take you on a trip along that isolated spur of the tube network. The sounds were captured on the day before the East London Line’s three-year closure beginning in December 2007.

The line seemed almost as detached from the rest of the Underground network as the Waterloo & City line, or the Northern City line which runs from Moorgate through the once gloomy and much-vandalised Essex Road station to Finsbury Park. The East London Line served the wharfs of Wapping and the Surrey Docks and was oddly named since five of its nine stations lay south of the Thames. It was the original Docklands railway.

This is the longest recording to date on the London Sound Survey, yet it seems to be just about the right length. If East London Line was shorter it wouldn’t convey the sense of a journey nearly as well. Here are all the groans, squeals and creaks made by the old A-class stock which remain for many Londoners the depersonalising signature tune of the Underground system. At full pelt one of those trains could sound like a tumbledryer full of steel bolts.

There’s only one sound I miss from there, and which I’ve been trying to track down for a long time, and that’s the brief and abrupt rattle made by a stationary train, perhaps by air being released from the brakes. It’s like the noise made by a vibraslap, a percussion instrument often used in 1970s and 80s TV thriller scores to signal suspense.

Many thanks indeed to John for sharing this.

London sounds from Richard Sanderson and Sam Appleby

Posted by IMR on 26 July 2011

A COUPLE OF recordings recently arrived at the London Sound Survey DropBox on SoundCloud. It felt like being the man on the desert island who finds not one, but two messages-in-a-bottle on the beach at the same time.

The first was a nicely-timed recording on the theme of one of London’s lesser rivers, the Quaggy in Lewisham. It was kindly shared by its recordist Richard Sanderson:

Richard recorded it in March this year at Manor Park in Lewisham. He’s picked a good recording spot where the water makes two distinct sound sources: a constant high-pitched hiss as if under pressure, and a deeper, busier trickling and gurgling.

Do have a look at Richard’s long-running Baggage Reclaim blog. He writes on post-punk, English folk music and dance, plus some south-east Londonism.

There’s a good post on netlabels too – nice to see Harry Towell’s Audio Gourmet get a mention.

The second recording comes courtesy of Sam Appleby, who captured the sounds in Battersea Park one morning:

I’d guessed this to have been recorded around 7am. There’s a commotion among the birds at the park’s lake, joggers and cyclists rush past from time to time, and the jets are beginning to stream towards Heathrow. But no, according to Sam the recording was made at 9am.

These then are the sounds of that brief and curiously empty time of day when most people are commuting to or arriving at work, and the parks and residential streets are deserted.

A sample of Sam’s photographic,  performance and urban studies work can be found on his website – among other things there are some good photographs from Dungeness and Romney Marsh made to draw parallels with the popular image of the American Midwest’s isolated gas stations and shacks.

New low-noise binaural mics from Sound Professionals

Posted by IMR on 26 July 2011

A NEW ADDITION from the US-based firm Sound Professionals goes up on the London Sound Survey’s Budget headworn mics page.

They’re an upgraded version of the popular SP-TFB-2 in-ear binaurals, which you can hear on Ollie Hall’s Binaural Diaries. The new ones get the name of MS-TFB-2. The ‘MS’ stands for Master Series, which needs saying aloud by Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, and they cost more at $149. Like DFS Sofas, Sound Professionals seem to feature eternally reduced prices but the MS-TFB-2s nonetheless have an encouraging spec.

The above picture with the faceless man shows how unobtrusive the mics are. They won’t pass for MP3 player earbuds like the German-made Soundman series or the Roland CS-10EMs can. Nosey parkers might charitably think they’re some sort of hearing aid and leave you alone, especially if you’ve chosen the beige option for the cables. Well, if Morrissey can wear a fake hearing aid for effect, so can the rest of us.

Now for the spec. Self-noise is an impressive 19dB – that’s very good indeed for the price. Sensitivity is also encouraging at around 25mV/Pa. The maximum sound pressure level is 115dB when the mics get plug-in power from a digital recorder, and 130dB with one of Sound Professionals’ own battery boxes. 115dB is fine for most everyday urban settings but not so good for recording gigs and sound systems. The frequency response chart looks pretty flat as well. There are a couple of samples on the Sound Professionals site for you to listen to.

If you’re not in the US then delivery can become a significant add-on to the overall price. Insured and tracked delivery to the UK begins at around $46. But that plus the cost of the MS-TFB-2s themselves works out at £122 given current exchange rates. That’s still pretty reasonable. The only downside is likely to be susceptibility to wind noise and the optional foam windshields won’t be able to do much about that outdoors. Better to invest in an acrylic beanie hat and pull it down over your ears.

Moving towards HTML5 audio for your website's sounds

Posted by IMR on 16 July 2011

ADDING A SOUND player to a webpage with the HTML5 audio element should be as easy as adding a picture. Many people running sound-based blogs and websites probably won’t be too bothered though. They’re already well-served by the WordPress audio plug-in and the embeddable Soundcloud player, or even the free player from the venerable Internet Archive.

But HTML5 audio might interest the following sorts of webmaster: those who want to keep their sound files on their own server space rather than rely on third-party services, but dislike Flash player code; those who have an eye on providing content for mobile devices; and those who wish to stay abreast of technical developments.

This post compares how different browsers deal with the audio element and then looks at two Flash/HTML5 hybrid players: jPlayer and Pickle Player.

Inserting the audio element on a webpage is simple. All you need is a single line of code at the point where you want the player to appear:

The controls attribute sets up the player with play and pause buttons, and a volume slider. The other available attributes are self-explanatory: preload, loop and autoplay. Here’s an example using the ‘Pub charity music box’ recording from this site. You may or may not be able to see it depending on what browser you’re using.

The line reading Your browser does not support the audio element alerts us to how some older browsers still in widespread use don’t support HTML5 audio at all. The latest version of Firefox does support it, but not for MP3s because of licensing issues. Also, variations in the size of the default audio players displayed by up-to-date browsers makes page layout more tricky.

So what at first seems like a straightforward way of including audio turns out to be hedged in by all kinds of limitations. Here are comparisons of the default players for the four most popular browsers along with some visitor stats from W3Schools.

FIREFOX

Over 42% of visitors to W3Schools in June 2011 were using Firefox, with version 4 accounting for the majority. It might seem irrelevant discussing Firefox in this context at all since it can’t do anything with MP3s, but Ogg Vorbis and Wav files will still evoke this player:

It’s 300 pixels wide and uses a moving speech-bubble shape to show the running time in minutes and seconds.

GOOGLE CHROME

The next most popular browser was Chrome and it accounted for nearly 28% of visits in June. Chrome, now into version 12, has been able to play HTML5 audio since version 3, and it can handle MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Wav formats.

To my eyes, the Chrome player is the most attractive one and, like the seldom-seen Firefox player, it’s 300 pixels across.

INTERNET EXPLORER

IE users made up around 23% of visitors, with IE8 accounting for the majority at nearly 13%. IE9 came in at just 3.6%, and it’s the only version of Explorer which can use HTML5 audio, but limited to MP3 format. Older versions of IE can be expected to hang around for a good while yet on PCs in corporate and institutional settings.

The stolid-looking native IE player is 450 pixels wide. This limits it and by extension the simple method of including HTML5 audio in general, to wide webpage columns only.

SAFARI FOR WINDOWS

Safari users amounted to under 4% of W3Schools visitors in June 2011. Safari is now into version 5 and has had HTML5 audio since version 3. I don’t own a Mac so can only show you what it looks like on Safari for Windows.

This sorry little player is 200 pixels wide and appears to lack a border on the right-most side. It looks like no more than an afterthought in a hurry.

Relying on unstyled HTML5 audio alone is out of the question for webmasters as long as Firefox doesn’t support MP3 format. You could strike out along the lonely Ogg Vorbis path instead, but that only shifts the problem onto IE9 users. So why not forget HTML5 and stick with Flash for the foreseeable?

HYBRID VIGOUR: FLASH MEETS HTML5

One reason is that if you’re building up a large stock of recordings online, then you might eventually have to shift to HTML5 audio anyway. Flash has already been around rather longer than the late and unlamented RealPlayer, but one day it will disappear. So too will the MP3 format, but there’s not much you can do about that except keep hold of all your original Wav files.

The second reason is that a small number of hybrid Flash/HTML5 players are now available which offer advantages over using either method on its own. They allow you to style the Flash and HTML5 player’s appearance at the same time using HTML and CSS alone. The players can switch from displaying one mode to the other depending on the browser’s capabilities. This sidesteps both the browser limitations outlined above and the need to use Flash authoring software.

jPlayer is a free, open-source jQuery plug-in. The Quick Start guide is the best place to begin reading, along with studying the source code for the audio player demo page. Once you’ve uploaded the required Javascript and Flash files to your web server, and linked to the jQuery library, most of the effort is likely to involve designing your own customised player skin with CSS. The downloadable Blue Monday skin gives you something to work with.

Pickle Player is a commercial plug-in that will cost UK customers just under £70 when bundled with the Skin Designer tool. It’s produced by the same firm responsible for the customisable and oddly-named Wimpy Flash player used throughout the London Sound Survey. That’s worked pretty well for me so I was encouraged to try out their newer offering. Also, it enables file path encryption, which is going to be useful for a new site section on the way soon.

Once you’ve uploaded the Flash, Javascript and other files to your server, it’s very easy to insert the player on a web page. Two lines of code need to go in the head section of the page, linking to the Javascript file and the player’s stylesheet:

Then a single line of code goes in the body of the webpage where you want the player to appear:

It’s straightforward to have multiple instances of the player on the same page, each linked to different sound files. Skin Designer uses a simple interface to add, remove and style different player elements with a colour picker, drop shadows, highlights, rounded or hard corners, and so on. It then compiles the stylesheet and associated images for you when you click the Publish button.

With all the graphics options it’s tempting to forget the design principle of ‘less is more’:

 

 

So long as you don’t alter their dimensions, you can customise the component images further in a graphics program before you upload them.

There are some limitations to Pickle Player. First, it’s not obvious how the player can be centred because it seems immune to any such specification from its parent DIV (hopefully someone reading this knows of a solution). Second, you can’t have players with different skins on the same web page without using iframes, although this isn’t an important objection. Finally, Pickle Player costs money. But ease-of-use often commands a price.

FROM VISITORS TO LISTENERS

Writing about audio players might seem of little importance when compared to what’s involved in making good recordings to begin with. A few sites still don’t even bother with audio plug-ins at all and just provide a link to the sound file, and the browser then has to start up whatever media player is available on the computer. This isn’t a very visitor-friendly approach.

If you’re running a website revolving around sound recordings, then the purpose of every element on the site should be to lead visitors towards a ‘play’ button, either directly or indirectly, and then ensure that they want to press another one after that, and then another. That’s why it’s important to devote some thought to audio players.

Rustic sounds with the new headworn DPA 2006C mic set-up

Posted by IMR on 14 July 2011

OUT NEAR CAMBRIDGE last weekend, thinking there’d be a good opportunity to test the DPA 2006C mics in quiet surroundings now all the bits for the new headworn stereo set-up are in place. But things rarely turn out quite the way you expect, and there wasn’t much peace in the countryside:

The lipstick-tube-sized DPA mics were attached by jubilee clips to the headband from a set of Beyerdynamic headphones. Luckily this can be bought as a spare part. With a Sound Devices MixPre-D preamp and a Sony PCM M10 recorder it’s an easy-to-use and very portable arrangement. The mics are covered with Rycote shotgun foams as a matter of course and Rycote furries can be added on top. This gives some protection from wind noise, although not as good as that provided by a blimp.

There’s some slight background hiss and it’d be good to identify where that was coming from. Other drawback: wearing the mics with the furries makes you look like a black-haired Noddy Holder.

World Listening Day at SoundFjord, Sunday 17th July

Posted by IMR on 14 July 2011

WORLD LISTENING DAY has come round again and this year it’s on the 18th of July, which seems an odd choice as it’s a Monday. Some of us still work five days a week and it must be down to a love of the job.

Luckily the brilliant SoundFjord gallery in north London has arranged a full-to-bursting roster of World Listening Day activities for Sunday the 17th.

Included in the line-up are David Chapman, David Cottridge, Felicity Ford, Emmanuel Spinelli and Martin Clarke. Even I get to help out co-hosting a bat walk with the two Davids along the River Lea in the evening. Full details are on SoundFjord’s website here. Make it along if you can and I look forward to meeting you.

Wind-powered sound art in Cumbria

Posted by IMR on 14 July 2011

AMONG THE 2,167 recordings which successfully made it onto the British Library’s UK Soundmap project, was this from the Ulverston Flag Festival in Cumbria:

Cumbria has less than half the number of wind farms as the cluster stretching from Newcastle to Middlesborough along the north-east coast. But artistic exploitation of the wind seems to be popular in the county nonetheless. The other day an email arrived from the Nature Around Me website with a link to a video they’d made at Pierre Sauvageot’s wind-powered, noise-making array of instruments, titled Harmonic Fields. Birkrigg Common near Ulverston was the venue.

There were 500 instruments in the array and some 8,000 visitors came along to see and hear them in action between the 3rd and 5th of June this year. Those are impressive figures and the video of the event shows it was worth travelling a good distance to be there.

Earlier this year the homely tinkle of the windchime got out of control in Essex as complaints mounted over the numbers of them being hung up in cemeteries. A Daily Mail article featured some admittedly tasty photographs from Colchester to tickle the sniggerers and sneerers of this world. It quoted one Fred Thompson, 45, who wanted all the windchimes taken down: “I came here today to spend time at the grave of someone dear to me. I don’t want this noise for starters but they also look absolutely horrific.”

It could be worse. Imagine if the cemetery had the creaking windmill from the opening to Sergio Leone’s Once upon a time in the West.

Drone noise weekend with Jamie Reid and the Organ of Corti

Posted by IMR on 06 July 2011

LAST WEEKEND I managed to record two drone-emitting sound sculptures: the Unity Stone at Jamie Reid’s The Ragged Kingdom at the Isis Gallery off City Road, and liminal’s Organ of Corti by St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Organ of Corti was the subject of a presentation at a recent day-long event held at the Sonic Art Research Unit.  But no one was letting on exactly what it sounded like.

The Organ is a sonic crystal , that is, an upright array of cylinders which has a scattering effect on sound waves passing through it:

This is a 3D view of it, and in real life it’s big enough for people to step up and walk through the short passageway among the columns:

Yes yes, but what’s it sound like? While I was waiting to go up and record, I watched a few tourists clamber onto the Organ’s platform and look around inside. All seemed to treat it as a visual rather than an auditory experience, gurning and waving at their friends through the optically-distorting perspex. Right enough the effect is quite subtle, as you can hear:

What’s interesting is how the droning sound isn’t the product of resonance or vibration (as I understand it). A visual equivalent would be something like a sculpture that could alter the colour spectrum of light rays passing close by it.

About a mile to the north in the Isis Gallery on Wenlock Road in Hoxton, formerly a laundry depot, was Jamie Reid’s The Ragged Kingdom show, billed as a ‘Peace Camp in our midst’.

Eight teepees representing the solstices and equinoxes of the year are arranged in a circle, with a smooth black granite pillar in the middle. On the opening night a cheerful, friendly man who seemed to be responsible for making it told me that it weighed half a ton.

The pillar has a square cross-section, about ten inches wide, and it rises to a height of just over four feet. The top half of the pillar is divided by two vertical cuts perpendicular to each other to make four equal-sized sections. (You’ll have guessed that the batteries in my camera had gone flat.)

When the top is made wet with water, and up to four people then rub it vigorously with the palms of their hands, a deep resonant drone grows in intensity. Perhaps it’s similar to how Tibetan singing bowls work.

On the following day I made this recording with the help of two other people who happened to be there, including someone from the Isis gallery whose voice you can hear towards the end:

The Ragged Kingdom is well worth visiting. All music-based youth culture needs a visual identity, and Jamie Reid’s work for the Sex Pistols played a huge role in defining the punk graphic style. The ecospiritual angle to Reid’s recent work seems a forlorn source of hope if you’re a materialist. But it’s good that Reid has remained true to what moves him.

Sonic pleasures of the landline telephone

Posted by IMR on 22 June 2011

THE NEW YORK TIMES website has a fine piece by Virginia Heffernan mourning the decline of the analogue landline phone:

You can read it in full here.

The shape and sound of old analogue telephones lives on, much like the way books for very young children usually depict steam trains instead of modern ones. The game show Deal or No Deal has a telegenic bakelite-era phone for when Noel Edmonds has to call ‘the banker’. The sound of an electric phone bell is one of the most popular mobile ringtones. Even the video for Lady Gaga’s Telephone features about four or five different corded handsets, including a 1970s Trimphone.

A. P. Herbert’s romantic novel from 1930 The Water Gypsies has its heroine make a call from a telephone box. It’s just not as nice as having a phone of your own:

Making phone calls has inspired umpteen pop songs. Blondie managed two with Hanging on the Telephone and Call Me, Jim Croce released Operator a year before his death in 1973, Electric Light Orchestra got into the Top Ten in 1976 with Telephone Line and, um, Phil Collins unleashed Don’t Lose My Number in 1985.

Here’s Der Telefon Anruf by Kraftwerk:

Les Passages Couverts – English Style

Posted by Des Coulam on 21 June 2011

I AM AN ENGLISHMAN living in Paris where I record sound. Most of my work involves capturing the street sounds of Paris but I do sometimes venture further afield.

Recently, I spent a long weekend in the north east of England partly to recharge my batteries and partly to record the sights and sounds of that delightful part of the world.

But while I was there, echoes of Paris were never far away. Sometime ago, I wrote a blog piece about les passages couverts, the wonderful early nineteenth-century Parisian arcades that first introduced the notion of primitive ‘shopping malls’ - a group of shops clustered together, inside and under cover. Delightful as these passage couverts are, they are not exclusive to Paris - they are to be found in England too.

I discovered this one, the Central Arcade, whilst visiting Newcastle-upon-Tyne recently. It’s Edwardian, built in 1906, designed by Oswald and Son of Newcastle and I think equally as elegant as the Passage Verdeau or the Passage Jouffroy in Paris.

What made the Central Arcade particularly special was the completely unexpected surprise I came upon whilst I was exploring it. In the arcade is one the UK’s longest established and largest music stores which goes by the unlikely name of JG Windows. It’s a veritable emporium of all things musical - acoustic and digital pianos, keyboards, synthesizers, electric, acoustic and classical guitars and much, much more.

Stepping inside, I was delighted to find my sound of the day.

Inside JG Windows:

A man walked in off the street and sat down at an £8,000 digital piano. He put his briefcase down beside him and began playing. The lower register of the piano was transformed into a string bass for his left hand whilst his right hand caressed the piano sounds in the upper registers. I was transfixed. When he finished playing, he simply picked up his briefcase and left just as quickly as he came without speaking a word to anyone.

I couldn’t help wondering what his story was. Was he a frustrated musician who couldn’t afford an £8,000 digital piano? Maybe he was road testing it with a view to buying it – or maybe he just needed a musical fix before heading off for his next appointment. Who knows? Whatever his motivation the sound he made obviously pleased him … and it certainly pleased me.

What I took away from this was that, if we take the time to listen, there are captivating sounds to be found everywhere – in Paris, in London, and in Newcastle too.

Des Coulam has a passion for recording and preserving our sonic environment. He writes and records the Soundlandscapes blog at www.soundlandscapes.wordpress.com.

Shopaholic

Posted by IMR on 20 June 2011

A FEW WEEKS ago I got an email from Michael Gallagher. He’s a researcher at the University of Edinburgh with an interest in sound and geography. The link will take you to his personal blog and there’s plenty of good reading to be had there.

He kindly offered to share one of his London recordings with the London Sound Survey. It’s a serendipitous capture of some unexpected music playing over the PA at the big new Westfield shopping mall in Shepherds Bush, west London:

Michael’s written an accompanying blog post about Westfield and why Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here is an incongruous piece of music to be playing in a shopping mall. I liked the way he described the impact the mall had on him:

My reaction to the place was an odd mixture of awe, excitement and dismay that I often feel when experiencing the excesses of capitalism. I have to admit that the awe and excitement outweighed the dismay on this occasion: despite the ludicrous, hyperbolic architecture, the comic timing (it opened in late 2008 at the height of the credit crunch) and the fact that I couldn’t find a pair of jeans that would fit me, I was overwhelmed by the light, the scale, the space and the massive wall of tesselated angled mirrors outside the toilets.

In Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital the writer and his companions visit the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent during their wanderings. This inspires Sinclair to go off on a rant about the place. It’s entertaining but also has a contrived feel. Michael’s honest astonishment at the scale and opulence of Westfield is more reliable than what Sinclair has to say about Bluewater.

Sinclair starts in good humour by likening the disused chalk quarry setting of Bluewater to the ‘Wellesian pit’ that the Martian invaders had as their Woking beachhead in The War of the Worlds. Then he goes off course when describing Bluewater as ‘profoundly conservative’. There’s not much that’s conservative about the workings of modern marketing-based capitalism.

Sinclair makes a passing reference to mall-muzak. Perhaps he’s thinking of the gormless 1960s novelty pop hit The Gonk, running its endless duty-cycle in the mall setting of George Romero’s zombie film Dawn of the Dead. I’ve never heard muzak inside Bluewater any time I’ve visited. The clothes shops and a few others play chart hits and that’s about it. What’s noticeable is how the acoustics seem designed to enhance the soothing hubbub of shoppers’ voices. Sound design for retail now provides a living for some, such as Julian Treasure’s The Sound Agency.

A calming mother-scent is also circulated through the air conditioning. It’s like a clean fleshy smell mixed with the faint perfume that banknotes pick up after they’ve been inside a handbag for a while. Bluewater’s designers obviously want visitors to feel safe and happy so they’ll hang around longer and spend more money. But Sinclair seems to think everyone must feel the way he does:

Arrive in rude health, buzzing with energy, and a few minutes trawling the overheated malls, losing all sense of direction, overwhelmed by excess of consumer opportunity (choice/no choice), will bring you to your knees.

A random sample of Bluewater shoppers would likely turn up more smiling faces than you’d find along Mare Street in Sinclair’s home borough of Hackney. This is what it sounded like on a recording spree a couple of years ago:

Shopping malls are the Great Exhibitions of our time, full of things to marvel at and desire. How long can it all last?

Sounds of the Thames estuary remembered

Posted by IMR on 18 June 2011

AN EMAIL OF the kind I very much like to get has just arrived from Martin Tanton, who was present at the Sonic Art Research Unit’s seminar last Thursday. I hope you don’t mind me quoting from it at length, Martin:

I’ve just been looking at the site and listening to some of the sounds. The river at Erith and Dartford scrambler bikes were sounds I recognised right away [. . .] I also used to cycle along the Thames up to Cliffe and out to Hoo, Upnor, the Isles of Grain and Sheppey, just looking and listening.

There are sounds I remember that have gone for good, trolley buses, trams, the Woolwich paddle steamer ferries, newspaper sellers, horse-drawn bread vans. When I was a kid there were a lot of iron barges on the Thames, and when it was windy they banged together like giant gongs, you could hear them several miles away in Welling, where I lived, if the wind was in the right direction. There wasn’t the constant car noise we have today to block them out. There was a lot of traffic on the river in the 1950’s, and when it was foggy at night I lay in bed listening to the ships’ horns in the distance. It would be great if someone had recorded these sounds.

From the way you’ve described them, I wish those sounds had been recorded too.

Nice to see you at SoundFjord and Oxford Brookes University

Posted by IMR on 18 June 2011

A QUICK HELLO to anyone reading this who came along to my two recent talks at the SoundFjord gallery in north London and the Sonic Art Research Unit in Oxford Brookes University.

Last Sunday it was pouring down in London, so before the talk at SoundFjord I was forced to take shelter in The Fountain on West Green Road. This may or may not have affected the delivery of the talk somehow. I’m still not sure how I linked a recording of a tornado demolishing a house to oil refinery sirens at Canvey Island – something to do with, er, chance – but everyone seemed happy enough. Thanks to all of you who turned up, especially with such rubbish weather prevailing, and much gratitude as ever goes to Helen and Andy of SoundFjord for inviting me along.

For the presentation I’d put together a video and copied the resulting MP2 file onto a memory stick. It’s so much easier bringing sound, photos and graphics together that way compared to messing about with Powerpoint. All you have to do is be reasonably quick with the Play/Pause keyboard shortcut. This method was again used (but with a different video) for the talk last Thursday at the You are here seminar on site-specific art at Oxford Brookes University, and many thanks to Paul Whitty of the Sonic Art Research Unit for having me along.

Paul had lined up a diverse range of speakers for the day-long seminar and it was fascinating to learn about so many different practices and approaches. They were: Cressida Brown from Offstage Theatre, sound artist and composer Ray Lee, David Prior of the Organ of Corti sound sculpture project, artist Hayley Newman talking about her Milton Keynes Vertical Horizontal project, and Jane Grant and John Matthias describing their neurally-inspired Fragmented Orchestra.

One date for the diary is the news that the Organ of Corti sound sculpture will be unveiled in Carter Lane Gardens, immediately south of St Pauls Cathedral, on Friday 1st July.

The London Sound Survey at SoundFjord, 12th June

Posted by IMR on 06 June 2011

TIME TO DUST down the Oyster card and make sure there’s nothing embarrassing on the memory stick. I’ve been invited by Helen Frosi to give a talk at the SoundFjord gallery in north London.

It’s on Sunday the 12th of June from 7 to 9pm. Doors open at 6.40pm, so if you get there early you can sit through my special London Sound Survey video testcard, complete with appropriate background music. But I won’t just be playing my own sounds, there’s plenty of interesting stuff lined up that you won’t have heard anywhere else. Price of admission: £2.

That’s cheaper than a packet of ten fake ‘Richmond’ cigarettes sold by the man with the holdall outside Seven Sisters tube which, by happy coincidence, is the nearest stop for SoundFjord.

Helen is doing a great job building up SoundFjord’s roster of events and exhibitions, so come along and help make it a busy evening.

The Entertainers: music hall revival from the 1960s

Posted by IMR on 03 June 2011

EVERY BREATH INSIDE the Waterman’s Arms is a warm gulp of tobacco smoke, hair oil vapour, sweat and perfume: the fuel-air mixture of entertainment in 1964. Daniel Farson, the owner of the east London pub, prefers not to think about the money he’s already lost trying to revive the music hall tradition.

But if the people won’t come to the Waterman’s Arms, then the Waterman’s Arms can come to them. Every home’s got a record player these days.

He’s already working out what to write for the back of the sleeve. Farson knows he can’t pull off televised London Palladium variety bills like Val Parnell’s Showtime or Barney Colehan’s lavish music-hall series The Good Old Days, which the BBC will run right up to 1983. But at least he’s got Kim Cordell to sing and be the compere for the evening:

Rex Jamieson, or Mrs Shufflewick when he’s in drag, gives Farson a wink before taking his turn on the pub’s tiny, ornately-framed stage:

Kim Cordell invites Farson up on stage to say a few words, and his educated voice sounds stiff and out of place. The audience are slightly relieved when he finishes and the entertainment can carry on. And, in truth, Farson feels much more at home among his bohemian drinking pals in Soho’s Colony Room, although his love of music hall is genuine.

George Hitchens the pearly king gets up to remind everyone of the Barrow Boy Song:

Kim Cordell’s song Susie in the shoeshine shop recalls the innuendo of Marie Lloyd’s She sits among the cabbages and peas:

The London pub comedian and pianist Jimmy Fagg used to perform the song What a wonderful fish the sole is, which I remember from his early 1980s Sunday lunchtime spot at the Red Lion pub on Exmouth Market (now a restaurant):

What a wonderful fish the sole is
What a wonderful fish are soles
I must relate I am partial to plaice
When served on a dish as rissoles

What a wonderful fish the sole is
Like salmon they swim in shoals
But the sweetest of fish
When placed on a dish
Are soles, are soles, are soles

The culture in which swearing was strongly disapproved of has largely passed away, and swearing has little subversive or magical quality left.

Music hall continues to attract the loyalty of a few enthusiasts as an archival genre. The Waterman’s Arms remains as a pub on the Isle of Dogs, lately renamed the Great Eastern with plans for a backpackers’ hostel on its upper floors.

Two years old today

Posted by IMR on 31 May 2011

THE LONDON SOUND Survey has now been online for two years. Time for the annual self-criticism session.

The site visitor stats seem healthy enough, but it’s a bit like counting the number of people who might look at your house as they go past in the street. Much more rewarding has been getting in touch with people with their own interests and projects, like Alasdair Pettinger at the Scottish Music Centre, and Ed Alexander who runs fromZtoA.

A guestbook might be worth adding to the site, given the obscure subjects of some of the blog posts. Some work needs done elsewhere too. One criticism has been that the home page has too much on it, but I’m not so sure. Minimalism in site design is a matter of taste rather than an objective virtue.

However, the wildlife section is the weakest on the site with an awkward-looking page layout. This year will see a new section that will eventually absorb the wildlife recordings into a bigger theme. It’s going to take a lot of work but should be worth it.

Progress has also just been made in getting permission to use some old sound recordings, so expect news on that in due course. It all helps keep me out of trouble.

What do tornadoes sound like?

Posted by IMR on 26 May 2011

230 PEOPLE ARE still missing after a tornado smashed through the town of Joplin in Missouri earlier this week. Many of those who survived by hiding in cellars and under tables may not have seen it, but they will have heard it.

Tornado reports often begin with a delicate turn of phrase. They are said to touch down, like cautious explorers of a new planet. They move seemingly under their own power and they are processes as well as objects, growing stronger before fading. Yet tornadoes are never thought of as like living things in the way people sometimes treat fire as alive. Popular stories recognise them as random and unfathomable. A tornado tears away the roof and walls of a house to leave a vase standing on a table.

Tornadoes don’t invite what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett calls the intentional stance, the way we try to predict the behaviour of objects by ascribing to them psychological states such as goals, desires and emotions. We adopt the intentional stance quite liberally too. In 2010 the Daily Mirror newspaper carried a story about the closure of the last blast furnace in Teesside and quoted David Cox, who had worked there as a furnaceman for 31 years:

Suppose you wanted to make an enjoyable popcorn film about tornadoes and the scientists who study them. The scientists will be the usual bomber crew of leader, love interest and assorted eccentrics. The tornadoes must have their own personalities too. The makers of the 1996 film Twister set about achieving the last goal by making their CGI tornadoes snarl and growl like enraged monsters. The film was nominated for a ‘Best Sound’ Oscar.

A public relations-style interview with the director Jan de Bont and the supervising sound editor Stephen Hunter Flick shows them express conflicting ambitions in saying how they wanted to depict the tornadoes realistically and how they gave them mind-like properties. As de Bont explains:

Research for getting the sound right began with interviewing people with first-hand experience of tornadoes. Stephen Hunter Flick then describes his understanding of the basic constituents of their sound:

Modern-day eyewitness (or earwitness) accounts typically reach for machine metaphors in likening the noise to passing trains or jet airliners taking off. A contemporary description from 1761 of a tornado in Great Malvern, Worcestershire refers to the prototypical industrial processes of the day:

After describing his empirical approach at the beginning, Twister‘s head sound engineer then jumps across the chasm of disbelief:

A few sequences from Twister can still be found on YouTube, and the film’s penultimate and biggest tornado hunts the two main protagonists across a corn field in this sequence beginning around 4:20. It growls as it goes like the angry God of the Old Testament and, fittingly, the scientists’ perseverance is eventually rewarded with the sight of the tornado’s interior. This resembles the tunnel often recalled in memories of near-death experiences and it comes complete with a patch of heavenly blue sky at the top.

Good sound recordings of real tornadoes are hard to come across for obvious reasons. One remarkable example survives of a tornado in 1974 which hit the town of Xenia, Ohio. It was made by a Mr Brokeshoulder, a dauntless sound-hunter who stayed in his apartment as long as was prudent before setting the mic and recorder down and hurrying to the basement. You then hear what is probably the roof being torn off about three-quarters of the way through.

This webpage gives the background story. The tornado has no voice in that or any other recording. It is a vortex, a phenomenon of physics, and belongs as much in a lifeless world as in our own.

England attracts a surprisingly large number of tornadoes. But, with a few exceptions, including one which may have wrecked London Bridge in 1091, they are usually diffident efforts which peter out unnoticed. In 1954, a more vigorous whirlwind inflicted serious damage on Gunnersbury station in west London, as described in this Pathe newsreel:

In 2006 another destructive tornado stripped roofs and felled trees and chimney pots in Crouch End, a prosperous part of north London. Many tornado eyewitness accounts express humility and a retreat of the self. Not so with Caroline Phillip’s Evening Standard article, in which the damage inflicted by the Crouch End twister on her house only released another unstoppable force: the self-absorption and instinctive social bragging of a north London media luvvie. There’s so much choice that’s it hard to pick a single best example, although this does pretty well:

Fortunately someone has decided to preserve the article for long-term amusement, and you can read it all on My Tornado Hell.

DPA's new 2006C Reference Standard mic: first impressions

Posted by IMR on 22 May 2011

RIGHT NOW I’M contemplating baked beans. Not even Heinz beans or HP beans, but large tins of the cheapest catering-grade baked beans where the sauce is thin and sour.

The reason is I’ve just shelled out for a pair of DPA 2006C omnidirectional mics. They’re part of DPA’s new Reference Standard series of interchangeable preamps and capsules.

The DPA 2006Cs are phantom-powered yet quite small at the same time. This makes them candidates for a part in a new headworn recording setup that I’ve been thinking of for a while. The specifications might help explain why they were chosen.

Self-noise is rated at 16dB(A). This is lower than any other mic you could conceivably stick on each of your head and escape having stones thrown at you in public, with the exception of some using remote capsules, of which more later. Sensitivity is high at 40mV/Pa. The frequency response looks mirror-smooth apart from a 3dB boost at 14kHz:

The DPA 2006C can cope with temperatures ranging from -40 °C to 45 °C and a relative humidity level of up to 90%, making it suitable for all-year-round outdoor use in Britain. The mic is just over two inches or 58mm long, and 19mm wide. Yet it feels quite hefty and solid at 60g/two ounces.

The capsule can be removed and replaced by any other from the Reference Standard range. These include cardioid, wide-cardioid, shotgun and the more expensive MMC4006 omni capsules. The mic is so nicely machined that it’s oddly satisfying just screwing and unscrewing the capsule from the preamp, until you remember you’re supposed to record sounds with it.

Each mic comes with a foam windshield and one of DPA’s own mic clips. These are absurdly expensive when bought individually but the clip does make it easy to hold each mic against the side of your head, so that the capsule is somewhere around your temple.

Here’s what it sounded like on Merton High Street yesterday. The river Wandle flows through a culvert in front of a supermarket, and you can hear it trickling past:

To my ears the sound is rather more detailed than what I’d expect from the headworn Shure WL-183s that I use. Traffic rumble is strong without being harsh and high-pitched noises are well-defined too. Here is a slightly quieter environment, recorded from a footbridge spanning the river Wandle in Earlsfield:

Neither of those situations show off the DPA 2006C’s low self-noise, but perhaps they give some idea of the mic’s overall character when used in fairly typical outdoor urban settings. Thomann’s are now selling the DPA 2006C at below the recommended retail price.

There are alternatives for headworn enthusiasts seeking high quality mics with sub-20dB(A) self-noise. Models made by Neumann and Sennheiser allow their capsules to be mounted remotely by connecting the capsule to the mic preamp with a length of cable. But they’re expensive, and the cable for the Neumann KM100 series doesn’t seem easy to track down.

Fortunately, Rode provide a more affordable option with their NT6 cardioid mic, with which you can swap the cardioids for Rode’s NT45-O omnidirectional capsules, although you’ll need to buy the latter separately. With those it’d work out at around £635 a pair.

More later on mounting and powering the DPA 2006Cs so they make a high-quality, discreet and versatile headworn stereo recording setup.

Come whiff me to Beddington Farm

Posted by IMR on 11 May 2011

IN MICHAEL MOORCOCK’s fine novel Mother London, one of the characters describes playing on Mitcham Common during his childhood:

Once Mitcham Common abutted Beddington Park to the south, making a large slab of land bounded by London Road and Beddington Lane. You can look up the Ordnance Survey First Series from around 1805 on the London Map’s Mitcham and Carshalton pages.

From around the 1860s Beddington Park began shrinking towards a corner in the south-west, making way for Beddington Farm: a sprawling array of sewage filter beds and what are decorously called ‘sludge beds’. It’s one of those places that looks intriguing on the map, an urban hinterland.

Last week I headed there with the vague hope of recording a dusk chorus. Beddington Farm is a popular spot for birdwatchers, after all. The sewage works themselves are off-limits to the public, but there’s a path running alongside from near Mitcham Junction station down to Hackbridge. Much of the way it’s banked in by high hedgerows, but here and there gaps appear, giving pylon-dominated views across to Beddington Lane and beyond.

Beyond the hedgerows lie chain-link fences to keep people out of the filter beds, backed up by some ominous signs warning of quicksand. There’s a pervasive sweetish smell, like the scent added to domestic North Sea gas so you can tell if there’s a leak. This recording was made around 8pm:

It’s not a particularly good recording, and that reflects how I don’t know this area at all. But it’ll be worth visiting again. There’s an interesting website run by the Beddington Farm Bird Group, who also organise tours of Beddington Farm – the next ones are on May the 15th and August the 21st.

Seeing sounds: Izotope RX2 as a wave editor

Posted by IMR on 05 May 2011

IZOTOPE RX2 IS a professional standalone audio restoration program aimed at recording studios, broadcasters, sound archivists and audio forensics experts. It isn’t designed as a wave editor, but many of its features might make it attractive to field recordists for just that purpose.

Recently my copy of Wavelab Elements 6 was written off by a trial version of Comodo Internet Security, which sandboxed Wavelab’s Syncrosoft electronic license. Gutted! So I’m using Izotope RX2 as a replacement. Here’s what it can and can’t do compared to a budget wave editor.

Wave editors display sound files as two-dimensional waveforms, showing changes in amplitude or loudness over time. Izotope RX2 instead renders the recording as a spectrogram with three dimensions of information: time, amplitude and frequency. The spectrogram is constructed very quickly and a fascinating amount of detail can be seen. Here’s a screenshot of a recording featuring the calls of several different bird species:

A much bigger version of the screenshot is on this page and it’s worth looking at to get an idea of the spectrogram’s resolution and the delicacy of the features revealed. At that zoom level, individually numbered seconds start appearing, but you can go in a lot closer.

Navigation is straightforward both in the main window and the overview strip at the top, although unfortunately there’s no ‘go to the end’ button. Markers can be added by tapping the ‘m’ key. Doing this with a selection turns it into a region with start and end markers, and annotations can be added to a small pop-up window.

The spectrogram is very useful when it comes to reviewing long recordings and getting an idea of the sequence and structure of the sounds within. It’s better than relying on an amplitude waveform alone. Being able to identify particular sounds and their precise frequency ranges also encourages experimentation with Izotope’s 4-band parametric equaliser, with has high- and low-pass filters plus adjustable notch filters.

The five audio restoration modules in the program are Declip, Declick & Decrackle, Remove Hum, Denoise, and Spectral Repair. Declick & Decrackle probably doesn’t have much relevance to the needs of most field recordists – no, it can’t do anything about the rustle of plastic carrier bags – but obvious uses can be found for the rest, especially Declip and Spectral Repair.

Here’s an Izotope promotional video for the Declip function:

The Spectral Repair module is the most intriguing. A much cheaper program called Magix Audio Cleaning Lab also has a spectral repair function, but it’s nowhere near as well-implemented as that on Izotope RX2. Spectral repair allows you to attenuate brief and inconvenient noises very precisely, or even replace them with background sounds found elsewhere in the recording. It’s analogous to the ‘intelligent spot healing’ tool in Photoshop and uses similar selectors such as a paintbrush, magic wand, and lasso.

Here’s a demonstration of spectral repair facing the admittedly favourable task of having to remove a brief, high-pitched and distinctive sound:

Should field recordists use spectral repair on recordings that will later be described as actuality? Such a question can only be answered by the individual recordist according to their own intentions. One of the goals of this site is to strive towards a neutral and depersonalised sound record of London, even if that is only a continually-receding mirage. So I think it’s acceptable to use spectral repair to get rid of my own inadvertent self-made noises such as the chink of unwrapped coins in a pocket or the sound of a twig snapping underfoot. Of course, far better to avoid making such sounds in the first place.

Now for the bad news. At around £185 RX2 isn’t a particularly cheap program, and many may feel that money would be better spent on upgrading from Audacity or a cheap wave editor to something like Pro Tools or the new version of Adobe Soundbooth – sorry, Audition! Also, you can’t use third-party plug-ins with the standard edition of the program. That feature is reserved for the high-end RX2 Advanced version and your heart will collapse into a heap of sand when you see the price. Judging by comments on various web forums, not everyone was overjoyed by Izotope’s decision on this.

RX2 makes fade-ins and fade-outs as easy as they should be, but it has no crossfade feature. The program can import a variety of file formats, but will only export to WAV and AIFF. There are a couple of ways you can get around this without having to open up files in a wave editor to convert them and add ID3 tags. The paid-for version of MediaMonkey allows tagging and converting or, for a cheaper option, you can use the free JetAudio player with its paid-for MP3 encoder at around £6.

If you’re curious, you can try out the save-disabled trial version of Izotope RX2 to see how you get on with it.

Regina Burbach: stories told through sound

Posted by IMR on 03 May 2011

A NICE EMAIL came the other day from Regina Burbach, a Bremen-based field recordist, composer and radio feature maker. She was among the first field recordists to put some of her work up on Soundcloud and I first stumbled across it while looking for recordings of frogs.

It was clear that a lot of work had gone even into seemingly straightforward recordings like this from Sri Lanka:

There are also some more complex, layered compositions, some of which might be described in a hurry as dreamlike, but are probably closer to a sound version of magical realism.

As Regina sums up her way of working:

Now she has her own website called The ballonist in the desert is dreaming, featuring more of her recordings as well as posts in German and English. Well worth visiting.

Today is International Dawn Chorus Day

Posted by IMR on 01 May 2011

MAYDAY THIS YEAR has been designated International Dawn Chorus Day, an event promoted by the Wildlife Trust. The site has a few recordings from past years on this page but they’re all very short.

The Wildlife Sound Recording Society is also taking part, and on this page there’s a good selection of hour-long recordings from different parts of the country. Fair play to Doug Ireland for getting up early enough to start recording at 4.30am in Minsmere, Suffolk. The webpage uses a plug-in that seems to work best with Internet Explorer.

Mark Kneebone’s recording from Westwood Marshes, also in Suffolk, is worth hearing just for the eerie booming call of the bittern. There’s also a few dawn chorus recordings on the London Sound Survey made in and around town last year, in the wildlife section.

Two easy ways to make a sound map

Posted by IMR on 27 April 2011

IF YOU’VE EVER tried wading through the Google Maps API documentation, you might wish you had the programming skills of sound map designers like Udo Noll or Max Stein.

Luckily, there are two off-the-shelf applications which make sound mapping easy for the rest of us who lack the code-warrior gene.

The first one I came across was on Jonathan Prior’s 12 Gates to the City website, which uses Umapper for its sound map. Jonathan seems to be the only person so far to have cottoned on to Umapper’s potential for making sound maps.

Umapper follows the familiar ‘freemium’ (not nice is it?) web business model. The free version has enough functions to make a decent sound map, while the paid-for version works out quite cheaply with the bill for 10,000 page views a month amounting to just $2. That’s a realistic amount of traffic for a hobby website. Umapper must be hoping to make bigger money from corporate and institutional customers.

After you’ve registered with Umapper, you can set about making your sound map. First a title and description for the map have to be entered, then you add the sounds and placemarkers from the edit page, as pictured below.

Sounds can be uploaded from your computer to the Audio Library, the icon for which I’ve circled in orange on the right of the screenshot. Umapper stores your sound files in the Amazon cloud, although once they’re in the cloud, there’s no obvious way to get at them other than by including them on a Umapper sound map.

When a file has finished uploading it joins your Audio Library, and then it’s simply a matter of dragging and plonking it onto the map. After you’ve saved the map, you can cut and paste its Flash code onto your website, as below with some unexpected sounds from the Faroe Islands:

The drawback is the pop-up only includes Umapper’s audio player and the filename as a title. Although there are options for including text and pictures in the pop-up, they won’t co-exist with the player. On the plus side, Umapper offers a range of different map types, such as the visually pleasing Mapnik layer from OpenStreetMap, and the more familiar aerial photographic views.

It also makes a simple collaborative sound map possible through the Wiki setting, meaning that anyone can upload a sound to your map. If you prefer, you can allow uploads but limit them to those contributors entering approved email addresses. Umapper allows you to build a list of such addresses and add to it as time goes by.

The second mapping application is Map Maker and it’s provided free of charge by web designer Richard Stephenson. Map Maker is very simple and straightforward to use. Unlike Umapper, it doesn’t have any custom features for including sound files. But the pop-up content box will happily accept Flash embed code for audio players, such as that used by Soundcloud:

After you’ve saved the map, you can cut and paste a small line of code consisting of no more than an iframe URL and its width and height. Here’s the finished result:

Since it looks like any map made in this way will use up some of his site’s bandwidth, it’s maybe a nice idea to drop Richard a thank-you note if you’re going to make prominent use of Map Maker.

Allhallows Marshes

Posted by IMR on 17 April 2011

THE ALLHALLOWS MARSHES lie towards the east of the Hoo Peninsula, the fat tongue of low hills and floodplain lodged in the Thames Estuary’s mouth. Here are a couple of recordings and a photograph from Saturday just gone by.

The marshes are separated from the northern part of the Isle of Grain by the Yantlet Creek. Looking across the creek from the Allhallows side you see a mysteriously empty quarter. On the Ordnance Survey map, part of it is corralled by magenta-coloured arrows and designated a Danger Area.

What goes on there? With no easy way across the creek I wasn’t able to find out and, besides, stumbling around inside a Danger Area didn’t seem like a good idea.

The variety of bird calls and song in the marshes was satisfying enough. You can hear the staccato cackle of a marsh frog near the beginning as well:

Here’s the recording spot with the Isle of Grain’s power station to the south:

The Thames is the most dynamic and changeable part of the landscape around London. Places we now trust as solid ground were once marshland or completely submerged. The Anglo-Saxon placename suffix -sey or -sea denotes an island, and Battersea, Chelsea and Bermondsey were all once marooned until people strove to consolidate them with the mainland.

When the river has its way the reverse can happen: islands are scoured away or lost to rising sea levels. The Ordnance Survey map of the early 1800s shows a blob of land at the mouth of the creek called Yantlet Island or Lobster Island. It’s gone now.

The ‘consignment station’ shown as an enclosure on a later nineteenth-century map has also disappeared. Only a cairn of stones and cement remains, with a hollow space where a plaque might once have been.

First round is the theme round

Posted by IMR on 13 April 2011

MONDAY EVENING IN Catford and the A-board outside the Blythe Hill Tavern is advertising a quiz night. It’s my favourite pub in London so it’s no effort to go in and record the proceedings.

I’d been meaning to make a quiz night recording for some time, and I’m happy enough with how it turned out. As usual, luck played a role in that the only seat going was in a reasonable spot sound-wise.

All the friendliest, least pretentious and cosiest pubs in south London seem to have Irish landlords. So does the Blythe Hill Tavern, and the bar staff all wear shirt and tie. It’s like having Dr Feelgood get the drinks in.

Sounds of protest from 12 Gates to the City

Posted by IMR on 12 April 2011

JONATHAN PRIOR OF the 12 Gates to the City website has once again very kindly shared some of his recordings with the London Sound Survey.

This time he’s captured the ‘March for the Alternative’ demonstration from a few weeks ago. It was one of the more significant protests in London in recent years, with somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 in attendance, depending on whose estimate you believe.

Five recordings of Jonathan’s now make up their own section on this part of the website. Here’s one of them, capturing the jeers and boos of the crowd as it passed Downing Street:

Do have a look at Jonathan’s website. It was very pleasant meeting him at the recent field recording workshop in Glasgow, and his hydrophone recording of periwinkles grazing in a rock pool got the most rapt listening of the day.

Thanks to everyone at the Scottish Music Centre workshop

Posted by IMR on 04 April 2011

LAST FRIDAY I held forth at the field recording workshop organised by the Scottish Music Centre in Glasgow. It was the first-ever workshop I’ve done and so approached the event with some nervousness, but I couldn’t have been made to feel more welcome by all who attended and helped out.

Special thanks to Alasdair, Keith and Tim of the Scottish Music Centre, and apologies for my bafflement at the Mac laptop and its touchpad, neither of which I’m used to. It did raise a few chuckles from the audience during the evening presentation. It was also good to meet some people who’s recordings I’d heard, but hadn’t met before, such as Jonathan and John. John’s given the event a very kind and encouraging write-up on his blog John’s World Wide Wall Display.

I’ve long had a particular affection and regard for Glasgow and its people, having lived there for about ten years from 1984 onwards. Three kinds of sounds stand out in memory from that time. The first involved hen parties who roamed the city centre on Friday and Saturday nights, as well the outer housing schemes, banging pots and pans as they accompanied the bride-to-be. Passersby ambushed by these patrols would have to kiss her.

The second was made by the newspaper sellers who used to cry out the titles and editions of their papers, the Daily Record and Evening Times. One man in particular was the silverback or alpha male of paper sellers and he occupied a pitch in a prime position at the junction of Hope Street and Sauchiehall Street. His huge, deep voice could be heard streets away.

The last involved the cries of boys who would go around Castlemilk, a housing estate in the south of the city which then housed some 30,000 people, selling newspapers – pay-paiiirr! – and fresh whelks and candy ah-pells. The drawing-out of the last syllable in both those cries is a sound-feature that has appeared in street-sellers cries’ in other parts of Britain.

I asked the people attending the afternoon workshop whether any of those sounds are still heard around Glasgow. Sadly, it seems they’ve disappeared already.

Adrian Stokes: an aesthete in Hyde Park

Posted by IMR on 25 March 2011

JONATHAN RABAN’S 1974 book Soft City was an influential work of popular sociology examining the rootlessness of life in the modern city. In it, Raban quotes from Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space, written in 1945 by the art critic and painter Adrian Stokes.

Raban was brought up in Norfolk and his writing occasionally has the pugnaciousness of the newcomer who thinks he’s more vital and authentic than the native-born Londoner. When Stokes describes his early memory of how ‘a street became informed for me by the sounds of a barrel organ’, Raban pounces on it as an example of the egocentric synaesthesia he thinks is typical of city-bred children – this little townie went me-me-me all the way home.

London is like a vortex cartwheeling across time and it draws energy from the life-force of young immigrants like Raban, who moved there in his late twenties. Adrian Stokes, however, was reared in the wealthy neighbourhood of Bayswater, near Hyde Park and inside the airless dead calm of the storm’s centre.

From his descriptions of Edwardian-era Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens we can imagine a solemn-faced little boy in a sailor suit being led around by his governess. Unlike Iris Murdoch, who enthused about the Round Pond being the joyous spiritual navel or ‘omphalos’ of London, Stokes’s memories of the parks are almost wholly negative. Even the mechanism forcing the fountains doesn’t intrigue him much:

Stokes mentions some features which have vanished from the auditory scenes of Hyde Park, including a herd of sheep (there presumably to keep the grass short), and park-keepers armed with whistles:

Military bands playing on bandstands also disappeared from the central parks after the IRA bomb in 1982 killed seven bandsmen and injured dozens of bystanders. The Magazine in Kensington Gardens by the Serpentine was used to store explosives until around 50 years ago. In the early 1900s it was guarded by a sentry:

Stokes recalls how a police account of the dead body of a suicide recovered from the Serpentine ‘exactly expressed my predominant impression of the Park as a whole’. The following lines are reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s descriptions of London in The Secret Agent as like a dank and scummy fishtank:

Raban saw theatricality as an inevitable feature of the behaviour of city dwellers, a strategy to avoid isolation. Stokes the aesthete found the architecture and layout of Edwardian London to be suffocating with its ‘shamelessness of pretence’. He would escape the eye of the vortex to have his moment of enlightenment in Italy when he was nineteen:

Elsewhere in Inside Out, Stokes considers the role of sound in how we form our impressions of city life:

A full reading of Inside Out (which doesn’t take long) shows Raban’s criticisms to be opportunistic. He just wants ammunition with which to launch a more general argument. Stokes’s ideas on sound perception show the limitations of the introspective method, but they amount to more than a stoned fascination with sounds rendered as shapes and colours, Fantasia-style.

This website, perhaps run by one of his descendants, has a collection of essays about Adrian Stokes. The Wikipedia entry on him quotes Herbert Read acknowledging his ‘phenomenological precision’. Inside Out has a good example of this about sound which can round off the post:

 

Thames drifter

Posted by IMR on 23 March 2011

HERE ARE SOME recordings and photos taken along the Thames over the last few days. First was a trip on the Riverbus from Putney to Blackfriars using what the Evening Standard might call ‘our most underused asset’ to get around.

According to the Transport for London website the first Riverbus departs Putney Pier at 6.20am. This wasn’t true last Thursday, unless the Riverbus runs unseen at that time in the form of a submarine. The 7.30am service was punctual. An Oyster Card won’t get you a ride for nothing: it costs £5.50 to go from Putney to Blackfriars, but it’s worth it to see the city from the river bright and early in the day.

Thames watermen have the relaxed attitude that comes from working in what amounts to a hereditary guild, and at a pace set by the slow ticking of the tidal clock. Someone in an office somewhere will want to change all that. In this recording you can hear the boat approaching Wandsworth Pier and one of the crew calling out to the waiting commuters:

Few people walk the Thames path east of Thamesmead, even when the weather’s fine like it was last Sunday. A colony of pigeons had turned the gantries at a riverside factory near Belvedere into their squalid home, flapping up clouds of birdshit and feather-dust, nature’s own asbestos:

You can see the factory by scrolling to the far right of this panoramic picture:

Ducks and wading birds were gathered further west in a tiny bay by the Crossness nature reserve. Perhaps they’re encouraged by the reeds and the waters welling up near the shore from the sewage works. Don’t say this website doesn’t take you to the most glamorous places. You can hear the plant’s incinerator in the background:

It must be a good spot for birdwatching and it’ll certainly be worth another visit equipped with a directional mic for recording bird calls.

Part of the concrete river-wall at Erith juts out slightly further forward than the section below it. I happened to pass by when the level of the river was just a few inches below this ledge and wash from a passing container ship was starting to reach the river-wall. The ripples struck the wall at an oblique angle, and the overhang made the sound of their impact deep and appealing:

So many of the little triumphs and disappointments of sound-hunting are down to luck, just like life in general. It’s good to overcome the urge to dither. Should I record that sound? Will it have gone by the time I’m all set up? Perhaps it can be recorded some other time? No, do it now.

Field recording workshop at the Scottish Music Centre

Posted by IMR on 17 March 2011

ANY SCOTTISH VISITORS to this site might like to know about the field recording workshop that I’ll be running at the Scottish Music Centre in Glasgow. It’ll be held on Friday April 1st and you can read all about it here.

Many thanks to Alasdair Pettinger who’s invited me to Glasgow to do this. He’s made some fine field recording contributions to the UK Soundmap which you can also listen to via his share of SoundCloud.

Also present on the day to help out and provide inspiration will be the composer and sound designer Timothy Cooper and the theatre maker and artist Tim Nunn.

Howling wolf

Posted by IMR on 09 March 2011

VIA A POST on the naturerecordists email group comes news of a new acoustic ecology research program at Purdue University in the US.

According to the article:

This is consistent with the established practice of acoustic ecology rather than being a new scientific field in its own right, as claimed elsewhere in the article. Perhaps the university’s press office decided to sprinkle a little stardust on the story. The scale of the study is nonetheless impressive:

You can hear a few recordings related to the project on this page. My favourite has to be the gray wolves howling in Ontario.

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and the dark. – Jack London, Call of the Wild

Cuckold's Haven

Posted by IMR on 05 March 2011

ONE STRATEGY FOR urban sound-hunting is to spend time poring over maps until an intriguing-looking enclave is found somewhere. Cuckold’s Haven on the Barking Creek in east London was one such find.

Doesn’t it look good on the Ordnance Survey map? A scrap of land not yet built upon or ground beneath the millstone of development into another windswept car park. The name ‘Cuckold’s Haven’ suggests isolation, a place where men who’d been cheated on could go and mope by themselves.

This morning I found someone else had got there and, appropriately enough, done something to Cuckold’s Haven. Like much wasteground near the old docks, this overgrown patch has been fenced off. Perhaps the soil there is contaminated, but perhaps it also reflects official intolerance of unsupervised and purposeless places. People must be kept out of them in case they get up to something.

A short footpath crosses Cuckold’s Haven but the entrances at both ends were blocked, with a council notice stating that this was because of works expected to last 30 weeks. The notice was dated March 2010. Further north was the Town Quay bridge crossing the Barking Creek, where this recording was made:

I’m not sure the video really adds much to the recording, except that if you didn’t know what Barking Creek looks like, you do now. Charles Veasey’s Hmsg Spiral Map (mentioned in this blog post) wisely limits its video clips to a length of ten seconds each.

 

Mark Peter Wright's Ear Room

Posted by IMR on 01 March 2011

MARK PETER WRIGHT is a composer and sound artist who won a BBC Radio 3 award in 2009 for his piece A Quiet Reverie.

He also runs the Ear Room website through which he compiles interviews with noted sound artists and musicians such as Eric Leonardson, Francisco López and Andrea Polli. He’s also just put up an interview with me on it, for which I am grateful indeed.

The first example of Mark’s work I’d heard was around the time of his winning the Radio 3 award. It was a composition made from recordings along the coast in the north-east of England titled Mal de Mer.

The elemental subjects of wind and tide are popular with sound-hunters, but they can be challenging to capture well. The temptation is there to retreat to the position of bystander, partly preoccupied with worries about wind-noise or recording levels, rather than immersing oneself in the all-surrounding soundscape.

Mal de Mer was more original and wild-sounding than any other seashore recording I’d heard up until then or since. This was the fruit of intense listening, and it conveyed a sense of personal dissolution within the subject recorded: the listener as a pebble cast up before what Ted Hughes called the whale’s den.

Fortunately Mark has uploaded some of his recordings and compositions onto Soundcloud here. This is Mal de Mer:

Willesden Junction at dawn

Posted by IMR on 26 February 2011

WILLESDEN JUNCTION REVISITED early in the morning with the Audio Technica BP4025 mic and grainy footage from a Sony HX5 camera. It’s surprising how busy it is there, even at 6.30am.

Mug-house riots and a short history of hissing

Posted by IMR on 23 February 2011

LAST YEAR I had to do jury service at Southwark Crown Court for cases involving an incompetent pickpocket (adjourned for background reports), an alleged paedophile (not guilty), and a fraudster (guilty, nine months and recommended for deportation).

If you get called up for jury service, then look forward to long periods of waiting around and a few jolts of genuine high drama. But until then, real people from London’s past can stand trial in your own little courtroom of the imagination thanks to The Proceedings of the Old Bailey. It’s one of the best online history resources around.

One case from 1716 is full of fascinating detail about the sounds of political violence in London. Pro-Hanoverian Whig factions had established drinking dens called mug-houses from which they fought fist and boot with Jacobite mobs in the early 18th century. These clashes became known as the Mug-house Riots. Walter Thornbury’s 1878 book Old and New London has an engraving of one such battle:

An attack in 1716 on the Roebuck mug-house at Cheapside led to the trial of Robert Read, accused of killing one Daniel Vaughan with a blunderbuss. Instances of slogan-shouting and other sounds of conflict feature prominently in the accounts of the witnesses.

Alcohol and public disorder are inseparable twins in English culture. As the shopkeeper Katherine Bennet testified:

Richard Newell had been sent on an errand that day, but was drawn out of curiosity to watch the turmoil instead:

The proclamation was likely a reading of the Riot Act, passed by Parliament in 1714. One curious sound-feature is mentioned in the statement of John Boyles:

Hissing as a way of expressing hostility now only survives in a humorous form among pantomime audiences. Its long association with the theatre goes back to at least the 17th century, and probably has its origins in the story of Satan taking a snake’s form in the Garden of Eden.

The French playwright Jean Racine wrote bitchily in his epigram The Origin of Hissing that the practice began when Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s play Aspar flopped on stage in 1680. “I should know, I was in it,” Racine claimed. However, Samuel Pepys noted an incident of audience hissing at a theatre in July 1661:

Hissing became such a well-established habit that the right of audiences to hiss entered English common law in the case of Clifford vs Brandon in 1810. Justice Mansfield ruled:

The USA had to wait nearly 100 years until a Boston magistrate set a similar precedent in 1903. But that didn’t help New Yorker Paul Kulikoff in 1917, who hissed a Russian war film at the Strand Theatre. A probation officer told the court that Kulikoff’s lodgings in East Twelfth Street were ‘barren of everything but a mass of literature on anarchism’, and he was sentenced to six months in the workhouse for disorderly conduct.

Coming up: Soundcloud embeddable player

Posted by IMR on 20 February 2011

WORK-IN-PROGRESS post testing the Soundcloud embeddable player. Idea is to provide the embed code so people can put the recordings on their own blogs and websites.

This uses their artwork player, where you can upload your own image to use as the background. The central orange play button appears as standard, luckily it can be incorporated into the Survey’s bullseye logo.

A slight softening of the original image occurs at the Soundcloud end. Changing image file formats or uploading images double the required size makes no difference. By the way, the big-brand-name webwasher at work blocks the player because it classifies Soundcloud as a filesharing website.

Next task, making an overlay function with JQuery Tools.

Naiant mics: best value binaurals around?

Posted by IMR on 18 February 2011

THERE’S A RECENT recording on the UK Soundmap of the sounds of Leciester City Market.

Helpfully, the recordist left a comment stating it’d been made using a Tascam DR-100 recorder and Naiant X-X mics in a binaural array. It sounds pretty good to me:

Looking up the X-X omnidirectional mics on the Naiant website uncovered a surprise.

First, the spec looks encouraging. Self-noise of 23dB, sensitivity of 25mv/Pa, maximum sound pressure level of 126dB, although a bit big on the stealth side with a capsule 9mm in diameter and 25mm long. The details have gone up on the Budget headworn mics page so you can compare them to other makes and models.

Now for the surprise. They’re $109 for a matched pair. The nearest equivalent to them on the budget mic list is the Shure WL-183, which will set you back £250 a pair. So what’s the catch?

The Naiant X-Xs need phantom power of between 9 and 48 volts. Most small recorders only supply plug-in power of around 5V, and they don’t have XLR sockets. You’d need to use them with a larger recorder like the Tascam DR-100, Zoom H4n or Marantz PMD-661. All three of those are sort-of pocketable, while bigger phantom juice-delivering machines like the Fostex FR-2LE have to go in a bag or on a shoulder strap.

Naiant also sell low-cost mic preamps, but it’d be handy if they just made a simple battery box to power the X-Xs, like Core Sound do for their DPA 4060 mics. Even so, the Naiant X-Xs appear to offer exceptional value.

Bernie Krause lecture on soundscapes and bioacoustics

Posted by IMR on 17 February 2011

THIS IS A great lecture by the bioacoustics pioneer (and Moog synth player) Bernie Krause and is just under an hour long. From FORA.tv.

Sights and sounds of London street markets

Posted by IMR on 13 February 2011

HERE ARE SOME photos of London street markets taken about ten years ago, from the same doomed project mentioned in the earlier post on vanished London cafes.

Church Street market is in the Lisson Grove area north of the Marylebone flyover. Ten years ago the market was very much off the tourist trail and catered to the needs of the local community. As with most well-established street markets, an array of unpretentious cafes and pubs co-existed alongside it.

This council workman kindly let me take a picture of him and his waste cart adorned with the furry toys he’d found lying around over the years:

Brick Lane is too deep a subject to summarise easily and needs a post of its own. You’d have been a fool to pay the £55 asking price for one of these guardsman’s tunics without at least trying to haggle. To buy one today from Silverman’s army surplus store in Mile End would set you back £250.

North End Road market runs between Fulham and West Kensington. I remember it in the 1970s as a busy market, with a lot of junk and secondhand shops along there as well. Ten years ago the number of stalls had declined and were limited to one side of the road, as happened with Berwick Street market. This man agreed to let me take a picture of him and his sweet stall, but he doesn’t look overjoyed about it:

A happier face from Whitechapel market, with the stallholder looking at ease in his domain. Most street traders are outgoing and confident people.

Detail from a toy stall in Shepherds Bush market:

Street market sounds are the low-hanging fruit for anyone starting out in field recording. This one from Petticoat Lane market was either the first or second ‘proper’ field recording I made, back in April 2008. I can’t say how happy I was when I got home and played it back, listening to all the different voices, especially that of the man selling batteries (“double A, triple A”):

East Street has a busy market between the Walworth Road and the shifting, uncertain point where it peters out before the Old Kent Road. That day the market had hardly any traders raising their cries, and without persevering it would have been a disappointing visit.

But at the very far end of the market was a single and highly vocal trader, one of perhaps only two or three ‘cheapjacks’ left in London. A fair-sized crowd was captivated by his sales patter:

Unlike vision, hearing can only detect something happening, not that which exists without moving or doing anything. So the simplest strategy for finding interesting sounds is to head where there’s plenty of action, be it the product of people, animals, or the elements.

There’s always something going on at Brick Lane on a Sunday. This recording from 2008 has some strong swearing in it, but it’s meant in a good-humoured way. Not everyone can get away with being that rude – as they say, don’t try it at home:

Some of my earliest memories of London involve markets, such as my mum taking me to Berwick Street where she did her shopping, and that’s surely true for many of us who grew up here. A few years ago I checked the accounts of around a dozen London boroughs to see if they operated their markets at a profit – most of them did.

Of the remainder, Lewisham didn’t calculate profits on its market division, and the council there does a good enough job in supporting its main market in the town centre. A few others had contracted out the running of markets to private firms.

Traditional street markets are still viable concerns well able to sustain themselves, even though almost no effort is put into advertising any of them. Not all councils see them as an asset or a useful service to the public. Westminster Council maintained a vindictive policy for some years towards the tiny market in Pimlico, motivated by personal rows involving a councillor.

Tower Hamlets had a long period of astonishing mismanagement of its markets, and a determined campaign had to be waged in Newham to defend Queen’s Market from the destructive attentions of ‘developers’.

Had the Queen’s Market campaigners lost, and the market struggled in the unfavourable new location planned for it, you can be sure there would have been talk in some quarters of the need to move on, of changing times and expectations, with a sad smile and a shrug of the shoulders, as if describing rain on a bank holiday.

Historical maps now online

Posted by IMR on 06 February 2011

LARGE MAP SCANS of Old London Town are now online here and you can start scrutinising them from the historical London maps page.

Of all of them so far, the Booth Poverty maps have to be my favourite. There is endless detail to inspect on them, and you might be struck by the constancy of relative wealth and poverty in some areas from the end of the 19th century to the present day.

The small scan of Bartholomew’s Road Surface Map of 1909 has, for now, been consigned to Dickensian orphan status on this page. I’ll probably get a high-resolution scan done of the entire map sometime.

The obvious missing layer in the All-in-One London Map is one covering the middle of the 19th century. There are maps for the beginning and end of the century, yet in that time population growth broke free of the Malthusian trap thanks to food imports and improved farming methods. In 1800 there were just under a million Londoners. In 1900 there were 6.5 million.

Other bit of site news: the London Sound Survey has been selected for inclusion in the British Library’s UK Web Archive as an example of a site ‘that reflects the rich diversity of lives and interests throughout the UK’.

It’s not up there yet, but this is still a good insurance policy in the event of being hit by a cement truck bounding towards the Olympics site.

Make the darkness your friend

Posted by IMR on 27 January 2011

ON THE SECOND attempt I find the path which cuts under the railway lines. Round the other side worn steps lead up to the footbridge. It hangs high over the waste of tracks at Willesden Junction and across to the Hythe Road industrial estate.

The map showed the footbridge to be around 150 yards long. I go up and try to see along it, but there’s no lighting. The city sounds vast in the night air.

Silhouettes bob at what might be the far end, or perhaps closer – I can’t tell. From their direction a young man’s voice makes a gleeful whoop. I go back down the stairs and slink off to the station, feeling old.

Another time: my dad knows I am nervous of the shapes of trees in the gloom and the black voids between their trunks. He bends down and says quietly, You can make the darkness your friend. I sense he is smiling as he speaks.

My dad liked walking at night by the Thames and was drawn to lonely places. He had had a busy war and didn’t seem afraid of much, still lean and wiry before the anti-cancer drugs puffed him up and smoothed the lines from his face.

Yesterday evening a drunk lunged at me as I waited for the bus in Catford. As with most drunks he advertised his intentions well ahead of doing them, and it wasn’t hard to dodge him.

So it was with the lunatic who generously enquired Do you want some? as he sprang out of his car to rush at me with a gallon container full of some liquid that sloshed from its spout. Also, the man who tried to headbutt me in Lavender Hill while comically yelling Tottenham!, and the young fellow in Archway who pointed at me and twice told his friends, I’m going to stab him.

Such near-misses have all happened in the past year and they concentrate the mind. Sometimes lured by the sounds of the night to woods and isolated tracks I wonder what I’m doing. I grow cautious with age.

Me and my dad watch a film on TV where a partisan sneaks up on an enemy base and throws a pebble. It makes a clatter where it falls and a sentry goes to investigate. My dad turns and says, They got that right. People always go to the source of the sound. Perhaps he thinks I will need to know this one day.

London has changed so much in recent decades that some prefer an imagined city cut from old cloth. Carnaby Street and Eel Pie Island, Alfie and Blow Up, Samuel Pepys and Marie Lloyd, the histories of buildings and buried rivers. All that has a tidal pull on me too, a kind of ancestor-worship, but I also wish to see and hear the city’s future.

Some of the best sounds collected at night-time escape as leftovers from doorways and half-open windows, clues as to what’s going on inside. I want to know more. Who are you and what do you do?

Dad said little else about his experiences in the war. None of the older men in the family did, not within earshot anyway. His military records are in the National Archives and will remain secrets until they’re released in 2024. The questions I’d ask him now are quite different to the ones I thought of when he was alive.

Not braving the footbridge at Willesden Junction was a disappointment, but I’ll go back sometime soon, just when the sun is coming up.

New uses for old London maps

Posted by IMR on 25 January 2011

QUITE A FEW people seem to be beating a path to the new all-in-one London Map. Just as well, since the map scans cost a small fortune.

If you’re a hobbyist of modest means then it’s a good idea to wring the most out of what resources you have. In the spirit of finding a use for every part of the cow, a new sub-section is being built presenting the historical maps through Zoomify viewers. Here’s a working example below (the finished ones will be bigger):

It works well in Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, but less so in Firefox. If you’re using that last browser, and hit the full-screen button on the far right-hand side of the viewer’s toolbar, then you’ll find not everything works as it should.

Navigation is limited to using your keyboard arrow keys to move around and the mouse-wheel to zoom in and out. The ‘click to activate . . .’ prompt in the middle of the screen won’t go away either. There’s a reason for all this involving Flash and Firefox which is too boring to go into here.

The beautiful scans of the Booth Poverty Map in particular, kindly made available by the London School of Economics, are endlessly fascinating. All the maps should be up in their new guise within the next few days.

Real sounds of Lagos

Posted by IMR on 24 January 2011

LAGOS LIES AT the centre of a burgeoning West African conurbation stretching along the Gulf of Guinea. An OECD study predicts that, by 2020, this sprawling habitation will absorb 300 surrounding cities and have a total population of more than 60 million people.

Such megacities could become home to the majority of the human race in the 21st century. The historian Eric Hobsbawm thought that the new century would best be symbolised by a young mother and her children. In a similar way, Emeka Ogboh’s recordings of Lagos are like a global summing-up of the sounds of present and future daily life.

Ogboh is a Nigerian artist leading the Lagos Soundscapes project. As part of the project’s exhibition stage, Ogboh travelled to Cologne and set up speakers outside the central library, playing sounds recorded in a Lagos bus station. As he explains elsewhere:

The Lagos Soundscapes website presents a batch of the recordings in the helpful shape of a Soundcloud player with the embed code option enabled, so here it is:

Some of the recordings are quite long, and my favourite so far is ‘Go-slow’.

 

 

Sounds and pictures of some traditional London cafes

Posted by IMR on 16 January 2011

AN EMAIL ARRIVES from Adrian Maddox of the Classic Cafes website with some dispiriting news. The Double Six cafe on Eversholt Street in Euston has shut down and the premises are being gutted.

The Double Six was where I first met Adrian. He’s a great raconteur with a remarkable capacity for tea, downing six or seven large mugs that lunchtime. The cafe was popular with cab drivers and railway workers, and its worn tables and chairs made for a more cosy, sympathetic atmosphere than that of the chain coffeeshops in Euston station. Here’s what it sounded like on another afternoon:

I’d first come across Adrian’s work with Classic Cafes years before and straightaway saw how it brought forward something of the eccentric and haphazard London that was quickly passing away. Secondhand shops, furtive enterprises in railway arches, army surplus stores run by strange and bad-tempered men, sprawling street markets and pubs with worn carpets, scruffy and content in the summer, and all somehow bound up in memory with the smell of household skips and brick dust.

For a while I tried to make my own website documenting such aspects of the city, but without setting a focus the project lost its way and nothing came of it. All that remains is a bunch of pictures taken around 2001 and 2002. Many of the cafes and pubs which I visited then have now disappeared just ten years on. Here are a few of those photos of cafes and the people in them.

George’s Restaurant was on York Way overlooking the gas holders at the back of Kings Cross station. It looked pretty much like the definitive workman’s cafe of the 1970s, complete with sun-scoured Pepsi sign.

The man who it was named after had died by 2001, and his widow and brother-in-law were in charge. [See comment below from George’s grandson.] She worked in the kitchen while Andy made the tea, took the orders and cleared the tables. He was a friendly man, and here he is keeping shop:

A charming couple ran Dave’s Restaurant on Battersea Park Road near the junction with Queenstown Road, just a short distance from Corelli’s restaurant and ice cream parlour. Nearby on Queenstown Road proper a huge wall-painted sign for ‘Dining Rooms’ can still be seen, but the cafe beneath it is of the modern kind with fixed plastic seating, which makes eating there feel a bit like visiting someone on remand. Dave’s Restaurant had the better option of individual wooden chairs.

Pimlico used to have a lot of interesting little shops, and its tiny street market still struggles on despite Westminster Council not always having been very supportive of it. Nearby was a small enclave of shops, including one of the last Popular Book Centres in London, complete with the usual copies of True Detective hanging up in the shop window, and next to that was a cafe with the straightforward name of Italian Restaurant.

Italian Restaurant has now gone too, but it had a loyal group of customers including this old lady who used to travel all the way from Sutton to spend the afternoon drinking tea and chatting with Johnny the proprietor:

Albert, another Italian Restaurant regular:

The cafe that perhaps preserved best the essence of an older London of stewed tea, bread and marge and ‘ta’ and ‘pardon’ was the Tea Rooms off New Oxford Street. Nearly every surface between the floor and ceiling was covered in Formica. The high-backed pew seating gave it the spartan and slightly solemn feel that pie-and-mash shops also have when they’re not busy. It too has been swept away by time.

In the photo below you can see the gleaming Still water boiler, which several cafe owners told me was the best one for tea-making.

Every working day I pass St Pancras International. Give me a moment to slag off Paul Day’s embarrassing ‘The Meeting Place’ sculpture, which features a nine-metre-high pair of Martian office workers embracing. Day would be better employed in a garden gnome factory. The only question is, did the developers pay Franklin Mint for it all at once or in twelve monthly instalments?

But before that and the overpriced shops, St Pancras had all kinds of interesting things beneath it, particularly in the warren of arches and cellars that extended north. On the Pancras Road side was the Railway cafe, patriotically painted in the national colours of its owners:

Some of the best London cafes were run by Italians, mostly immigrants from south of Naples. Italians have done a lot over the decades and centuries to make London a more civilised place.

Unfortunately, few of the sons and daughters of the older proprietors want to carry on in the business. It involves hard work with an early start, but at least Alpino is still there in Chapel Market, and Pellici in Bethnal Green Road has a beautiful interior and friendly atmosphere:

When they’re all gone it’ll be time to leave London.

Sound maps from Inukjuak and New York State

Posted by IMR on 11 January 2011

TWO NEW SOUND maps recently stumbled across thanks to Twitter. What’s interesting is that both of them supplement their recordings with images, and I wonder whether this marks a trend towards multimedia projects in which sound plays the role of first among equals.

The first is the Inukjuak Sound Map from an Inuit settlement of the same name in northern Quebec.

Many of the recordings document activities in the town, such as building kayaks and feeding huskies, as well as examples of throat singing and the sounds of the surrounding landscape. When you click on one of the map’s sound icons, a pop-up appears with an audio player, explanatory text, and a photograph.

Much of it is the work of sound artist Nimalan Yoganathan, and you can read more about the project on his blog. But it also looks similar to the Montreal Sound Map, and sure enough Max Stein is there as programmer and designer too.

The second project is Charles Veasey’s Hmsg Spiral Map with sounds and video from the Capital District in upstate New York. Hmsg is short for Hudson Mohawk Sound Gate, and properly speaking it’s a multimedia presentation rather than sound map. Nonetheless Veasey has a strong background in music and acoustics and among other things he’s worked for the pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros.

The Spiral Map looks and sounds very impressive as it progresses smoothly through its 30 different sound recordings and videos. Most of the videos have very little motion in them and much more action is heard than seen. It’s a great way to set a balance between the ravenous eye and the patient ear.

The All-in-One London Map is now online

Posted by IMR on 09 January 2011

IT WAS ALL meant to be over by Christmas, according to an earlier post, but better late than never.

The new All-in-One London Map is now online, combining the different recording types on the London Sound Survey into a single interface. It’s not finished yet by a long way. More historical map layers are planned, and quite a few sound recordings remain to be added. So far, the whole section consists of around 390 carefully-aligned map tiles and 120 image maps. Now you know why there’s not been any new recordings on the site for a few weeks.

I reckon it’s the first sound map to use historical mapping, and it’s probably also the only one to have the slightly antiquated method of image maps targetting iframes. Adobe Fireworks CS4 was used to prepare the image maps, but there are much cheaper programs available which can do the job, and there’s also a free online tool for making them.

For arranging sounds onto something representing the size of a city or less, image maps are worth considering as an alternative to the ubiquitous Google map. They give you a lot of control over the graphics and they make layering easy. Plus you’ll know that your site visitors are more likely to be listening to your recordings than trying to spot nude sunbathers.

Any gloating over the finished result has been stopped short by seeing how thinly spread the 600-plus recordings of the London Sound Survey are. Large areas of the city have very few recordings indeed, making me realise how the work of documenting London’s sounds has barely begun. But I hope you’ll get some pleasure from the results so far and, if you do, then those shiny social sharing buttons on the right-hand side are there to help spread the word.

Across the miles

Posted by Des Coulam on 31 December 2010

TOWARDS THE END of each year I always think about the sounds of Paris that I have recorded in the year that has passed and the sounds that I might record in the year ahead. I always look back on my year’s work and try to select a “Sound Of The Year”. It’s always a difficult task since there are so many sounds to choose from.

During 2010 I have recorded many sounds in this wonderful city. I have recorded the magnificent church organs of Saint-Sulpice, Notre Dame and the delightful church of Saint-Médard, a Franco-Russian wedding and street musicians in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the rue Mouffetard and in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I have recorded the sounds of railway stations – the Gare du Nord, the Gare de Lyon and even London St Pancras, as well as the sounds of the streets of Paris.

I have recorded the huge street demonstrations in Paris about the pension reforms all of which were lively and provided exciting, but often chilling, raw, sounds. And there have been many more recording too.

It is often said that less is more – and after much consideration, this year I have selected a Parisian sound from 2010 which I would like to share with you as my “Sound of the Year”.

It is a simple recording – the sound of a man with a little street organ in the Marché Noël in my quartier of Paris.

And why is it my “Sound Of The Year”?

First, it is undoubtedly French – a man, surrounded by children from the local Ecole Maternelle, singing a favourite French children’s Christmas song, Le Petit Garçon.

Second, the children add an air of innocence and complete unrestrained joy to the recording and . . .

Third, thanks to the internet, this recording from my quartier of Paris has flown across the miles and was broadcast on an Australian radio station in Sydney on Christmas Eve.

I hope you enjoy this recording as much as I do and I wish Ian and all of you all a very Happy New Year.

Des Coulam has a passion for recording and preserving our sonic environment. He writes and records the Soundlandscapes blog at www.soundlandscapes.wordpress.com.

 

Happy New Year everyone!

Posted by IMR on 31 December 2010

HERE’S TO EVERYONE in 2010 who shared a recording, left a comment, spread the word, sent an email, gave help and encouragement, or just stopped by to listen to a recording or two.

I’d particularly like to thank Nick Hamilton of Lost Steps, the film critic Ed Lawrenson, Helen Frosi of the SoundFjord Gallery, Wang Fai of the BBC World Service, Felicity Ford of the Domestic Soundscape blog, my colleagues at the British Library Sound Archive (that’s the day job), and Des Coulam of the Paris-based soundlandscapes blog – he’s produced the charming end-of-year post and recording above this one.

There’s a few things in the pipeline for 2011, including a new London sound map, an alternative site for smartphone users, plus an ambitious project which will hopefully turn the wildlife section into something a bit more exciting.

And maybe a new microphone or a Jecklin disc or a boom pole or . . . oh behave! Have a very happy New Year.

London through a glass

Posted by IMR on 29 December 2010

PATRICK HAMILTON’S NOVELS are among the best books to resurface amid the growing interest in London as a literary subject. He was at his most productive between the late 1920s and early 1940s with a string of novels set in the then sub-bohemian districts of Fitzrovia and Earls Court.

Pubs and drinking play a big part in Hamilton’s books, just as they did in his life, and he provides us with some good descriptions of the past sounds of pub life. Here ‘The Midnight Bell’ pub is heard early on in the novel of the same name from 1929:

Hamilton’s 1941 Hangover Square is a bleakly humorous tale in which George, the main protagonist, goes into a fugue state whenever he hears a popping sound inside his head – the first word in the book is click. Most of the action takes place in pubs and lodgings around Earls Court, an area which would later feature in other London novels including Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net and Jonathan Raban’s Soft City. One drinking den off the Cromwell Road provides a refuge from the sun’s glare:

Pre-war pubs had other forms of automated entertainment before juke boxes came over from the USA. A coin-operated player piano is described in The Midnight Bell:

Hamilton’s arch and condescending tone in that extract might have come from the pages of Punch magazine, or a student humorist at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival sharing his ‘sideways look at life’ – he was only 25 when the The Midnight Bell was first published. Again Hamilton reminds the reader of the distance between himself and the subject in this description of a slum house in Bolsover Street, Fitzrovia:

Like Earls Court, Fitzrovia is now at one with the wealth and transience of most of central London. Only Cleveland Street hints at the existence of a settled community needing things other than media production houses and sushi restaurants.

One sound described at the beginning of Hangover Square hasn’t disappeared though, and I felt that slight jolt of surprise at seeing what I’d thought was a peculiar and private experience (as if) written down in print:

Soundtransit to move onto Soundcloud

Posted by IMR on 20 December 2010

SOUNDTRANSIT IS ONE of the best online collections of field recordings around. Over the years it’s amassed around 1,800 sound files sent in by recordists from all over the world, organised through an elegant and original interface.

Sadly, this superb resource faces a sharp and unwelcome increase in hosting costs. The following message now appears on Soundtransit from its founder Derek Holzer:

It’s a great shame that Soundtransit can’t be transferred to a new host in its existing form, but the SoundCloud music platform is a logical choice, and it’ll certainly raise the profile of field recording there.

SoundCloud is worth keeping an eye on. Apart from the recent tweaks to the interface, it’s also launching its own iPhone app for recording and uploading, similar to that used by ipadio and audioBoo.

iPhones and Android smartphones can bind geodata to a recording. Will a built-in mapping service for Soundcloud recordings be far behind?

Three recordings from Greenwich and its peninsula

Posted by IMR on 18 December 2010

TODAY’S SNOWFALL MEANT shelving a second attempt at collecting sounds along the River Colne. The sorry service run by Chiltern Trains was stuck fast to the rails.

But Greenwich was reachable and the park there was full of people hurtling downhill on toboggans. These ranged from improvised sheets of vinyl flooring and plastic bread-crates to faster-moving shop-bought efforts. Everyone was enjoying themselves.

Londoners have always tried to extract some fun from the coldest weather since the time of the Frost Fairs when the Thames froze above London Bridge, and back to the earliest written descriptions of city life. William Fitz Stephen’s panegyric A Description of London from around 1173 includes this passage:

The pleasures offered by the O2 Dome are flabby by comparison. A long gallery of themed restaurants and amusements curves along the inside before reaching a dead end. Recorded music echoed everywhere against the deep roar of the heating system which was on full blast.

One curious feature in the Dome consists of perspex columns displaying adverts on a cylindrical plasma or LCD screen. The two vertical edges of the image don’t quite meet at the back and there’s a narrow seam filled with an accidental-looking and restless mosaic of coloured squares.

Taking this as a reminder that margins can be more interesting than what they surround, I headed for a run-down stretch of the Thames path along which hardly anyone walks.

The tide was going out and the lower shore was filled with London’s clutter and rubble, dirty against the snow further up. Rust and peeling paint, weeds sprouting from cracks in brickwork and the river holding the city’s din at a distance – bliss.

Two quick recordings from Camden Town

Posted by IMR on 13 December 2010

LAST SATURDAY WAS spent trying to get some Christmas shopping done in Camden. This didn’t go well, but a couple of recording opportunities popped up instead.

The first recording contains some swearing and begins with an off-colour joke. An animated old man was pestering drinkers sitting by the canal at Camden Lock. Just before being able to make out the individual words, you could hear the distinctive speech pattern of someone telling jokes in the What do you call a . . .? tradition.

I’d been told of this particular beggar before and how he sometimes works the night-time queues outside the Dublin Castle and other venues in Camden. On went the recorder:

The jokes sound decades old and the way he slights his own people comes across as an appeasement tactic for reducing the risk of violence. It was a strange contrast to the globalised tourist culture on display in Camden Market, like finding an Egyptian mummy in a supermarket freezer.

Flyer distributors are hard to avoid in Camden, but this man’s voice faced no serious competition outside Camden Town tube station:

He was working with a younger man, and as I was waiting for the train home, they both came and sat nearby. The older man talked for a while, telling his partner the work was good if you got through the flyers quick. The young man listened and said nothing.

What are the earliest sounds you can remember?

Posted by IMR on 05 December 2010

AN EMAIL ARRIVES from Helen Frosi of SoundFjord about a new project by the artist Stijn Demeulenaere called Soundtracks.

Demeulenaere is asking people to post him their handwritten recollections of sounds, and he makes some interesting points in the preamble:

This seems about right for many instances of auditory memory. Although I can summon up a mental image of what my parents looked like, I cannot directly recall the sounds of their voices. Yet I would surely recognise their voices if they’d been recorded on tape and played back (sadly they haven’t). An auditory memory is there but it can’t be pulled into consciousness without the presence of a matching cue.

It’s hard to know if one’s earliest sound memories in particular really consist of faint analog traces of the sounds as they were originally heard, or are formulaic reconstructions built around knowing that a particular sound event took place. These are the earliest sounds that I think can remember:

– Cooing of pigeons lured to the kitchen window-ledge with breadcrumbs;

– The rag-and-bone man’s cry which drew out the syllable of ‘bone’ and always sounded remote;

– The hollow, metallic-sounding rush of a sewer beneath a grille in Green Park;

– A recording of sleigh bells issuing from unseen speakers while visiting Father Christmas at a department store;

– Newspaper vendors with loud voices yelling a long strange word beyond understanding: Starnoostane-e-e-erd!

– Discordant noises made by buskers with accordians. At the time I knew something was up, but only later grasped it was because they couldn’t play. For many years beggars hired accordians for a daily fee as props to help avoid trouble with the police.

Music is the one sound type which goes against what Demeulenaere’s saying about auditory recollection. It’s not hard to bring to mind old tunes that you haven’t heard in decades. The first popular tunes I remember being aware of were Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Benny Hill’s Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West, and Lieutenant Pigeon’s Mouldy Old Dough.

But before those were some pieces of music that were regularly played on TV. Kids’ programs were usually on first when broadcasting began at something like 11am. First, there was a tantalising build-up to the magic of moving images with the trade test card, accompanied by something sounding like Tijuana Brass, but for licensing reasons probably wasn’t.

Next, an oddly stirring tune played while transmitter information was displayed. It felt like something significant was about to happen. The tune was Perpetuum Mobile by Michael Roberts, who worked for the ABC television company in the 1960s and composed string music as a hobby.

Perpetuum Mobile is on the British String Miniatures CD by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia and you can buy it here from Amazon. Almost straight after came the continuity announcer’s voice, followed by the Thames Television ident set to Johnny Hawksworth’s Salute to Thames.

This was an amazingly over-the-top and brazen fanfare that lasted a good couple of minutes. A short version of a few seconds was used for the rest of the day’s viewing:

Hawksworth based the opening on Battersby and German’s 1896 song Who’ll buy my lavender?, which in turn evokes the old street-seller’s cry of ‘Who will buy my sweet lavender?’ The Thames ident music matches those syllables faithfully.

Other street cries had also made their way into popular songs from time to time, and Ralph Vaughan-Williams worked the melody of the violet-seller’s ‘Who will buy my violets?’ into A London Symphony, composed in 1914.

An elderly violet-seller used to be seen around central London into the early 1970s. Did the old duck have a ruddy complexion, twinkling eyes undimmed by age and a kind word for everyone? No, she had a foul mouth on her, ready to give abuse to all who refused to buy her violets, so you can guess how she spent most of the day. There was probably a sad story behind all that, but she was feared nonetheless.

What are the earliest sounds you can remember?

Lonely Planet and the London Sound Survey

Posted by IMR on 04 December 2010

LAST WEEK I signed a contract with BBC Worldwide for a few dozen recordings to be used in a forthcoming Lonely Planet iPhone app.

Some of the recordings were already on the site, and others were commissioned specially. The site is due to get a credit and a link on the app, so it’s a good spur to get on with producing cut-down versions of some of the pages for smartphone users.

It’s no problem thinking up simplified forms in which to present the site’s content, the only headache being finding an iPhone-friendly alternative to Flash-based audio players. No doubt they’ll go the same way as the unloved RealPlayer, once HTML 5 becomes widespread.

Sound and history: new site section preview

Posted by IMR on 04 December 2010

LATER THAN PROMISED, but here’s a preview of the new site section which is going to bring together all the different recording types.

You can see a good deal more than that if you start exploring on this London map page for the Waterloo and City districts.

Use the little mosaic map of London in the top right-hand corner to inspect other areas. Every map square has both modern OpenStreetMap and mid-1930s Land Utilisation Survey views, and many are also covered by Booth’s London Poverty map of 1898-99. The Ordnance Survey First Series from the early 19th century will be in place before Christmas, with one or two more layers to follow early in the New Year.

Sounds are only available right now for the Waterloo and City square and its West End neighbour. It’s been time-consuming putting all this together, and there’s a lot more work ahead, but I’m fairly pleased with the results so far. Any comments, criticisms or other feedback would be very welcome.

Get thee to Evolving English

Posted by IMR on 24 November 2010

COMMENTARIES ON CHANGING English often lift up new words for inspection with the cautious help of inverted commas. Today’s ‘kids’ do so enjoy their ‘pop’ records – it dates quickly and looks like an elderly dowager removing something unpleasant from the lawn with a pair of sugar tongs.

Lyndsay John’s recent London Evening Standard piece The secret world of gang slang stands out as better than most.

A broad and ambitious account of the development of our language is now being presented by the British Library at their Evolving English exhibition. It’s free to visit, runs until April the 3rd next year, and shows the British Library combining several of their strong cards to good effect.

The exhibition starts in a respectfully-lit annexe with a chronological account of Old and Middle English. Several of the Library’s most distinguished items are on display, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, its vellum pages bearing shield-walls of strange letters. There’s also a 12th-century dictionary for Anglo-Norman children which gives the English words for animal sounds. Anglo-Norman cows mugist, but English cows louuet and English dogs berket.

Next to the dictionary is the manuscript for Sumer is icumen in, the oldest-surviving example of an English round or counterpoint song. Animal sounds are again part-and-parcel, and you can hear it sung in this YouTube video by the Hilliard Ensemble.

Like English, the exhibition then spreads out onto a larger stage beyond its medieval incubator. Touchscreen displays, archival sounds, books, posters and multimedia projections are all brought into play in the main room. It feels like entering a nightclub for MENSA members.

The main theme here is the variety of forms of English, nationally and beyond. An accent and dialect map of Britain occupies a large vertical touchscreen. Smaller listening posts allow you to scroll through archival recordings of English from around the world in speeches and song. The example of Appalachian Mountains English is Doug Wallin singing the folk ballad Brother Green.

The calypso singer Lord Kitchener represents Caribbean English with Victory Test Match and Frank Zappa’s daughter appears on Valley Girl with the stock phrases of Californian mall-rats which now seem universal. The scholarly notes draw attention to her rising intonation as an example of I-hope-you-like-me uptalk.

Evolving English is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon, and be sure to put some money in the collecting box. Like much else, the British Library is having its funding cut in an attempt to offset speculative mistakes made in the City of London and elsewhere.

The Audio Technica BP4025: your reliable stereo workhorse

Posted by IMR on 14 November 2010

ONCE IN A while a comment or an email arrives asking whether the Audio Technica BP4025 mic is any good. I’ve used it to make a number of recordings and can recommend it as a reliable and versatile workhorse.

The BP4025 is a single-point stereo mic which runs on 48V phantom power and, in Britain, should cost less than £450 new. Its main plus points are good build quality, quite a spacious-sounding stereo image, and low self-noise.

The first thing you’ll notice about the mic is that it has a solid, sturdy feel. The BP4025 is just over 7 inches or 18 cm long, and weighs 9.5 oz or 269 g. Its weight, build and business-like black finish challenge you to get some work done.

The BP4025 uses large-diaphragm capsules set in a coincident X/Y pattern at a mutual angle of 160°, rather greater than that used by other coincident X/Y stereo mics such as the Rode NT4. Here’s what the capsules look like minus their protective grille:

Despite the two diaphragms being almost back-to-back with one another, the mic avoids producing a hole in the centre of the stereo image. How does it do it?

1. Sound pressure waves propagated through the air impact on the electrostatically-charged diaphragms. 2. Then a miracle occurs. 3. The resulting electrical signal reaches your recorder’s A-D converter.

If only I knew how to be more explicit about stage 2. Instead, here are a couple of dawn chorus recordings to give you an idea of the mic’s performance outdoors. The first was made in October before last in Abbey Wood, south-east London:

The next recording was made in April this year in the woods at Sydenham Hill. The mic was positioned on a tripod stand with an embankment about ten metres behind it, so the birdsong (and peacock shriek, but that’s another story) that you’ll hear was mostly in front and to the sides of the mic.

The large diaphragms enable the BP4025 to have a low stated self-noise level of 14dB. Rob Danielson, who contributes regularly and very helpfully to the naturerecordists Yahoo Group and who knows a lot about recording, reckons the true level could even be slightly lower. This recording was made in a cramped passage in the Chislehurst caves and there’s no noticeable hiss in the brief silences between drips:

The BP4025 puts plenty of oomph into the lower frequencies similar to an omnidirectional mic. Traffic rumble can sound very prominent in urban recordings if you don’t use the built-in roll-off switch. I’m pretty sure I didn’t bother with the roll-off for this recording of an automatic car wash going through its cycle:

The BP4025 fits inside a Rode blimp without any difficulty. But because the mic is head-heavy, it’s a good idea not to walk around for too long with it fixed inside the blimp, otherwise it can sometimes work its way loose of the suspension.

I’ve had the pleasure of listening to some very beautiful recordings made by skillful and experienced recordists using more expensive microphones. The BP4025 isn’t in the same league as a pair of spaced Sennheiser MKH20s, or a mid-side array using Schoeps mics. But you can take it anywhere and for what it costs it’s excellent value for money.

Recordists on film: The Stone Tape and The Shout

Posted by IMR on 11 November 2010

MORE EXAMPLES OF sound recordists and recording on film courtesy of contributors to Phonography on Yahoo Groups.

Sound is acknowledged in horror fiction as a royal road to the brain’s fear centres. Seamus Heaney perceived this in a poem as old as Beowulf when he described the presence of Grendel the fen-monster as ‘a dog’s breath in the dark’. And so through the eldritch voices and hideous ululations of HP Lovecraft, to the plot-friendly demon voices of Sam Raimi’s film The Evil Dead, informing a bunch of hapless teenage jerks that you have disturbed our ancient slumber.

Seth Denizen made a superb recommendation with The Stone Tape, straight from the BBC’s golden age of innovative drama in the 1970s. In it, scientists discover how the fabric of an old building can act as a recording medium for the sounds and sights of intense past events. As Seth wrote on Phonography:

An altruist has uploaded The Stone Tape in segments onto YouTube, and the final installment begins and ends with the horrors of disembodied sound:

The Stone Tape is consistent with the themes explored in earlier dramas by its writer Nigel Kneale, including Quatermass and the Pit and a radio drama about a haunted telephone line titled You Must Listen. The notion of stone-as-recorder also matched the rise of a widespread appetite in the early 1970s for topics such as geomancy, Stonehenge and ley lines.

Sound-magic from another culture featured in the 1978 British horror film The Shout, starring Alan Bates and John Hurt, and recommended on Phonography by Steve Peters. Alan Bates plays a drifter who has acquired an Australian Aboriginal knack for killing others by giving voice to a terrifying magical shout. Sound features in other intruiging ways. As Steve wrote:

Here’s a short extract in which Hurt experiments with sound, beginning around 5:10:

The effects of Alan Bates’s death-dealing voice are hinted at without much subtlety in the film’s entertaining trailer:

Steve also recommends this review of The Shout. Despite some critics concluding that it would have worked better as a short feature, the film aspires to finding a role for sound that goes beyond suspense and towards the intensity of the sublime.

New site section on the way

Posted by IMR on 10 November 2010

THINGS HAVE BEEN quiet on the recording front here recently. In truth, I don’t much like the clocks going back or the cold and the dark.

Another reason, though, is that a new site section is under construction. This will bring together a lot of the existing sections within a single interface, plus some extra historical information thrown in.

It’ll use layered maps, and upwards of 500 different four-kilometre-square map tiles have to prepared and lined up with one another. Hopefully a test page or two will go online next week.

Recordists on film: Lisbon Story and Gadjo Dilo

Posted by IMR on 09 November 2010

ONE OF THE best places for sound-hunters to chew the fat online is Phonography on Yahoo Groups. It’s worth signing up with Yahoo just to read the messages there.

A few days after the Sound collectors post here about portrayals of recordists, I put a message on Phonography asking for more examples. This got some very helpful responses citing several different films. Here are just two of them.

John Singer, Rinus Van Alebeek and Maria Arias all separately recommended Wim Wenders’ 1994 film Lisbon Story, about a sound recordist who sets out to make the soundtrack for an unfinished film. As Maria Arias wrote:

And here he is:

Greg Simmons recommended a 1997 Romanian film with the English title of Crazy Stranger:

This looks like the scene Greg’s referring to:

Next up, two 1970s British horror films in which sound will take you to the threshold of madness – and then beyond.

Tēnā koutou katoa, New Zealand sound lovers

Posted by IMR on 02 November 2010

JUST GOT AN email from Jay Buzenberg, who’ll be featuring some London Sound Survey recordings in tonight’s Deep program on the Wellington-based station RadioActive FM.

If you’ve dropped by after hearing the show then hello, welcome and hope you enjoy exploring the sounds of dirty old London town.

Paris street music

Posted by Des Coulam on 30 October 2010

I’M ALWAYS ASTONISHED by the quality of the music to be found on the streets of Paris. Whether it’s the classical musicians and opera singers to be found under the arches in the Place des Vosges, the jazz bands in St Germain des Prés, the street musicians in Montmartre or the buskers in the Métro, street music fills the air of Paris and I have recorded them all. 

Parisian street music is an old tradition out of which emerged no less than Edith Piaf who began her career by singing in the streets of Paris. I wonder how many others will rise from the streets of Paris to the world stage?

Whether it is legal or not to play music on the streets in Paris is a difficult question to answer since the regulations are shrouded in the fog that is French bureaucracy. What is clear though is that street musicians don’t have the right to ask for money. It’s up to you to decide whether or not to leave a token of your appreciation by dropping some loose change into one of the boxes that adorn every street musicians pitch.

Here is my token of appreciation to the street musicians of Paris.

Recently, I came across a very down-at-heel gentleman in the Metro station Charles de Gaulle Etoille playing an even more down-at-heel accordion. Having deposited my token of appreciation in his box he gave me a virtuoso performance.

From the wonderful sounds that the street musicians make – the stunning individual performances and the terrific ensemble pieces – I admit to taking a special delight in the sounds that conjure up the sounds that represent the Paris that I love.

This gentleman is sometimes to be found in the rue Mouffetard – and not only does he make his little street organ sing but he also sings himself.

. . . And I mentioned Edith Piaf earlier. Here is a gift which was recorded in Montmartre earlier this year. Unwrap and enjoy.

Des Coulam has a passion for recording and preserving our sonic environment. He writes and records the Soundlandscapes blog at www.soundlandscapes.wordpress.com.

 

The sound collectors

Posted by IMR on 30 October 2010

WIRTERS AND INTELLECTUALS sometimes express the hostile view of collectors as soulless Gradgrindian labellers, quite unlike creative people such as themselves.

John Fowles’s 1963 novel The Collector depicted an aspergery office clerk who nets and hoards butterflies. After winning the pools he thinks bigger and abducts an art student instead. It’s not obvious which Fowles considered worse: a lower-middle-class nerd coming into lots of money, or his imprisonment of the student. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm claimed a greedy mindset was at work among amateur photographers, with their cameras as killing-jars for little fragments of visual experience.

Those of us who go around recording sounds for pleasure have got off lightly, probably because we don’t come up on many people’s radar. Ragnar di Marzo’s short film The Palagonia Game has an anguished sound collector (with unshielded shotgun mic!) run out of things to record. A mysterious stranger teaches him the value of stillness:

Do small children flee from the sight of you with your fluffy blimp and headphones? Cheer up, it’s only because of Roger McGough’s poem The Sound Collector:

Here’s McGough reading it aloud on the BBC Learning Zone. The poem makes a good launchpad for getting young children to think and write about sounds, and seems to be used widely in primary schools.

This viral ad from the USA takes a more indulgent view of sound collectors. An unnamed Detroit musician scours the city for sounds to use in his work:

What do you mean, he might be an actor?

Guest post from Nick Hamilton of Lost Steps

Posted by Nick Hamilton on 18 October 2010

AS IAN TOLD you last week, the second series of Lost Steps has just begun on Resonance FM. Ian has kindly offered me the chance to elaborate on his post and to detail some of our upcoming shows. This may also read as a shameless plug.

Lost Steps was formed by Malcom Hopkins and myself around 18 months ago whilst walking, drinking and talking our way around central London as stragglers on a walk led by our friend Tony Gilles. I had previously made London-based radio and sound pieces with people like Iain Sinclair, Michael Parsons, Stewart Home, John Barker and Robin Bale. I had also contributed a lot of London field recordings to the initial Edible Landscapes project on Resonance FM in 2008. Malcom has worked in the book trade for many years and is currently manager of Housmans Bookshop on Caledonian Road where he has been steadily building up a really interesting selection of London themed books and pamphlets that reflect his cultural and artistic interests.

With a mutual respect for each other’s knowledge and tastes we decided that radio would be the ideal starting platform for the project which Malcom had dubbed Lost Steps. We set about creating our own Nurse With Wound-type list of people that we saw as producing, or having produced, work that contributed to our subjective vision of London. The list included writers, artists, musicians, photographers, bloggers, journalists, academics and film makers. The idea was to try to make an episode of Lost Steps either with or about each of the people on the list. We hoped that each episode would stand up on its own as well as contributing to an archive that would mean more than it’s constituent parts.

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that the list now seems naive and quite incomplete. Virtually everyone we’ve met has suggested someone else that would make a worthy addition to the project and we keep discovering new and forgotten works too, so it looks like a project that may run for quite a while.

So far the second series will feature:

* photographer Peter Marshall who set out to photograph every London street
* author Simon Wells explaining the London connections he unearthed while writing his 40th anniversary book on Charles Manson
* Scott Wood and Sarah Sparkes discussing Haunted London
* London Dreamtime and Nigel of Bermondsey discussing oral culture and folktales in London
* Phil Baker talking about the artist Austin Osman Spare
* artist Simon Terrill explains his latest project based in and around the Balfron Tower
* writer Catharine Arnott discusses her London trilogy
* sound artist Dan Scott talking us through his various London-specific works
* Mark Baxter and Darren Lock present their photo book on the history of Walworth
* Sisters Burn talk to us about their forthcoming ‘After London’ exhibition that meditates on post-London possibilities and strategies
* Vic Pratt from the BFI talks to us about the Flipside series of screenings and DVD’s that unearth London’s forgotten celluloid memories
* writer Paul Willetts discusses his biography of Paul ‘Revue Bar’ Raymond
* blogger Neil Transpontine talks us through his research around Deptford and New Cross
* film maker Marc Isaacs talks about his studies of the City
* artist Lottie Child presents her Campfire Conversations and Street Training practices
* writer James Bridle details his endeavour to catalogue, archive, and re-shoot Patrick Keiller’s ‘London’
* broadcaster and Blue Badge guide Diane Burstein gives us her take on London
* Stefan Dickers from the Bishopsgate institute shares details of a wonderful East End tale

All the shows are archived on our website the week after broadcast. As of this post we’ll be broadcasting on Thursdays at 10.30pm and then repeating on Wednesdays at 5.30pm. So far we’ve received a lot of positive support and met some fascinating people, including of course your very own Ian Rawes whose London Sound Survey added a welcome sonic dimension to the first series. We’re always keen to hear ideas and suggestions too so do let us know if you think of someone’s work we should know about.

Film sound clichés

Posted by IMR on 15 October 2010

DOGS THAT ALWAYS bark at bad people, dream sequences with added reverb – these are two examples from an entertaining list of cinematic sound clichés compiled by film expert Sven Carlsson. Here are some more he’s come up with:

* Bombs whistle when falling from a plane;

* Text being spelled out on screen MUST make some sort of typing and/or dot-matrix-printer type of sound;

* When a light bulb gets broken, there’s always a kind of electric sound;

* When a character pulls out a knife, even from his pants, you hear a sound of metal brushing metal;

* People in a wide open field or dense forest can make their voice echo if they yell loud enough; and

* Anytime a person speaks into a microphone, their first words will cause the mic to feed back.

You can read the whole article on Carlsson’s comprehensive FilmSound website here.

Carlsson also includes a couple of London-specific clichés, namely seeing Big Ben and hearing ‘Rule Britannia’ whenever the main character visits London, and all Cockney accents being modelled on Dick van Dyke’s efforts in Mary Poppins. I’m not sure if either of those have been true for a long time, but would add a couple of historical sound clichés which still crop up fairly regularly in films and TV costume dramas.

* No tavern scene from the Middle Ages to Victorian times is complete without raucous laughter and/or Brian Blessed shouting More ale, wench!; and

* Cobbled streets are always seen and heard in any drama set before around 1930 and after some indeterminate period of severe medieval squalor.

Otherwise British historical dramas err more on the side of what they leave out. A strong impression left from reading novels written over a hundred years ago is of the general forwardness and articulacy of many people, as harsher social conditions usually punish reticence. Street-sellers and beggars had to do their utmost to avoid either the workhouse or starvation. But film and TV portrayals of ye olde London tend instead towards people shuffling around listlessly.

Two films with interesting takes on London sounds are David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, with its gas-lamps making those rushing, dissociative sounds of the void which also appear in Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and Roman Polanski’s ominous hearing of 1960s London through the ears of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.

One scene in Repulsion has Deneuve setting out on an aimless, drifting walk around the city, when she comes across three old street musicians advancing towards her along an otherwise empty street. One plays the spoons, another scratches at a washboard, altogether they make a brilliantly sinister trio and the dry death-rattle of their music complements Deneuve’s quickening madness.

Surely each borough could sponsor such roaming memento moris today, instead of sending councillors on ‘fact-finding missions’ to exotic places? The scene isn’t among any of the film’s snippets on YouTube, but look out for it next time you watch Repulsion.

Lost Steps back on Resonance 104.4 FM!

Posted by IMR on 12 October 2010

FLICK THROUGH THE radio channels on Freeview and what a load of rubbish there is: religious nutters, Heart FM, Chris Moyles. It’s more fun watching the messages scroll down on Rabbit Chat & Date: tell me all about yrself . . . then tell me some more! – sent in by someone with a head like a fifty-bob cabbage.

But there’s not just hope for me, there’s hope for all Londoners now the brilliant Lost Steps programs are back on Resonance 104.4FM, starting this week on Thursday 14 October at 10.30pm.

Lost Steps is produced and presented by Nick Hamilton and Malcolm Hopkins and the first program in the new series interviews Peter Marshall, a photographer who set himself the goal back in the 1970s of photographing every London street. Ambition on that scale is what the London Sound Survey trembles and aspires to, and Peter Marshall has put a lot of his work online here at his My London Diary website, which stretches from 1999 to the present, with links to some older photos too.

You could spend hours exploring Marshall’s work, but don’t miss him on Lost Steps, this Thursday, only on Resonance 104.4FM.

Some overdue shout-outs from the Sound:Site weekend

Posted by IMR on 12 October 2010

SATURDAY BEFORE LAST I went along by invitation to the Sound:Site get-together in Bracknell. Since then I’ve been working away on my first paying audio commission and, as one of life’s monotaskers, have found it hard to shift my attention back onto writing blog posts.

Praise for the event’s organisers is therefore long overdue for what was a very encouraging and friendly event, and you can read a full write-up on Felicity Ford’s excellent Domestic Soundscape blog. I’ll just give an inventory of the projects presented at Sound:Site.

When I arrived, Chris Clark from the British Library was talking about the UK SoundMap, a crowdsourced endeavour using Google Maps and AudioBoo to collect and present recordings from the general public.

Patrick McGinley spoke engagingly about Framework Radio, in which he’s been producing field recording-based broadcasts and podcasts since 2002. Framework has now passed its 250th episode, and from the ones I’ve heard it’s been of consistently high quality – all in all, Framework is a considerable achievement.

Felicity Ford and Paul Whitty explained their Sound Diaries project, which is based at Oxford Brookes University. It’s an umbrella under which anyone working with sound and the idea of sound diaries can share their projects and ideas online.

The sound designer Harry Towell gave an overview of his net-based Audio Gourmet label, specialising in electro-acoustic music. His site’s among the best thought-out ones for net labels that I’ve seen, and really encourages exploration of the music on offer.

Helen Frosi was there on behalf of SoundFjord, which is London’s only sound art gallery. This is a great project which deserves the support of anyone in the city who’s into sound art, field recording or experimental music.

Several people from the Devon-based SoundArt Radio turned up, and I got to have a pleasant chat with co-founder Nell Harrison. There’s a good write-up on the station by Elisabeth Mahoney in the Guardian.

Also there was Simon Whetham, who contributed to the evening’s performance. Simon is an artist, recordist, musician and model builder, and he kindly gave me one of his CDs, which like a chump I later managed to lose during the course of the day. Whetham has a lot of composition and performance work under his belt, so it’s not easy choosing a replacement to buy.

Artist Kathy Hinde and technical whizz Ed Holroyd showcased their impressive Twitchr birdsong sound map. Like the UK SoundMap, it uses AudioBoo so any contributor can easily upload sound files. Individual recordings are then turned into elements in a virtual music box.

After getting off the train at Bracknell I was hanging around near the cab rank, trying to guess by appearance alone who might also be headed for Sound:Site. Along came a friendly-seeming chap who was looking with interest at the surroundings, so I guessed he wasn’t a native Bracknellian.

He turned out to be none other than Weymouth-based Joe Stevens of 51 Degrees North. Joe’s involved in several projects, but fans of the UK SoundMap will have been enjoying his ‘Sounds of the Seaside’ recordings, uploaded under the monicker 51joe. It was a real pleasure to meet him, and he was great company.

Roll on the next Sound:Site sonic arts festival.

Hello and welcome to our Chinese listeners

Posted by IMR on 01 October 2010

IF YOU’VE SEEN the welcome bar on the home page in Mandarin Chinese, you might be wondering what it’s doing there.

A while ago I was contacted by Wang Fei of BBC World Service, who wanted to include some London Sound Survey recordings and a short interview in a series of radio programs for Chinese speakers wishing to learn English.

The programs are due to be broadcast very soon, so I thought I’d get in there with the welcome bar now. In the meantime, there are some nice pieces on the BBC’s Learning English pages about Authentic Real English and the complexities of British slang terms.

West to Arcadia

Posted by IMR on 29 September 2010

THE THAMES FLOWS east through London towards the world and its uncertainties. In the west it draws back to an Arcadian ideal of the countryside, the landscapes of which have existed more for leisure, prestige and aesthetic enjoyment than for growing food.

An inkling of this starts west of Putney Bridge, with the rowing clubs and tree-lined towpath, nowadays overrun by panting fitness fanatics. But Hammersmith Bridge marks a more definite change in the river’s character, with parkland and elegant houses running intermittently along both sides from there all the way to Hampton Court and beyond. It also has some significance in drama and literature as a gateway between worlds.

The time-travelling narrator in William Morris’s utopian fantasy from 1890, News from Nowhere, finds himself in the future just upstream from Hammersmith Bridge:

The soap-works remained by the river off Fulham Palace Road until demolition in the 1970s. Hammersmith Bridge appears in Philip Marlow’s dreams in The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter, as well as Pennies from Heaven, with one of the characters contemplating throwing herself off it. A mansion flat overlooking the bridge from the Castelnau side was used for some of the filming too.

A. P. Herbert was an early twentieth-century writer and satirist who emerges from his Thames novel The Water Gypsies as a laid-back liberal patrician. It’s an outlook which is still in keeping today with political attitudes among many middle-class people in south-west London, distinct from the conservatism of the stucco belt of Chelsea and Kensington, and the left-leaning intellectualism of Islington and Hampstead. This picture from the Life magazine archive shows him at the wheel of his boat, accompanied by a diffident-looking young sailor.

The Water Gypsies begins in the shadow of Hammersmith Bridge, where Jane Bell lives with her sister on a sprit-sail barge. Jane is young, pretty and lithe, goes swimming in the river to the alarm of the police and can handle the barge under sail as well as any man. Herbert perhaps intends her to be symbolic of the river, a Daughter Thames in place of a Father Thames, but is astute enough not to overdo it – The Water Gypsies is foremost a romantic comedy. She acts as a foil for the up-to-date pretensions of two of her suitors, and in choosing the canal bargeman Fred as her husband near the end, raises an Arcadian ideal above modernity.

Industry certainly wasn’t absent from the river around Hammersmith. Barges and tugs begin their working day in this passage:

A journey in the barge to Brentford reveals a new world to Jane, that of canal barges and the people living and working on them:

Nothing survives of the warehouses and wharves at Brentford, although by the mouth of the Grand Union Canal there are extensive boatyards with a sparse workforce:

Jane eventually takes to the canal way of life:

Herbert knew from observation that such a life was not one of leisure, but he has Jane conclude that it is still a good one, as she takes stock on the eve of her honeymoon in a quiet reach of the canal near Ealing:

Thames lightermen and an origin for whistling

Posted by IMR on 27 September 2010

“MY FATHER WAS a Thames Lighterman. So had his father been before him. And his, and his. Back through the generations. I suppose that, looking back, there was never much option about me following in the footsteps of my ancestors.”

This is the opening to Men of the Tideway, a book in which author Dick Fagan looks back over his working life on the Thames when the river teemed with barges and tugs in its lower reaches.

The lighterman’s job was hard and dangerous. He was in charge of an unpowered barge or ‘lighter’, laden with up to fifty tons of cargo, and could use only the tides, currents and huge wooden paddles to get to his destination. In the picture below you can make out the lighterman standing at the stern:

There’s an annual Thames Barge Driving Race to preserve and commemorate those skills.

One passage in Men of the Tideway describes the different kinds of whistles the lightermen used to recognise one another on the river. Fagan relates how he discovered that their origins lay in birdsong. It’s great to read his excitement at this and his appreciation of the long continuity of the lighterman’s way of life.

One of last year’s blog posts here, titled The decline of whistling, mentions in passing the bird impersonator Percy Edwards, and it’s interesting to wonder whether whistling in general sprang from the imitation of birdsong.

Anyway, here’s Dick Fagan on the whistling lightermen of the Thames:

“One of the things I learnt to do, this may surprise you, was how to whistle.

I ought to explain that every lighterage firm had its own kind of whistle – the sound, I mean, because all the whistling was done with the mouth and not with any instrument. Whistling was a way of identifying yourself across distances, especially at night, with other men working for the same company. Very useful. Getting it right was a work of art though. At first I just imitated others, stuck two fingers in the mouth, stretched the lips apart, blew like fury, hoped for the best. You had to aim for a variation on half-a-dozen notes that made your call different from that of any other firm. The high notes would sail across the water beyond the reach of any human voice; after a spell the answering call would float back clear and clean against the wind and the noises of the river.

It took plenty of time and practice to get perfect at it. In the end I got it so that I didn’t take a blind bit of notice of any whistle that wasn’t intended for me, while everyone who heard my effort knew exactly what it meant and where it came from.

But for years I never knew how all these different whistles, each with its own sort of melody, originated. Then one day, when I was courting, my girl and I felt an urge to get away altogether from dockland, to be really and truly on our own. So we took a day trip to the country. We finished up in a large wood way beyond the last of London’s houses. Shouldn’t be surprised if today the wood hasn’t vanished and the houses go on for ten miles beyond it. In years to come you’ll never get outside London on a day excursion.

We wandered through these woods, down paths that were soft to the feet; it was all quiet and we never met a soul. I’ve got to confess that it was the first time I’d ever been in real country. Southwark Park was about the only open space I knew. You couldn’t call that brimming with peace and beauty, though it was better than nothing.

Finally we were sitting on a fallen tree trunk just dreaming. Then it happened. A loud shrill whistle, very close. My firm’s whistle.

I was shaken rigid. I damned nearly jumped to my feet and started searching for the nearest pair of paddles. My girl made a little worried noise.

“Whatever’s the matter?”

I didn’t answer. It had just come to me that the whistle I’d been using for many years was part of a bird’s song. After a bit I spotted the bird as large as life up on a nearby tree with its beak open and the familiar notes pouring out of it as though it had been a lighternan all its life.

In Bermondsey we only had sparrows. Who’s ever heard of a whistling sparrow?

Then another bird started up with a different tune, after that another, and another. I listened to them in amazement because I could connect each one’s song with the lighterage firm that had converted it into its own whistle.

Soft green grass, graceful trees, peace, love – yet because of the birds’ song it was all connected with the hustle and struggle of river and dock life. The whistles of watermen must have been invented long, long ago, when London’s river was still close to open country, when all these birds were singing in Shoreditch and Wapping, in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, when the largest ship wasn’t much bigger than the barges I now rowed every day.”

Sounds from 12 Gates to the City

Posted by IMR on 27 September 2010

THREE NEW SOUND recordings have appeared here, thanks to Jonathan Prior of the Edinburgh-based website 12 Gates to the City. It’s an ongoing project collecting sound recordings and producing podcasts for walks around Scotland’s capital.

This part of the site’s ‘About’ preamble struck a chord:

12 Gates to the City also includes an Acoustic Map, the first one I’ve seen based on Microsoft’s Bing Maps. Individual adjacent placemarkers merge into a single numbered circle if you zoom out far enough, a nice feature. There are a couple of dozen recordings from Scotland, as well as five from London, three of which Jonathan has very kindly shared with the London Sound Survey.

The first indulges the universal curiosity about what’s under the city streets with the sounds of a sewer in Clapham Common, recorded from inside an open manhole cover:

The political section of the sound actions page here isn’t very well populated, given the number of demonstrations and rallies that must happen in London. This recording of the protests by Sri Lankan Tamils in 2009 is only 23 seconds long, but is joined to events of historic importance nonetheless:

Lastly, there’s a cheerful performance by a band of buskers near Hungerford Bridge, presumably on the South Bank:

These three make for lively and vivid additions, but when you’ve had a listen to them, check out the podcasts on 12 Gates to the City.

Adventures in ultrasound: recording with the London Bat Group

Posted by IMR on 24 September 2010

IF YOU PUT yourself on the email list for the London Bat Group, you’ll get regular updates on the training sessions and bat surveys they’re running. I’d strongly recommend going along to one of them.

Even if you’re not (yet) much interested in wildlife, it’s still satisfying to explore in a group those nocturnal London places which usually only appear in newspaper reports: wooded area, dense undergrowth, unlit footpath.

Last Wednesday’s survey objective was to see if any Nathusius’s Pipistrelles were visiting the Leg o’ Mutton reservoir in Barnes, south-west London. To identify bat species during a survey, you need to listen to their ultrasonic squeaks with a bat detector. Here’s the cheapish model I use, a Magenta Bat 5:

Nearly all bat detectors have line-out sockets so you can record what they pick up. Bats usually mate during the autumn, and around this time several species in Britain start to form swarms and emit mating calls. Early in the evening we encountered a swarm of perhaps a dozen Soprano Pipistrelles, hurtling and wheeling only a few feet above our heads:

One of the pleasures of using a bat detector lies in the roughness of the signal which comes out of it, a quality of sound which more and more signifies the past. The bats’ sonar is mysterious when emerging from a background of hiss and crackle, like the cryptic radio messages in Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée.

Other things beside bats produce ultrasound: clothes snagged by brambles, the clink of coins or keys in a pocket, and insects. A harsh, monotonously regular signal had us wondering, until Philip Briggs, the survey’s leader, explained that it was the chirp or stridulation of a Dark Bush Cricket, here recorded at 25 kHz:

No Nathusius’s Pipistrelles were heard that evening, but by the reservoir’s edge was the sonar rattle of two or more Daubenton’s bats that flew fast to shock the vague clouds of insects an inch or so above the water.

Hello and welcome to Joe the biologist and anyone else who was there that evening, and has stopped by to read this.

Workplace web-based research #1

Posted by IMR on 22 September 2010

A QUICK ROUND-UP of some sound-related things to look at and listen to if you’re busy skiving conducting mission-critical internet research at work.

The British Library’s UK SoundMap heads towards its 700th recording. As far as I know, it’s the first properly crowdsourced sound map, and anyone can take part in this very democratic project from smartphone users to those toting top-of-the-range mics and recorders.

An attractive page of sounds and photographs from Islay in the Inner Hebrides appears on the mapsadaisal blog.

From the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University comes a half-hour podcast on the subject of noise in the digital world.

Lastly, an excellent online article titled The quest to find the first soundscape from the Atlantic magazine’s website. Includes an old wax cylinder recording noted as Urban scene – newsboys yelling “Extra, extra”; car horns; and other sounds of the city, sometimes in non-English language, but which turns out to have been staged.

Coming up: the LSS at Sound:Site and on BBC World Service

Posted by IMR on 10 September 2010

COMING UP ON Saturday 2nd October is the Sound:Site sonic art festival. In their own words, it’ll consist of:

One segment of Sound:Site will be given over to nine five-minute presentations by people running web-based sound projects, and they’ve invited me to go along and hold forth about the London Sound Survey as part of that. The five-minute format sounds ideal, and I’m really looking forward to meeting fellow sound fanatics on the day. Do come up and say hello if you’re going along.

Last Saturday I was interviewed at Bush House by Wang Fei of the BBC World Service. He’s going to be using some recordings from the London Sound Survey as part of the popular Learning English series for Chinese speakers. Earlier in the day we’d gone around recording some more sounds for the program, starting at St James’s Park, where all sorts of bells began chiming at nine o’clock:

There was a heap of intrusive noise there, including someone dawdling nearby and an appearance of one of those dreaded wheeled suitcases. It was largely got rid of thanks to extensive spectral cleaning in Izotope RX, but it’s not good to rely on reconstructive techniques like that. Better to make a decent recording in the first place.

In the afternoon I came across a busker playing Schubert’s Ave Maria on a trumpet at the junction of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road. He’d found a spot on a traffic island with vehicles rushing in and out of the underpass below. It seemed a bleak and unusual location, accentuated by the melancholy sound of his music:

A puzzle for grammarians: in the first draft, I wrote “on the Euston Road”. Named roads sometimes attract the definite article, for example: They like it up the Old Kent Road. But named streets never have a ‘the’ at the beginning. No-one says: Christmas shopping’s murder along the Oxford Street. Why the difference?