George Gissing and the Nether World

Posted by IMR on 09 March 2010

GEORGE GISSING WAS a late Victorian novelist who, among other things, had an alcoholic wife, did a month’s hard labour in prison, and contracted emphysema. His fine London novel The Nether World easily tops any Christmas Day edition of Eastenders for gloom. Nearly everyone in it comes to a bad end.

But it’s full of naturalistic detail, and the London of the late 1880s is much more recognisable than the dirty, chaotic city of Dickens and Phiz. Let’s start with something pleasant:

Nowadays, central London becomes busy with traffic from around 6am onwards during weekdays. Sunday mornings were pretty quiet well into the 1980s, and some early morning photographs from the 1938 Lilliput Annual show Piccadilly Circus to be completely deserted except for a lone, dishevelled figure wearing a top hat – “For one man, the night is just ending.”

But with a clandestine meeting at Waterloo station, Gissing depicts London as a noisy and degrading prison for its working-class inhabitants:

This theme is revisited when one of the book’s central characters goes to live in ‘Farringdon Road Buildings’, which probably refers to the large Peabody estate that still stands there:

The most extensive and vivid sound descriptions in The Nether World are reserved for an August bank holiday spent at the Crystal Palace:

Even an all-you-can-eat tearoom at the Crystal Palace only produces a deafening ‘uproar of voices’ and ‘shrieks of female laughter’, while at the start of a fireworks show:

Gissing must have known that any crowd of people goes ‘Oh’ when they see fireworks, but he can leave no easy way out of The Nether World.

Categories: Historical sounds

On the Hoo Peninsula

Posted by IMR on 04 March 2010

THE HOO PENINSULA is a fat tongue of land in the Thames estuary, and its northern flood plain is the largest stretch of anything like wilderness near London.

Few people venture into it beyond the bird-watching platforms to the west, and the caravan park at Allhallows to the east. Between those points lies a four-mile-wide waste of rough hummocky ground, wind-stunted trees and tumbledown buildings. Important things once happened here: monks gathered salt from an inlet, a munitions factory was built during the Second World War. Now it’s left to the short memories of the sheep and cows foraging among the creeks.

Yesterday it was very blowy and, not having brought any gloves, my fingers soon became stupid with cold. This isn’t a particularly good recording, but maybe it’ll convey a faint sense of this strange and grand place.

Categories: Site news

Car wash in three acts

Posted by IMR on 03 March 2010

HAD WANTED TO do this for a while, record the sounds in a car wash, and today a friend was willing to take me through one inside his set of wheels. It’s more popular that way. Three extracts taken from a longer recording for different parts of the wash cycle:

Recorded with an Audio Technica BP4025 single-point stereo mic, which at just over £400 is a pretty good bit of kit, in my humble opinion.

Categories:

At the banger races

Posted by IMR on 02 March 2010

TWO OR THREE times a month Wimbledon stadium at Plough Lane, south London, hosts stock car, hot rod and banger races. Here’s a recording of the first banger race of last Sunday evening:

After the bangers were done the stock car races began, a more orderly and serious-looking business. By now it was dark and a rain shower had spread the track with puddles. The people became quieter, some blinking at the floodlights then glancing downwards, thoughts left unsaid. The cold night-time air, the circling cars and the harsh tide of their engines were hypnotising.

As each race ended, the cars left the track through a gated passage out into the stadium’s car park. Here had sprouted a brief township of drivers, mechanics, camp followers and on-the-spot repair shops:

The stadium has a bar and hot food, although to be honest there’s a reasonable alternative to the latter, known as hunger. The races are a fine spectacle though and that evening it was £12 for adults and £6 for kids. 

Categories: Site news

Sound and sociability

Posted by IMR on 21 February 2010

RECENTLY CAME ACROSS some fascinating pages on radio producer Mark Vernon’s Meagre Resource website about tape recording clubs.

These enthusiasts’ associations date back to the 1950s and the arrival of affordable recording equipment. Mark has already made radio broadcasts about them for Radio 4 and Resonance FM, and his site has an impressive array of material, including original tape clubbers’ recordings, local newspaper articles, and photographs. Here’s one of members of the Leicester Tape Recording Club:

Much of the tape clubbers’ activities reflected the eagerness and curiosity which often comes with breakthroughs in access to technology. The clubs were also products of a time when people were better able to create durable organisations among themselves through forming committees, complete with treasurers and secretaries. Greater informality today goes hand-in-hand with social transience.

A few club contact details can still be found through the website of the British Sound Recording Association, which began life in 1958 as the Federation of British Tape Recording Clubs. The nearest club to London includes in its contact address the now-vanished county of Middlesex, a nice touch and in keeping with the awkward-squad mentality of us hobbyists everywhere.

Categories: Sound websites

Head-worn mics for under £300

Posted by IMR on 15 February 2010

IT DOESN’T HAVE to cost a lot to start making field recordings. A digital recorder and set of half-decent external mics can work out cheaper than most entry-level digital SLR camera kits. Banned from the eBay forums? Need a new hobby? Sorted!

Many of the recordings in the London Sound Survey are made using head-worn mics. That is, two small omnidirectional mics are worn on each side of the head, with their leads converging onto a single jack-plug which goes into the digital recorder. Each mic by itself can only record in mono. Used together, though, they can produce recordings with a very realistic-sounding stereo image. This is partly because the mics will be the same distance apart as your own two ears, and also because your head acts as a sound-absorbing and sound-colouring baffle between the mics.

You might have come across the term ‘binaural stereo’ or ‘binaural recording’. Strictly speaking, binaurally-positioned mics are put inside the ear canals. Binaural recordings can have extremely lifelike stereo images, but they usually only come into full effect when listened to through headphones. They just don’t sound as good over speakers. Positioning the mics elsewhere on the head, typically just before the ears or at the temples, produces a stereo image that sounds equally good over headphones and speakers. The term ‘head-worn stereo’ is used here to describe this particular recording arrangement.

Fortunately, several firms produce mics for binaural or head-worn recording, and many of the models are pretty cheap. There’s now a handy list of 28 different models on this page . . .

http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/budget_mics/

. . . gleaned from different websites, and because there are different ways of expressing some of the specifications, they’ve been standardised to make comparisons easier.

Self-noise is shown in dBV, eg 23dBV, and the higher that value is, the noisier or more hissy the mic. Relatively high values like 34 or 36dBV aren’t going to be a problem if you’re recording at gigs or other busy places, but you might not be so happy with the results if you’re trying to capture the subtle ambience of Victoria Coach Station at two in the morning.

Sensitivity (or, more correctly, the ‘transfer function’) is expressed in values of mV/Pa. The higher the value, the more sensitive the mic is. Again, whether a high or a low sensitivity is good or not depends on what you’re going to do with the mics. But 10 mV/Pa seems to be an acceptable average value, and it’s probably best to go up from there rather than down.

Lastly, maximum sound pressure levels are given, and these are the levels of loudness at which the mics begin to produce unpleasantly-distorted sound. The value of 105dB is the most common in the list, and that’s alright for many everyday recording situations, but it won’t be enough for loud gigs or if you’re in the middle of a crowd at a football match. For those kind of events you’ll probably want to look at something like 120–130dB.

There are two models in the list which fall in that range, and a few others that will approach it provided they get a slightly higher voltage from one of the custom-made battery boxes which many of the manufacturers will be eager to sell you. Otherwise, all of those mics run on the plug-in power, or PIP, which just about any pocket digital recorder can supply through its mic socket.

The list page is quite basic right now, but a few little features should be added to it shortly. If you’ve got any experience of using any of those models, then please feel free to make a comment on that page and share your knowledge.

Categories: Site news

From Kew Gardens to Battersea Bridge

Posted by IMR on 14 February 2010

A BELATED UPDATE on a long day’s recording Saturday before last. (Field recording is naturally verboten on Valentine’s Day weekend.) First stop was Kew Gardens dead on the 9.30am opening time, to try and get in before too many others arrived.

The main conservatory at Kew has the humid atmosphere of a rainforest, with coffee-maker shrieks as the plant misters throttle themselves down, and a constant, furtive dripping onto palm leaves all around:

A walk along the Grand Union Canal was diverted onto a small footpath which skirts the northernmost side of the Old Oak Common railway yards, close by Wormwood Scrubs. It’s an impressive expanse of puddles and tracks and locomotive sheds, made grander somehow by the small number of people that could be seen and heard working there:

A short trip to Kilburn was made after that in the hope of getting a decent betting shop ambience, but the results just didn’t come up to scratch. A few old men stared at the television screens or, frowning, filled out their betting slips, all without making a sound, not even coughing.

Night-time began with another disappointment. Newspaper reports had said that local residents were fed up with the incessant barking at the Lambeth Council dog pound near Loughborough Junction. But that evening the abandoned Staffies of south London had put been under manners, and nothing disturbed the standard nocturnal auditory scene of a residential street.

Just under a mile to the west, the stairwell into Brixton Station provided a good vantage point some forty or fifty feet above Atlantic Road from which to capture the Saturday night atmosphere:

Fans of the old-school greasy spoon can take themselves to a more rarefied, Zen-like level by contemplating the roadside tea-hut. For a long time there’s been one on Queenstown Road at the approach to Battersea Bridge, popular with bikers and other night-owls. Some years ago it was threatened by developers but efforts were made to save it. The tea-hut is now more of a snack bar, selling burgers and cans of pop, and the grumpy former owner (last seen being given a character reference by a Post Office van driver) has made way for a friendlier proprietor:

Categories: Site news

Rituals of public shaming

Posted by IMR on 02 February 2010

TWENTY YEARS AGO or more you might have occasionally heard the word ‘sherricking’, as in ‘she gave him a right good sherricking’, and it doesn’t mean what you might be thinking, or hoping.

Instead, ‘sherricking’ refers to a woman giving her man a public and no-quarter-given character reference for his various failings – fooling around, spending all his money in the pub, being a git. I remember it used by a few Irish people in west London, and the word crops up here and there on the net. Some funny posts on a Scottish local history website recall the custom:

So a sherricking was a fairly low-risk strategy on the woman’s part, as it was carried out in public view and earshot. It was a performance or ritual summoning an audience and in which the participants had different roles expected of them. Rows in the street between couples nowadays don’t seem to have that division of labour. Both the man and the woman are likely to yell at each other.

Further back in time whole communities had developed rituals around marital discord, and they had a strong sound element in their performance. Samuel Pepys made the following entry in his diary for the 10th of June, 1667:

What was a ‘riding’? Lord Baybrooke’s notes in the 1893 edition of Pepy’s diary offer this explanation:

On a side note, drums seem to have been the cheapest or most readily available musical instrument in street life for a long time. Most town criers used them before town councils upgraded them to classier horns and bells. It’d also be interesting to know why the humorous figure of the cuckold has disappeared from popular culture as completely as the once-common and noisy rituals of public shaming.

Categories:

Notting Hill Carnival 1984

Posted by IMR on 27 January 2010

CAMERON McNALL FROM Los Angeles has very kindly uploaded some recordings of his made in London back in 1984. There’s a nice one of the Chelsea vs Liverpool match, with some great crowd noises and atmosphere. If the Chelsea fans sound happy, it’s because their team’s busy beating Liverpool, final score 3:1.

A short slice of London pub life in Notting Hill during the Carnival was captured as well. You’d be less likely to hear such voices and conservation around there now. The Carnival has attracted a much more cosmopolitan audience and some of the pubs have been reinvented as bars with mysterious single-word names.

Two recordings stand out as particularly good. This, at just under three minutes long, features a DJ playing his set somewhere among the crowds:

Cameron is keen to know what’s being played, so if anyone reading this knows, please leave a comment below. The next one weighs in at just over thirteen minutes and it’s a fantastic recording of some musicians jamming in a park – could it have been Meanwhile Gardens?

Would you hear music quite like that at the Carnival today? I only go about once a decade, not liking very dense crowds much, so I’m not qualified to spot many changes over the years. But there does seem to be a lot more high-profile corporate sponsorship compared to when sound systems might get a helping hand from small Caribbean-run businesses like Duke Cars in Brockley.

So many thanks to Cameron for those, and remember, uploading your London sounds to the Survey DropBox only takes a bit of this – takka-tak-tak – on your keyboard. Also, have a look at Cameron’s Electroland website to see some wonderful light sculptures and installations.

Categories: Historical sounds

Binaural sounds from Russia

Posted by IMR on 25 January 2010

AFTER HIGHLIGHTING THE recent surge in site visitors from Russia, a welcome email arrived from Vladimir of Sergiyev Posad, which is a town some forty miles north of Moscow.

He runs the oontz sound blog, showcasing several dozen binaural recordings he’s made in the town. Each recording stands in its own right as a good piece, but together they create an intriguing account of life in Sergiyev Posad.

Vladimir also works for the local newspaper, and perhaps this contributes to the sense of the town being represented in a full and rounded way through its sounds. A military band plays ‘Strangers in the Night’ to accompany an unarmed combat competition, and sparrows chirp among the noise of an indoor market. Local street musicians perform to a high standard, as in recordings of a group of drummers and a man playing the hurdy gurdy and gusli, the latter a kind of stringed instrument.

Many of the recordings are very clear and have little of the traffic and aircraft noise which constantly presses against Londoners’ eardrums. Accompanying photographs show Sergiyev Posad to be an attractive town, and the website comes across as the work of someone who likes both the place and the people.

Categories: Sound websites

Night-walking and the poet of Villiers Street

Posted by IMR on 24 January 2010

ONE OF THE two reasons why the London Sound Survey doesn’t have search boxes is that they close off the possibility of serendipitous discovery. The other reason is I don’t know how to do them.

Making happy discoveries by chance was the motive for a night-walk last Saturday, Shure mics safety-pinned inside the Benny-from-Crossroads Hat of Sound. The final destination was Fulham Broadway because it’s been portrayed in the Evening Standard recently as a nocturnal basin for drunks to roll around in. This Standard article comes with the required girl-worse-for-wear photo. Around midnight the Broadway had a lively, cheerful atmosphere, and the entrance to Fulham Broadway tube station seems to be a popular meeting-spot:

Earlier there had been some fruitless wandering around the back streets of Earls Court and West Brompton, with the hope of coming across that brief auditory scene which is likely more common in upmarket neighbourhoods. Night-time, a quiet residential street. 30 or 40 yards away a car pulls up, the engine stops. Brief silence. Then animated conversation and laughter as two couples get out, the doors slam with deep thuds – it’s an expensive car. Voices and footsteps are heard briefly, then the slam of a front door. Silence. No luck.

But a fine discovery was made in Villiers Street by Embankment station at the start of the night’s expedition. Two years ago I’d seen a man occupying a small pitch on the river path by Blackfriars Bridge. By him was a handwritten notice stating he was available to recite poems he’d written. The batteries in the recorder had gone flat and by the time I’d returned after buying some from a cornershop, he’d gone.

It was a real pleasure to see the poet and his pitch spread out once again. Dozens of handwritten cards were propped up on the ground, each bearing the title of a poem, with a couple of candle-lanterns set among them, and him keeping a benign and hopeful eye over the whole scene.

I pointed to a card with ‘An Ode to London’ written on it: “Would you recite that one please?”

After that I had to hear more, but asked him to make the choice. He correctly guessed that another poem relating to the city would go down well. Before reciting it from memory, he explained that the idea came from a Big Issue seller, who’d told him about a woman commuter who always took the time to stop and talk to him on her way home from work. The poem is called ‘It’s a long day, lady’.

If you come across him, ask to hear one of his poems, and pay him for his time.

Categories:

Sound is Art

Posted by IMR on 21 January 2010

MARGARET NOBLE, A US-based electronic musician, runs a blog called Sound is Art which presents a range of fascinating and unusual sound recordings.

The blog has categories such as field and archival recordings, unusual instruments, performance and sound oddities. An amplified musical toy top sounds like an extract from Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, a surgical operation is recorded on a bizarre Sounds of Medicine record released by the Smithsonian Institute in the 1950s, a slightly alarming recording made at a bee farm provides uneasy headphone listening, and there’s much else besides.

One recording attracts the comment of ‘wow humbling’. It’s of fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field and is called Earth Music and it really is worth hearing. Margaret is always on the look-out for new material for Sound is Art, so if you know of any suitable recordings, please drop her a line.

Categories:

Здравствуйте и добро пожаловать к нам, русские слушатели

Posted by IMR on 21 January 2010

. . . WHICH SAYS (hopefully) ‘Hello and welcome, Russian listeners’. Server logs show around 15,000 unique visitors so far this month, with a fair proportion of those coming from Russia.

What’s more, Russian listeners seem to be playing a greater number of sound files on average than people from most other countries. So, welcome to the London Sound Survey, and hope you enjoy exploring the website and its sounds.

Categories: Site news

Crowds and crime in Defoe's Moll Flanders

Posted by IMR on 19 January 2010

DANIEL DEFOE WAS a restless and energetic writer who produced over 270 books and pamphlets from the late 1690s to just before his death in 1731. It’s not surprising then how works such as History of the Plague in London and The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders revolve around action and dialogue, with only scant accounts of sights and sounds.

Moll Flanders does, however, contain some descriptions of how the public strove in very vocal ways to apprehend thieves and pickpockets. The central character of the book, Moll Flanders, makes her living in London first as a confidence trickster and then as a shoplifter and pickpocket. There is no police force to set her before the judiciary. Instead it’s the public who step up to the job of thief-taker. In this excerpt, a Covent Garden crowd mistakenly identifies her as having stolen from a shop:

On another occasion, individuals in a crowd raise the alarm while Flanders goes pickpocketing among them:

Flanders is eventually caught and confined to Newgate, the same prison where Defoe himself had been incarcerated after writing the satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters:

Newgate is where the uproar of the streets is confined and concentrated. The most extensive sound description in the whole of Moll Flanders is of the morning of an execution in the prison:

It’s hard to think of any examples today of strangers calling and acting together in public as a matter of routine. Gigs, demonstrations, sporting events and religious gatherings are special occasions for most people, rather than part of everyday life.

Categories: Historical sounds

Weird Vibrations and the politics of sound

Posted by IMR on 13 January 2010

SOME RECOMMENDATIONS FOR other sound-related websites are long overdue, and there’s no better one to begin with than Ben Tausig’s Weird Vibrations blog.

The Ohio-based Weird Vibrations sets out its ambitions in a short ‘About’ section:

Also, Weird Vibrations appears keen on a conceptual integration of several different areas of research and practice into the single discipline of Sound Studies. More on this in a moment. The blog shows a voracious curiosity encompassing all sorts of subjects, each written about in a very clear explanatory style.

Here are some post topics picked at random: ethics in sound recording, visualization of sound using wavelets, sonic sculpture, sound design in film, sound in bureaucratic settings, the old practice of people hired to read literature and news to factory workers, the use of voice in protest. It’s a real pleasure roaming across them. Ben also includes some of his own field recordings: this one of a Thai language teacher working with English-speaking students is a particular favourite.

There’s an interesting post titled A Sound Studies Primer, which in my mind raises a lot of questions about what a fully-formed discipline of Sound Studies might be like. What practices and disciplines would it seek to integrate, and within what kind of framework? For someone tending towards reductionism, this isn’t easy to grapple with. My own hunch is that there may be some mileage in adapting the speech act theories of philosophers like John Searle and J.L. Austin to develop a theory of sound acts. The inclusion of a ‘sound actions’ section on London Sound Survey is a way of wondering about that out loud, but goes no further.

Weird Vibrations, I suspect, has a clearer road map and it’ll be well worth watching to see how it develops. The biologist John Maynard Smith believed it was valuable to allow room for both holism and reductionism, and so have a ‘well-furnished mind’. If you’re looking to stock up your mind, visit Weird Vibrations.

Categories:

Two sunny afternoons in south London

Posted by IMR on 09 January 2010

A SOUND-WALK IS a recording made while strolling around somewhere. It’s easy to make one so long as you pay attention to your breathing and don’t wear clothes that rustle or creak as you move. If you’re using head-worn mics of some kind, you have to try not to turn your head. Doing all these things at once must look odd but no-one cares. London’s full of strange-looking people.

Short excerpts of these two sound-walk recordings have already been uploaded, but why not just put the whole lot up? No idea why this wasn’t done in the first place, anyway, this one was recorded while walking around Brixton on a Saturday afternoon May before last, and it’s six-and-a-half minutes long:

The next recording was made in Rye Lane, Peckham, late on a weekday afternoon, just as many of the shops and stalls were starting to close. It’s just under five minutes long:

Both are reminders of warmer weather and I can’t wait for spring to come round again.

Categories: Site news

Voices of animals and men

Posted by IMR on 08 January 2010

FOLLOWING ON FROM an earlier post about budgerigars, I was listening recently to this CD produced by the British Library Sound Archive:

Most of the recordings on the CD are of wild birds imitating other bird species. There’s also one of a raven saying ‘hello’ and a blackbird mimicking a dial-up modem, now an obsolete sound and probably not one that many people will miss. Parrot-like birds are represented by Sparkie Williams, the champion talking budgie of 1950s Britain.

Only birds can reliably mimic human speech. In the 1970s a dog called Prince achieved brief fame after appearing on the BBC’s That’s Life program, where he growled a few indistinct sounds that could be taken as words if you were in a believing mood. As you can see, he also had some help from his owner:

There is one genuine example of a non-human mammal producing human speech sounds and a few short recordings survive of it.

If you enjoy the unsettling feeling of some of your mental categories being undermined then listen to these recordings of Hoover the talking seal:

First, second, and third.

Hoover had been found by a Maine fisherman as a pup, swiftly outgrew his new home, and ended up in the New England Aquarium in Boston, where this webpage commemorates his residency. By chance Hoover also came to the attention of the neuroscientist Terrence Deacon. As Deacon recalls in his book The Symbolic Species:

Deacon was able to study Hoover with the help of an undergraduate student, videoing and recording his utterances and other behaviour. The seal was sickly compared to its fellows at the aquarium, and fell ill and died a little over a year later. During the autopsy a veterinarian noted that Hoover’s cranium was calcified to an unusual degree, probably as the result of early encephalitis or other brain damage.

Deacon never tracked down the whereabouts of Hoover’s brain to examine it for himself, and he says the case ‘remains open and unclosed’.

Categories:

Gone to the dogs

Posted by IMR on 04 January 2010

GREYHOUND RACING, LIKE speedway, was once a mass spectator sport in London. Today the only races left are held at Wimbledon and Romford, the latter being technically in London but spiritually in Essex. Walthamstow stadium shut last year to make way for yet another housing development, although at least the stadium’s attractive front will be preserved.

Catford stadium is gone, and Hackney too, making way for a while to a furtive little market where you could buy all sorts of stuff. In turn, that’s been bulldozed as part of the Olympics. Come 2012, it’ll help transform the area from one full of people running around on drugs into one full of . . . alright, let’s not be cynical.

The old Wembley stadium had dog racing, but it was a grim place, and the most beautiful venue of all, White City, has been turned into a car park. This recording was made last year at Wimbledon on a Tuesday evening:

British games developer robotJAM recently asked if they could use that recording for one of their upcoming titles. Some intensive research on the robotJAM website showed their in-browser games were a lot of fun with well-thought-out gameplay, and also a nice sense of humour that’s lacking from sites like PopCap. Here’s robotJAM’s finished result:

Give it a go here and see if you can earn the right to wear that Tony Gubba sheepskin.

Categories: Site news

Wishing you all a happy 2010

Posted by IMR on 31 December 2009

THE LONDON SOUND Survey has now been online for seven months. In that time, the number of recordings has nearly doubled to around 450. Each month a reasonable and increasing number of visitors drops by, not counting webcrawlers and other automated whatsits. The site is climbing up the search engine rankings and there have been a couple of radio interviews and an offer of a telly appearance, which I knocked back because it seemed premature. Plus I’m shy. And very ugly.

This is not a bad start. But it’s impossible to work in a vacuum, and none of these things would have happened without the help and good will of many people. In particular, many thanks to those who’ve sent in recordings, including Dave Ackrill, Ben Cripps, Stuart Fisher, James Huckle and Dave Pape.

Much gratitude is owed to Martin Paling, Neil of the Transpontine and History is Made at Night blogs, Adrian Maddox of Classic Cafes fame, Another Nickel in the Machine blog, the Londonist, Nick and Malcolm of Resonance FM, Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, Eric Leonardson of the World Listening Project, Living Geography, KR Connect, John Ptak, helpful people at the Freesound Project, Taperssection, soundtransit, Electromusic, the Montreal Sound Map, Will Montgomery, Rob Danielson on the Phonography Yahoo group, Ollie Hall, Sergio López Figueroa, Mike and Eme of Goldtop/Urban75, and anyone else who ought to be in that list.

Thanks also to several colleagues at work for their encouragement and technical advice, in particular Christine, Andrew, Trevor, Paul, Richard and Will. Finally, thank you to anyone who has come along and sent in a comment, an email, or who has just taken the time to listen to a recording.

2010 will see further developments on the London Sound Survey, with two major site additions planned. One of those in particular should help push it forward to a new level, but first there’s extensive behind-the-scenes work needing done to pave the way for it. Be sure to keep an eye out and an ear open for those changes – you won’t be disappointed!

Have a very happy New Year.

Categories: Site news

Toothache hotel

Posted by IMR on 29 December 2009

I HAD BEEN meaning to record the sounds of hospital environments for a while, but somehow never got round to it. Now fate has intervened in the form of toothache, which has been slightly distracting. On the plus side, this ought to provide a good excuse to get mic’ed up and visit a dental hospital in the next day or so.

A previous trip some years ago found virtually all my fellow sufferers to be men, and some of them were trying and failing to suppress yelps of discomfort as they sat waiting their turn with the dentist.

Categories:

Modern voices of authority

Posted by IMR on 29 December 2009

IN ALDOUS HUXLEY’S Brave New World, controlling unrest is very different to the ‘With a loud voice command’ of the 1714 Riot Act:

The Voice is a sexless ‘it’ but in the 1930s when Brave New World was first published, nearly all voices ordering or informing adults were those of men. As described in Anne Karpf’s book The Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent, women’s voices were judged to be too ‘shrill’ and lacking in gravitas for public announcement.

By the 1970s, however, women announcers had become common in supermarkets and department stores. Actress Stephanie Gathercole provided the brisk and efficient lift voice for the opening credits of the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served?:

Lift voices are one of those helpful features which now no longer seem to exist in any London department store, although one survives in the British Library:

Elsewhere in settings as diverse as buses, train stations and chain stores of every description, women’s voices are now the preferred option for recorded announcements. It’s a significant change in the public sound environment compared to just thirty years ago. Even the Eurofighter’s ‘voice command feature’ is described by a test pilot thus:

The nickname suggests that the tones are those of a woman older than the average fighter pilot. It might also be an ambivalent acknowledgement that critical alerts delivered in a woman’s voice get better compliance.

So too for recorded announcements in general. Chauvinism has given way to the realisation that using women’s voices is now effective in telling people what to do.

Categories:

A new website feature

Posted by IMR on 23 December 2009

OVER A HUNDRED short videos have now been added to the London Sound Survey YouTube channel, where they get a small dribble of views.

As mentioned in an earlier post here, each plays one of the site’s sound recordings, with a red bar creeping in time across a spectrogram plot.

Admit it, I mean, alright, so people will say that sounds boring – the one on YouTube of the hamster stuffing all the food into its face was better – give you that, people want a bit more action, agree with that, but anyway now the sounds are appearing there, they can also be worked into this site.

Nearly all the sound recordings on this page now have a link under the Flash player which allows its associated video to open in the middle of the page in a fancy ‘modal’ style. For example, Blackheath funfair. Hopefully by the end of January there will be one for the majority of recordings, excluding those covered by other people’s Creative Commons licenses.

In the meantime, have a very merry Christmas.

Categories: Site news

Please keep your belongings with you at all times

Posted by IMR on 18 December 2009

Please keep your belongings with you at all times. Any unattended items could be lost or damaged or destroyed by the security services.

Do you ever half-expect a few more ‘ors’ to be added when that’s announced over the tannoy in a railway station?

. . . or scuffed a bit, or painted an unpleasant colour, or . . .

Categories:

A warm welcome to Dave Ackrill and Ben Cripps

Posted by IMR on 18 December 2009

MORE OF YOUR recordings have been arriving at the London Sound Survey DropBox, and very much appreciated they are too!

Dave Ackrill has been out and about with a Tascam DR-07 recorder and has captured the evening-time ambiences in a couple of London pubs. This is what the Princess Louise in High Holborn sounds like on a Wednesday night:

Dave writes: “The Princess Louise has a lot of glass, mirrors and tiles, which probably accentuates the harsher end of audio frequencies.” That kind of sound is probably more common in pubs from High Holborn in the west to St Pauls in the east, than elsewhere. First, pubs there have traditionally served a well-heeled crowd, so they’re often opulently fitted out. Second, the legal profession is well-represented in the area, and they’re likely to prefer Edwardian-era tiles and mirrors to stay just the way they are.

One day it’d be nice to have a decent-sized array of reference recordings from pubs all over London, even if it means growing a beer gut.

Ben Cripps has got himself an Olympus LS-10 digital recorder and has already shared several of his recordings with the London Sound Survey. In this one, a choppy Thames laps up against the steps leading into the river from Victoria Embankment:

The next recording of Ben’s captures a sound many of us might hear several times a week, yet not register as part of life in the capital. It’s of the squealing, grinding noise inside the carriage of a train making its way slowly from City Thameslink station to Farringdon.

Those really are typical sounds of several routes in central London where the trains crawl along at little more than walking pace. They’re bound up with the ugly backs of buildings creeping past, the railway’s archaic hinterland of iron girders and brick-built huts which can be studied in detail, the impersonal fact of London. Que sera, sera.

Categories: Site news

Bleak House and Babbage's library of sound

Posted by IMR on 15 December 2009

CHARLES DICKENS’ ACUTE sensitivity to the dramatic uses of sound makes his novels a good source of auditory descriptions of 19th century London. John M. Picker’s scholarly book Victorian Soundscapes scrutinises the sounds in Dombey and Son, and it’s particularly interesting to learn how Dickens was influenced by the thinking of Charles Babbage, famous for designing early mechanical computers.

Babbage believed that every sound ever made lived on in the atmosphere, weakening without disappearing. In 1837 he wrote:

Dombey and Son was published in the late 1840s, and the influence of Babbage’s ideas can also be discerned in Bleak House, published a few years later. Characters in the novel often speak in whispers, and in one passage ‘ghosts of sound’ threaten to intrude after whispering has lowered the threshold of perception:

Bleak House‘s environment of whispers and silences is largely an indoor one. But sometimes London itself approaches silence, even though its perpetual hum is not entirely absent:

Another urban sound of the 19th century punctures the relative quiet of night:

A now-vanished sound associated with road traffic is described when Ada, Esther and Richard cross the boundary between London and the countryside:

Bells on horses’ harnesses had a long history before the Victorian era. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written towards the end of the 14th century, the pleasure-loving Monk has them as a sign of affluence:

‘Jingling’ and ‘jingle’ are also among the most common sound-related words in Bleak House, associated with everyday actions and hospitality, warding off for a while the ghosts in the library of sound.

Categories: Historical sounds

Some field recording tips

Posted by IMR on 13 December 2009

THIS IS REALLY only a list of things that I try to remind myself of from time to time. There’s no technical tips among them, because you can find plenty of those elsewhere on the internet, written by better-qualified people.

1. Whatever you do with your recordings, organise them well from the outset.

2. Don’t take it for granted that your recording will cause the listener to share the same feelings you had when you were there making it.

3. Take time with editing and experiment with different selections from the same recording. Say you record a three-quarter-hour ‘sound walk’ – what’s the best two or three minutes?

4. Be aware of your own geographical routines and habits, and come up with ways to step outside them. Study maps and consider arbitrary schemes to get you to go to places you otherwise wouldn’t visit.

5. Building up mental categories for different kinds of sounds and their environments makes it easier to think of new subjects to record.

6. Some of the best field recordists have the advantage of a musical background. But if you’re like me, and only ever got the triangle in the school band, you can find other ways to approach sound. Recordings can be imagined as telling fragments of stories, or providing the atmospheric soundtrack to a film.

7. As Woody Allen once said, 80% of success lies in turning up. Go out and start recording. Don’t worry about not having some £2,000 digital field recorder. If you earmark an afternoon for field recording, and the first hour or two is disappointing, don’t give up. You never know what you might come across next.

Categories:

Out and about

Posted by IMR on 13 December 2009

SATURDAY JUST GONE found plenty of people in the city centre making music. Oxford Street was of course a human log-jam, but the sounds of a steel band had me quickening my pace to find their origin. In a pedestrianised side street near the House of Fraser, the Ebony steel band were playing to a large crowd doubtless grateful to jump off the shopping treadmill for a brief while:

Ebony also appear on a recording made at the 2008 Notting Hill Carnival. They’re one of around five steel bands performing from lorries trundling along Ladbroke Grove at the Jouvert parade held early on the first morning of the Carnival. In the early evening, I headed down to Trafalgar Square to see what the Climate Camp people were up to, but they weren’t doing a lot. A few individuals stood quietly around a brazier warming themselves and gazing into its fiery interior. But a few yards to the north a crowd was gathering to hear the London City Mission’s carol service:

There was less luck in other places. The Winter Wonderland funfair in Hyde Park, while looking far superior to most other fairs, didn’t offer many surprises. Yes, there was a man in the Bavarian village enclave dressed as a Tyrolean peasant, playing David Hasselhof songs on a synth, but you don’t want to hear that, do you? The ice rink turned to slush any hopes of making recordings with a strong stereo wow factor from skaters hurtling about. Most people made their way around the ice cautiously and without much noise. A Greek kebab house in Green Lanes, visited later at night, somehow produced a recording where the stereo image sounded all wrong, creating a sense of uncomfortable pressure when listened to over headphones.

The subways around Charing Cross station have all kinds of curious shops, including a wonderful-looking one for stage magicians. They also attract beggars and buskers. Something about the style of a woman playing a saxophone held the attention – no tune that I recognised, more an extended improvisation with a lot of abrupt stops to draw breath. She was hesitant when, having stopped playing, a few people offered her coins, and there was no hat or instrument case to collect money. Perhaps she was just looking for somewhere to jam without neighbours banging on the walls, absorbed in her playing and as far from the world as Chekhov’s bishop:

Categories: Site news

London Sound Survey on Lost Steps/Resonance FM

Posted by IMR on 10 December 2009

LAST MONDAY I was invited into the Resonance FM studios to talk about London Sound Survey for the weekly Lost Steps program. Nick Hamilton and Malcolm Hopkins, the producer and presenter, couldn’t have been better hosts. The program will be broadcast in February 2010, and I’ll bung up a reminder here nearer the date.

When Nick Hamilton got in touch by email, he included a link to the Lost Steps website. Here’s the succinct description of Lost Steps from the home page:

At the time of writing this, there’s twelve half-hour broadcasts to listen to on the site, and I’m still working through them. They are fascinating – much better than anything you’ll hear about London on any of the BBC or commercial radio stations. Here are just a few: Andrew Whitehead on classic London literature; Niall McDevitt on William Blake’s London; Kevin Pearce on London’s obscure and transient music scenes; Matt Hayes, publisher of the magazine Smoke: A London Peculiar; Clive Bloom on the Tottenham Outrage of 1909; and John Constable on the Crossbones prostitutes’ graveyard in Southwark.

Nick also has more radio work on his semi-detached website, including a great series of broadcasts made in and around Hackney titled Foot & Mouth. Malcolm is manager of Housman’s bookshop, one of the few remaining independent bookshops in London and (in my opinion) one of only three good things left on the whole of Caledonian Road in north London, the others being KC Continental Foods and The Den pub.

Categories:

VE Day celebrations and a tram's final journey to New Cross

Posted by IMR on 02 December 2009

TWO MORE REFERENCES to London sounds from around the middle of the twentieth century. First, the diarist James Lee-Milne’s record of the VE day celebrations in Piccadilly:

It’d be interesting to find more eyewitness accounts and see how they compare. The second reference is a great piece of descriptive journalism from George Gale about the last run of the Woolwich to New Cross tram in 1952:

Categories:

Some auditory curiosities

Posted by IMR on 30 November 2009

THE WEBSITE OF the Acoustic Ecology Institute is always worth checking up on, and recently there appeared a couple of interesting links about singing sands. There’s this scholarly take on the phenomenon, and a more artistic approach. Both have sound recordings you can listen to of the eerie humming and droning sometimes made by sand dunes.

There aren’t nearly as many auditory illusions as optical ones. Perhaps that’s because visual experiments are easier to devise and implement than auditory ones, or because the brain devotes more computational clout to vision than to hearing. Anyway, this page features Risset tones, an auditory equivalent to the famous Escher drawing of the never-ending staircase.

When parrots mimic a human voice, the underlying acoustics are similar to sine-wave speech. Matt Davis of the Medical Research Council describes sine-wave speech as a form of abrupt perceptual ‘pop out’, where successful perception of an impoverished signal depends on top-down knowledge. It’s like those 3D posters that were popular some years ago, and for which you had to go cross-eyed to enjoy properly. It helped once you knew what the hidden object was, and you either got it or you didn’t.

Categories: General audio

Ding dong merrily on high

Posted by IMR on 28 November 2009

. . . THE CASH TILLS they are ringing! Most of the one-to-many sound actions in London aim either to manage people’s movements or get their money off them somehow. With the West End now stuffed full of Christmas shoppers, this afternoon seemed like a good time to try to capture some more examples of the latter.

One product demonstrator working in Hamley’s toy shop was getting a bit carried away showing off a tiny remote-controlled helicopter:

Back outside in Regent Street, a small troop of Hare Krishna devotees were providing free entertainment for the masses:

A peaked woolly hat, like that sported by Radar from M*A*S*H, had made it possible to secure two Shure WL-183 mics in the vital just-before-the-ears recording position. The hat material and weave makes it fairly transparent acoustically, and the peak prevents the bulges of the concealed mics from being noticeable.

I’m a big fan of the Sonic Studios DSM mics in their supplied windshield, but there are some situations where wearing them on your head looks a bit strange. Last week I’d tried having them round my neck for making recordings at the Charlton Athletic vs Bristol Rovers match, but it produced muffled results. That, and some mic clipping, meant a little stardust had to be sprinkled on the sound files courtesy of Magix Audio Cleaning Lab:

The name ‘Magix’ may bring to mind the cheesy photo software that often comes bundled with compact cameras, but don’t let that put you off. Audio Cleaning Lab is a capable program for the price of £30, and has some useful tools for declipping, noise removal and other tasks. Even better would be the high-end audio restoration program Izotope RX, only the ‘advanced’ version costs nearly £800. Dear Santa, I have tried to be good this year.

Categories: Field recording Recording equipment

Two great sound references from 'History is Made at Night'

Posted by IMR on 26 November 2009

IF YOU’VE FOLLOWED the link on this site to Transpontine, easily among the best London blogs, you’ll also enjoy reading another one by the same man: History is Made at Night. Keeping two good blogs going at once shows an enviable work ethic.

I read Transpontine a lot for local history and news around south-east London. History is Made at Night has more in-depth articles on music and politics in the tradition of ‘history from below’, and one recent post kindly offered a couple of fine sound references for inclusion in the historical section here. The first is from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, first published in 1925 and set immediately after the First World War:

The optimistic sense of the city imparting energy and life through its sounds, and not simply disorienting or overwhelming the listener, has earlier echoes in works by other authors, as with this short excerpt from Anthony Trollope’s The Three Clerks, published in 1858:

The second reference also conveys liveliness, and is taken from Geoffrey Fletcher’s 1962 city guide The London Nobody Knows:

On the strength of that extract The London Nobody Knows comes across as more engaging than some other books which also claimed to provide insights into the city of the 1960s, such as Colin MacInnes’s London, City of Any Dream and Hunter Davies’s The New London Spy. Lots of people evidently did know the London that Fletcher was describing, but the assumption of those times was usually that the readership would never overlap with the people being written about.

Categories: Historical sounds

Golden days of the rag-and-bone men

Posted by IMR on 17 November 2009

RECENTLY FOUND A selection of letters from The Guardian newspaper dated June 2007, on the subject of rag-and-bone men. David Collins from Kidderminster wrote:

David Stanners from London had fond memories:

The radio comedy show Band Waggon ran from 1938 to 1940, and it appears that the character was either called Syd Walker or was played by Syd Walker. Anyway, he made it onto the front of Radio Times, and looks the double of Mel Smith:

A rag-and-bone man or ‘totter’ used to patrol the West End streets near where I lived as a child. The last drawn-out syllable of his cry sounded pure and remote to fresh young ears: rag and b-o-o-o-o-ne; an elegy that seemed to come from a great distance through quiet Sunday streets.

Someone on a web forum elsewhere thinks there’s a rag-and-bone man still occasionally raising his cry around Sutton in south London, so any information or accounts of hearings would be gratefully received.

Categories: Historical sounds

Look who's come to Pinner

Posted by IMR on 15 November 2009

CONTRARY TO LONDON’S stereotype as a grey Limbo of wailing sirens, many of the city’s inhabitants live the suburban life in the twenty outer boroughs, serenaded by birdsong, ice cream vans and jet airliners.

Pinner is an attractive and prosperous suburb in north-west London. The bells of St John the Baptist were summoning a respectable-sized congregation at eleven o’clock this morning, but I wasn’t near enough to record them well. Here they are striking noon:

The Roman Catholic church nearby also set its single bell tolling, whilst all was silent at the Christian Science reading room on Elm Park Road. Inside the Queen’s Head pub on the High Street, there was a busy hubbub from men chatting at the bar and families eating their Sunday dinner:

The six foot-wide River Pinn has to sneak through and under the centre of Pinner, its tawny, guttural water boxed into a concrete culvert. In the fields to the east it flows as a clear stream over gravel:

Categories: Field recording

Jive at the Paramount Ballroom, 1947

Posted by IMR on 12 November 2009

‘THE HEP-CATS ARE at it, the jive is on, they’re in a groove.’ That’s how it was at the Paramount Ballroom in Tottenham Court Road in 1947, described by William Sansom in the anthology The Public’s Progress, which also included contributions from Alistair Cooke and Mass Observation founder Tom Harrisson. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Later, he witnessed a jive competition:

Categories: Historical sounds

Doodlebugs

Posted by IMR on 11 November 2009

THE FIRST DOODLEBUG or V-1 rocket to land on London killed six people at Mile End in June 1944. Londoners soon became familiar with the loud clatter of their pulse jet engines as thousands more were aimed at the city. ‘Doodlebug’ had earlier been a slang term for a cheap car – one that spluttered and banged – and perhaps this in turn was derived from some general name for noisily-flying beetles such as maybugs.

The flying bombs appear in Winifred Vere Hodgson’s wartime diaries, published as Few Oranges and No Eggs and subtitled ‘A diary showing how unimportant people in London and Birmingham lived through the war years’. In July 1944 she recorded:

When the V-1’s onboard apparatus calculated that it had flown the required distance, the missile was pitched forward into a dive. This caused the jet to cut out. The brief silence that followed before the warhead’s detonation was listened to intently by Londoners. George Orwell made light of this in his regular ‘As I Please’ column in Tribune:

The sound of a V-1 kicked off an album by the 1970s punk band The Vibrators. Here’s just the doodlebug bit from it:

This morning another meaningful silence was observed across Britain to mark Armistice Day. A few years ago the artist Jonty Semper released a CD titled Kenotaphion, made up of all the recordings he could find of the two-minute silences between 1929 and 2000, a task which had taken him four years. The CD’s hard to get hold of now, but the link has three samples to listen to.

Categories: Historical sounds

Past sounds of Lambeth Walk and London Bridge station

Posted by IMR on 10 November 2009

TWO EXCELLENT DESCRIPTIONS gleaned recently of early twentieth-century London sounds from the reformer Maud Pember Reeves and the writer V.S. Pritchett.

Pember Reeves was a Fabian socialist and co-author of the 1913 social investigation Round About a Pound a Week, which revealed to its readers the lives led by working-class women in Lambeth Walk. Here she describes the now-vanished auditory scene of children’s games in the street:

V.S. Pritchett wrote the autobiographical A Cab at the Door in 1968, and from it comes this lyrical passage about the cries of station porters at London Bridge, around the time of the First World War:

Categories: Historical sounds

A beautiful recording made with skill (and expensive mics)

Posted by IMR on 09 November 2009

ONE OF THE good things about field recording is that you can get some capable kit together for less than the price of a consumer dSLR camera. But does splashing out big bucks on top-of-the-range gear make a difference? Unfortunately yes.

Unlike expensive hifi equipment, mics and recorders are usually designed to be tools ahead of any function as status symbols. Higher costs should predict performance improvements that you can actually hear. Months ago I came across a nature recording of wonderful clarity on the God’s Own Clay website. It was made by Romilly Hambling with a pair of borrowed Sennheiser MKH20 omindirectional mics. New they’re at least £1,100 each. Romilly has kindly allowed London Sound Survey to feature it:

Here’s the recording’s original page. The first impression on hearing it over a pair of £50 computer speakers was like a window opened straight onto the scene.

In his email Romilly writes: “I’ve always marveled at that recording and wondered whether it was the acoustics of the location or the mics that did it (both probably).” Plus the kind of situational awareness which good recordists surely develop through patience and a love of the subject.

Categories: Recording equipment Wildlife

Sounds of the Chislehurst underworld

Posted by IMR on 06 November 2009

AMONG THE GENTLE folds and rucks of the chalk hills to the south of London are the Chislehurst caves. They were first burrowed by Stone Age people seeking flints, so although all subterranean places somehow feel ancient, these caves really are old.

20th-century uses included an ammo dump, a mushroom farm, and an air raid shelter holding up to 2,000 people during the V-weapon raids. But in the post-war period the tunnels and passageways had a sound-related role. Dr Eric Inman’s pamphlet Chislehurst Caves: A Short History explains:

Those must have been memorable gigs. In the early 1970s the caves also hosted shows by Radio Caroline DJs, which set off the someone’s-having-fun alarm at the Ministry for British Dullness:

The caves are open once more as a visitor attraction, and the adult ticket price of £5 for a guided tour is great value. The official website is here, with details of opening times and how to get there.

This morning I was fed up with the constant intrusion of aircraft noise, which had made difficult the previous evening’s recording of Guy Fawkes night. The caves held out the promise of a certain purity of sound. Here’s a recording of water dripping from a seventy-foot shaft to the surface, where it begins beneath someone’s garden pond:

At one point in the tour the guide whacks an old metal junction box with a length of pipe. The resulting crash is shockingly loud and it reverberates for several seconds through the network of tunnels, becoming deeper and fainter. It was just too much for the mic though, so I’ll have to try again another day.

Categories: Field recording

London Sound Survey on YouTube

Posted by IMR on 05 November 2009

THE SECOND LARGEST search engine after Google is YouTube. It seemed like a good idea therefore to set up a London Sound Survey YouTube channel and begin turning the 400-odd recordings here into simple videos. Here’s an example, and you can see how the sound analysis program Syrinx has been pressed into service making spectrograms for each one:

So far there’s only about three dozen videos, and it takes a while rendering them, but hopefully the arrival of a new computer next week should speed things up a lot. If you’ve come here from YouTube, hello and welcome!

Categories: Site news

Genghis Attenborough rides again

Posted by IMR on 02 November 2009

OFFERS OF MONEY and the lifestyle of a Mediterranean playboy are all well and good, but what London Sound Survey really craves is your sound recordings. You can send them easily via the Soundcloud DropBox.

So getting three sound files last weekend from recordist Stuart Fisher (or Genghis Attenborough as he’s known elsewhere) was like Christmas coming early. The wildlife section here wouldn’t exist without Stuart’s work, and among the three is this superb recording of a blackbird’s alarm calls:

The train lines spanning bridges and viaducts all around Waterloo station dominate the surroundings with the rumblings of their cargoes and the squealing and grinding of wheels. This recording captures the feel of the area:

Remember your first cigarette (cough!), your first kiss (smack!) or your first broken heart (crack!)? They probably happened in an alleyway. These overlooked little lanes are like the city’s lymph system, and whether surburban or in the city centre, they have their own distinctive auditory scenes. Stuart’s recording from one near Manor Park brings to mind the smell of damp earth and vegetation:

Categories: Site news

Kenneth Williams and the Mayor of Garratt

Posted by IMR on 30 October 2009

AMONG THE CHAOS swarming off the pages of Clive Bloom’s excellent book Violent London: 2,000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, there’s a few sentences ending in exclamation marks. You get the sense Bloom thinks London’s a bit dull these days, and he’d very much like to swap his professorial chair for a ringside seat at some of the spectacles described in his book. For example:

The oath was part of the 18th-century mock election of the Mayor of Garratt, a ‘dusty and neglected heap of cottages between Wandsworth and Tooting’. Despite the obscure surroundings, the mock elections attracted huge crowds and an anti-authority, carnival atmosphere took hold. Candidates had to swear to the following roll-call of smutty innuendo:

This blog touched on the subject of ordinary people mocking high-falutin’ speechification in an earlier post about fairground barkers, so it’s good to find more examples. There’s a present-day echo in the Up Helly Aa festivals held in Lerwick and elsewhere in the Shetlands, and they start with annual proclamations filled with local in-jokes and unflattering remarks about island worthies. The proclamations also appear as printed banners, and this one in PDF form comes from 2009.

Back on track with the theme of smut, there’s a good example of a pompous lecture being sent up in one of the later Carry On films, the underrated Carry On Behind made in 1975. It begins straight after the opening credits, and has Kenneth Williams as Professor Crump making a mess of the proceedings. The setting’s closer to home than the Shetlands, but a gap of thirty-four years makes it seem like another world:

Categories:

When smashing windows is a sound action

Posted by IMR on 26 October 2009

THE OTHER DAY I watched some workmen smash in the old windows of a block of flats they were gutting and renovating. They looked like they were enjoying themselves. Here’s a short clip of a window being broken from a sound effects library:

The spectrogram shows an interactive cascade of at least thirty discernible impacts as individual glass shards and fragments hit the ground and each other.

When the noise is part of the motivation, breaking windows becomes a sound action. In Clive Bloom’s excellent book Violent London: 2,000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, there’s an example quoted from the East Ham Echo describing an anti-German riot during the First World War:

A few years earlier in 1910, Suffragettes launched a major window-smashing campaign in central London as a response to Parliament’s refusal to extend the vote to women. Emmeline Pankhurst wrote in her diary:

The Daily Mail reported breathlessly:

Many of the frequencies produced by breaking glass are highly directional and pull attention immediately to where the action is happening. It can’t be ignored and the message is: Now we can do this.

Categories:

Fun with spectral analysis

Posted by IMR on 20 October 2009

SPECTROGRAMS ARE A great way to visualise sound. Laid low by the Dreaded Lurgi, I’ve been trying out different freeware and shareware programs at home. My computer is barely an advance on the abacus, so a compact program using scant resources is what’s needed.

Luckily Dr John Burt at the University of Washington has written Syrinx, which works a treat. Here are a couple of examples of its output. First, a snippet of song from a robin recorded in Lesnes Abbey Woods in south-east London:

You can switch between black-on-white and white-on-black – I’ve gone with the latter as an outreach attempt for the emo generation. Next, a street trader’s cry from Lewisham market:

Many people are familiar with the appearance of amplitude envelopes, but spectrograms convey more information. Somehow their snowdrifts of noise and painterly scrapings seem a much better analogue for the experience of hearing.

Categories:

Catford night life

Posted by IMR on 14 October 2009

A COLD, MECHANICAL clicking comes briefly from the bat detector’s built-in speaker. Could that really be an animal? Perhaps it’s something to do with the points on the nearby railway line. Then the signal is gone and the static surges back. I am standing on an unlit and overgrown path which runs alongside the Ravensbourne river in Catford.

On the previous evening I’d joined a London Wildlife Trust bat walk at their nature reserve off Sydenham Hill, but the star performers didn’t turn up. Tonight things go better. The bat flies back along the path, and so I make my first ever bat recording – a moment of pure pleasure. Here’s what the sonar of the Common Pipistrelle sounds like once it’s brought from its secret spirit world around 45 kilohertz to within the range of human hearing:

In my excitement I forgot to check the recording levels until near the end, and the background noise is high. But hopefully you’ll enjoy it anyway, and many thanks to Cheryl Tipp for lending me her bat detector.

Categories: Wildlife

Read all about it

Posted by IMR on 12 October 2009

SO THAT WAS the last paid-for Evening Standard yesterday, and with it the end of a little London tradition of newspaper sellers shouting out the title or edition of the paper. Why bother when the papers are free? The existing freesheet distributors don’t make a lot of noise, the bolder ones preferring just to shove a copy under your nose. The cry of West End fiiii-nelll! will go the same way as Starnoostanerrrd!, heard back in the days when London had three different evening papers.

Here’s a short recording I made last year of a newspaper seller outside Whitechapel tube station:

Lively evening paper traditions existed elsewhere in Britain too. Glasgow also enjoyed the attentions of three evening papers in the 1960s, and maybe the competition encouraged a culture of sellers’ cries. Some older Glaswegian friends remembered one seller in particular, a far-gone alcoholic who’d only held onto his pitch thanks to a family connection. He’d always croak Terrible tragedy! Terrible tragedy! – it didn’t matter what the headline was.

There were still plenty of very vocal paper sellers there in the 1980s. One man of barrel-like build had a pitch for the Daily Record in the city centre, and his cry was incubated in some internal Hades of pies and cigarette fumes before bursting to the surface as a baritone Deee-leee-ahhh Reh-caird! You could hear him streets away.

Because the appearance of the city gets a lot more attention than its sounds, the newspaper seller’s cry will probably have a lingering afterlife in films and TV dramas set in present-day London, without being recognised as dated.

Categories: Vanishing sounds

Gone to budgery

Posted by IMR on 09 October 2009

IT’S NOW OPEN season on ring-necked and monk parakeets, thanks to a decision by the Natural England quango. In practice this probably won’t be as apocalyptic as some people expect. Under the same regulations crows and magpies can be shot if they’re causing damage to crops, and there’s no shortage of them.

While free-living parakeets muscle in on suburban London’s auditory scene with their urgent squawking, another member of the parrot family is in unremarked decline. Budgerigars were first brought to Britain from Australia in the early 19th century, and their popularity rose dramatically in the first half of the following century. By the 1950s it was estimated that around four million were kept as pets, eclipsing other cage birds such as finches and canaries. Into the summers of the 1970s their calls could often be heard in the street as living-room windows were opened and cages placed on ledges and verandas.

Perhaps part of the widespread appeal of budgies to ordinary English people lay in those qualities which mirrored our preferred self-image. They weren’t graceful birds or melodious singers, but they were homely, busy and chatty. Budgies were like Tolkein’s idealised portrait of the English as hobbits with their stocky little bodies, brisk movements and impression of perseverance. Or, as the common complaint went, they never bloody shut up.

The budgie cult reached a peak in 1958 when the Newcastle-bred Sparkie Williams won an international talking bird contest with his repertoire of nursery rhymes and hundreds of words. The remaining four years of his life were filled with media appearances and solitary millet binges, and Parlophone released a record of his utterances with an orchestral backing. This website loads a recording of the B-side.

Nowadays budgies number less than one-and-a-half million in Britain and their popularity seems to have fallen even faster in London. It’s rare to hear the chatter of budgies from someone’s house or flat. They’re from a time when people looked towards small and familiar things to find consolation.

Categories: Vanishing sounds

The Dukes of Hackney

Posted by IMR on 08 October 2009

WORD REACHES LONDON Sound Survey that someone in east London has fitted a multitone horn to their car and is treating Stratford and Clapton residents to blasts of ‘Old Dixie’. That’s the twelve-note tune emitted by ‘General Lee’ in The Dukes of Hazzard, although its London counterpart probably isn’t as impressive-looking.

Multitone car horns that could play tunes were outlawed in Britain in 1973. Two very common tunes up till then were the first eight notes of ‘Colonel Bogey’ and the first ten of ‘La Cucuracha’.  But they can still be bought online in this country and, like cannabis seeds, they seem to occupy the curious legal position of being okay to sell, but not okay to do anything with.

This commercial website has twenty different set-ups for sale, with recordings of each one to listen to. They all sound pretty irritating, and there’s no ‘Colonel Bogey’. If you fancy yourself as a bad boy, you can get a set of horns which plays the theme from ‘The Godfather’.

Categories:

Birds and police whistles

Posted by IMR on 29 September 2009

THE OMNIPRESENT GROWL of city traffic is mostly made up of low-frequency sounds. In response, some birds living in built-up areas have begun adapting their behaviour by putting more effort into the higher-frequency parts of their songs, so they can make themselves heard better. I wondered whether any human noise-making technologies had undergone similar changes in response to traffic noise.

So I emailed Acme Whistles of Birmingham. How could you not want to know more about a firm with a great name like that? They began making whistles in the mid-1880s, with the Metropolitan Police as their first customers. London policemen had been using whistles in a haphazard way since the 1820s as an alternative to cumbersome wooden rattles, but whistle-tootling tests on Clapham Common were carried out in the 1880s, and the Acme product became standard issue. Were whistles back then lower in pitch than those made today? Simon Topman replied:

The only real effect of traffic noise on police whistles was that it contributed to them being abandoned nearly altogether by the 1970s. This Daily Mail article from May 2009 reports on their modest comeback in Falmouth. But they also persisted in one specialised corner of London policing.

Motorbike riders of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Escort Group use whistles to clear the way ahead as they escort the Royal Family and visiting heads of state around London. The Wikipedia entry for them states that whistles are used to “reduce the level of noise that precedes an escort and reduces the environmental impact on the escorted person and general public.”

All well and good, but if you’ve ever seen and heard the Royal motorcade heading through London, the blowing of the whistles somehow adds to the impression of sleek and understated prestige, and that probably isn’t accidental either.

Categories:

Weird for sound

Posted by IMR on 23 September 2009

HEADLESS CAVALIERS MAY lure ghosthunters to dine on Knorr soup in draughty hotels, but auditory apparations seem rarer than visual ones.

In April 1665, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary:

This was a false alarm. No such battle occurred until June that year off Lowestoft. Then, Londoners in boats on the Thames (doubtless quieter than the city’s streets) scored a perceptual hit by correctly detecting the sounds of distant gunfire.

Rumblings of less certain origin formed the legend of Francis Drake’s drum, whose disembodied beating Plymouth people claimed to have heard during times of conflict. Occasions included Napoleon’s arrival at the city’s harbour as a prisoner in 1815, the outbreak of the First World War, the evacuation of Dunkirk, and the start of the Falklands War.

Other legends of portentous sounds have much older beginnings. Edric the Wild was a Saxon nobleman from Shropshire who appeared in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1067: ‘he fought with the castlemen at Hereford, and did them much harm’. He didn’t win, but at least he lived up to his name. The story of his resistance to the Normans was popular in the county and became the root of local myths lasting into the 19th century. The folklorist Jacqueline Simpson relates an account by a Miss Burne:

Above ground, some auditory apparations had more ominous meanings. Jabez Allies, a 19th century writer, recorded the legend of the Seven Whistlers in Antiquities and Folklore of Worcestershire:

Allies guessed the legend’s likely origins:

London seems to lack tales of supernatural sounds. We don’t even have a Screaming Skull of our own. Maybe the city’s population has grown and shifted too fast for such stories to last long.

Categories:

How Islington sounded in the 1950s

Posted by IMR on 17 September 2009

WANT TO KNOW how London sounded forty or fifty years ago? Go and ask someone who remembers. Here, my old friend Martin speaks in his own entertaining style about the sounds of Islington from the 1950s and 1960s, where he grew up in a tenement near the Angel.

Among other things, he recalls a quack doctor in Chapel market, accordion players, the sounds of fights from a rough pub called the Scotch House, kids’ street games, travelling knife grinders and lots more. It’s about ten minutes long, edited down from a half hour interview:

Categories:

Noisy streets of London

Posted by IMR on 10 September 2009

LAST MAY THE Times ran an article about new EU rules in the pipeline for electric vehicles, requiring them to be fitted with engine noise simulators so they don’t run over blind pedestrians or the unwary. Smurf cars plus Brussels made an irresistible target for Clarkson:

This is reasonable enough for cars moving swiftly and at constant speed on motorways, but electric cars really do seem quieter in urban settings. Milk floats weren’t battery-powered on a whim. Even so, road surfaces add to the inescapable auditory fog of traffic in cities. There’s a trade-off among different grades of tarmac between surface noise and grip.

What were road surfaces like a hundred years ago and how noisy were they? Most people might guess they were entirely made up of cobblestones, like the ones which survive in Little Green Street in Kentish Town and a few other places. Not so – road types in the capital were so varied that Bartholomew published a Road Surface Map for 1909, with a later edition for 1929. Here’s a bit from the 1909 one:

You can see a much bigger section among London Sound Survey’s Historical pages. Don’t say we don’t treat you! The colour-coding is: blue for granite setts (small blocks) or cobbles; green, asphalt; pink, macadam (hard to make out and the least common surface type); and lastly yellow for wood. 

Granite setts and cobbles were often described as noisy beneath traffic. Wealthy residential neighbourhoods in the 19th century had their cobbled streets watered to reduce the racket of hooves and iron-rimmed wheels. Wooden block paving was, for a while, held up as the way forward in being quieter and cleaner. This was helped by the import of Australian hardwoods and better wood preservation methods.

Every city is a work in progress and the Road Surface Map shows this for London, with cobbles and setts being replaced by newer surfaces. You can see how this happened sooner in high-status areas away from industry. Road surface noise alone would have helped you guess what class of neighbourhood you were in.

Categories:

Doves from above

Posted by IMR on 08 September 2009

A TRIP TO Rainham Marshes last Sunday nearly came to nothing until two collared doves began calling among the overhead power-lines at Rainham station while I waited for the train home. The wing flapping towards the end is them getting it on above the destination board.

Bill Oddie won’t be losing any sleep over that recording, but it felt like a small reward for trudging around all day. You never know what’s round the corner.

If anyone would care to donate the use of a nice drawing of a collared dove, please get in touch. Collared doves only became established in Britain in the 1950s, so they don’t appear among the pictures in those old out-of-copyright ornithological books.

Categories:

London Sound Survey on Radio 4

Posted by IMR on 07 September 2009

WELCOME TO ANY Radio 4 listeners who may be visiting after the brief interview with me aired last Sunday morning. I’d never done a radio interview before, but luckily the journalist Alex Bushill edited out all the er er I mean um bits. Here’s a link to it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8236000.stm

Categories: Site news

Small is beautiful (but big is useful)

Posted by IMR on 02 September 2009

APOLOGIES FOR A slight dearth of blog posts lately. In the background London Sound Survey has been furtively growing, meaning larger text and wider pages. Here’s the Sound actions page in its new form, and you can click on the Deptford Car Auction recording link to see the player loaded.

The player will be stretched a little to fit the new column width, but that has to be left until the very last. Hope you like the new format, and it should all be ready some time next week. Any feedback is very welcome.

Categories: Site news

Thames and Docklands dates for the diary

Posted by IMR on 25 August 2009

TWO EVENTS OF special interest to those of you into London history and sound are coming up on Friday 4th September as part of the Canary Wharf Film Festival.

The Museum of London Docklands is putting on a series of short films about the docks-that-were, including Basil Wright’s 1951 lyric documentary Waters of Time. Just before that, in the same place, is Listen: A Soundtrack of Shared Memories, a project involving youngsters and ex-Port of London Authority workers with a strong emphasis on sound, sound editing and oral history.

Then on the 12th and 13th of September is the Mayor’s Thames Festival. No, not Boris Johnson going for a swim and being mistaken for yet another disoriented whale, but a range of events including fireworks displays and a pageant of boats. Maybe reminiscent of the Croatian wave-powered Sea Organ will be a performance of Flood Tide on the 12th starting at 2pm. It’s a ‘musical composition generated by tidal flow . . . achieved by placing a sensor in the water which reads the speed of the current’, and will performed by forty musicians.

Categories: Arts projects

New wildlife section

Posted by IMR on 23 August 2009

REGULAR VISITORS TO London Sound Survey may have noticed a new addition to the site in the form of a wildlife section. At the moment, almost all of the recordings are by xeno canto recordist Stuart Fisher, and are reproduced here under the terms of their original Creative Commons license. The dedication and patience of wildlife sound recordists is always impressive. Sounds in the human world are often laid on for you. Not so with animals.

Two recent attempts of mine to record wildlife sounds didn’t go well. The other morning I was up at around half past four to record birdsong in the local park. Instead of the tranquil scene hoped for, someone had heaped a large bonfire of sticks and rubbish against the back of a wooden garden fence, then set it alight. Not a soul was present except for a dog fox warming himself a few feet from the blaze. He looked round slowly at me and then back at the fire. It all felt dreamlike and puzzling until some aerosol cans in the bonfire began exploding. I slouched off home grumbling and called the Fire Brigade.

Today, I tried my luck at the Leg o’ Mutton reservoir in south-west London, recommended by the RSPB as a good spot for bird-watching. Bird-watching maybe, but not good for bird-recording, as it lies directly under the busiest flightpath into Heathrow. Of course, a quick look at the Sound grid would have confirmed this before setting off. Dear oh dear.

Categories: Site news

The Elephant and the Submarine

Posted by IMR on 19 August 2009

WILL MONTGOMERY IS a south London-based electronic musician with an interest in field recording. His Selvageflame website contains details of his releases and provides links to some of his compositions, which I like and think you ought to hear.

Of particular interest are two projects of his rooted in south London. First, Will’s explorations of the sounds and spaces of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, one of a kind as shopping centres go. It starts here with a quote from Dickens describing the fierce joy of Londoners looking forward to a public hanging in Southwark. The underlined words link to pop-up pages which play field recordings made in and around the centre: buskers in echoing subways, passing voices, a harsh hissing from the Faraday monument, and an unnerving, cicada-like sound – what could it be? His article extract succinctly explains the background of the project.

Second, a composition made with sounds Will recorded when he gained access to an odd-looking structure housing the underground boiler room for a housing estate. Local people call it the Camberwell Submarine, and the picture below comes courtesy of urban75’s extensive online collection of London photographs:

The piece is entitled Submarine. Turn the lights down, close your eyes, and listen.

Categories:

These are the warning sounds

Posted by IMR on 11 August 2009

IT’S NOT EASY to think of many current examples around London of sounds used to convey information over long distances. Even police sirens, which can be heard from far away, are really only designed to get traffic shifting on the road ahead. Unlike Edinburgh, there’s no one o’clock gun in London either. Many thanks, then, to Andrew Pollard for allowing London Sound Survey to include the soundtracks of two of his YouTube videos of working sirens.

First, the regular Monday morning test of the sirens at Broadmoor maximum security mental hospital in Berkshire, which can be heard over a wide area:

Next, a recording of a routine test of the flood siren warning system at Canvey Island in Essex:

This siren sound may not be around for ever. Proposals have been put forward for the sirens to be scrapped and replaced with radio broadcasts and mass text messaging. Does this really inspire confidence? Fifty-eight people died when the island was flooded in 1953.

Sometimes, typically during spring tides, a siren on the Thames Flood Barrier sounds a continuous tone to warn boats when the flood gates are about to be raised into position. But there can be very few working sirens left in or near London. Gone are the small electric and hand-cranked machines used in the docks when ships entered and left.

Gone too are the air raid sirens first installed in a hurry before the Second World War. (The 1936 film Things to Come doesn’t feature them in its depiction of the aerial bombing of ‘Everytown’.) The network of sirens was maintained throughout the Cold War, and this 1980 Protect and Survive public information film was produced to let people know what warning sounds to expect, with the help of some sound-to-light animation: 

How long would it have been between the attack warning and the fallout warning, perhaps half an hour? Doesn’t seem long to rush back to a pre-electric age of gongs and whistles.

Categories:

The whistling busker of St Paul's tube station

Posted by IMR on 09 August 2009

NEATLY TYING TOGETHER two themes explored in earlier posts – whistling and busking – is this sound bite which recordist James Huckle has very kindly uploaded to London Sound Survey:

It’s of a busker plying his trade in an unusual way at St Paul’s underground station. I spent my earliest years in central London, and so became familiar with all kinds of buskers, including accordionists, penny whistle players, guitarists, even the now-vanished one-man-bands that used to crop up from time to time.

(Someone once said that if you played a mouth organ and a guitar at the same time, you looked like Bob Dylan. But if you played a mouth organ, a guitar, and had cymbals attached to your knees, you looked like a nutter.)

But I’ve never before heard a whistling busker. Do also check out James’s smart-looking website Digital sounds for some excellent recordings of vintage aircraft. Not only do they look great, but they sound great too. Personal favourite has to be the DH.88 Comet getting going. Also good for up-to-date news on the latest digital recording kit.

Categories: Public transport Street entertainers

Gypsy buskers on the Underground

Posted by IMR on 06 August 2009

AS A FOLLOW-UP to the Train Beggar post, here’s a recording made last November of a Romanian gypsy kid playing an accordion on a Northern line Underground train:

There were two boys, possibly brothers, making their slowly along the tube carriage. The older boy played the accordion and, as you can hear, he’s pretty good. The younger one, who couldn’t have been much older than ten, followed with an old tin can fixed to the end of stick to receive donations.

Categories: Public transport Street entertainers

The train beggar

Posted by IMR on 03 August 2009

YOU CAN SEE his pale, alert face through the connecting door windows as he swings quickly along the aisle towards your carriage. Some of the commuters glance up as he enters and slams the door. Then they fix their eyes back on their mobile phones and newspapers and books. They can guess what is going to happen now he’s taken the stage.

(He shrugs and puts on a hangdog smile of self-recognition.)

Beggars want to sell you a clean conscience and, like other advertisers, they have to create the need if you haven’t already got it. They also have to cut the risk of being physically attacked. The train beggar is one of the best at doing both these things. He works his reluctant audience on commuter trains running through Blackfriars station into south and south-east London, either just before or after rush hour, when the carriages aren’t too full to hinder movement, and never at night.

After a long absence, he resurfaced briefly some months ago with a refinement to his routine: an overdone stammer, making his pitch last twice as long as before. And then no sign of him since. Maybe dead, or scrubbed up, or carrying on as before somewhere else, the long hallway of doors closing behind him.

Categories: Beggars

1892: Grisly sounds in a London church

Posted by IMR on 23 July 2009

FROM AN ARTICLE in the London Daily News, dated November 1892:

Categories: Good old days

From the Crystal Palace to Bluewater

Posted by IMR on 22 July 2009

INSIDE THE CRYSTAL Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Charlotte Bronte heard the sound of the people in a state of oceanic calm:

Not everyone was impressed; Marx and Dostoevsky disdained what the Crystal Palace and its contents represented. Shopping centres are today’s Great Exhibitions and, as before, some people don’t like them. George A. Romero paid shoppers no compliments in his 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead, and parodied mall-muzak by repeating Herbert Chappell’s idiotically cheerful tune The Gonk. You can hear it on this YouTube video.

London’s shopping centres differ in their ambient sounds. The newish Westfield Centre in Shepherds Bush lays on live music of a polite kind, fresh-faced cello players and such like. The Elephant and Castle shopping centre is smaller and livelier, and once I was surprised to hear the bleating of sheep and goats. Animals from a city farm had been brought in for the day for children to look at. Nowhere seems to use piped music throughout the whole building; that’s old hat.

Bluewater, near Dartford, approaches the peace of Bronte’s Great Exhibition:

No announcements come over any tannoy and none of the shop units play loud music. Someone, somewhere, has decreed that nothing must overwhelm the reassuring hubbub of voices gathered beneath the skylights of Bluewater.

Categories: Commerce Crowds

The London Sound Survey kit bag

Posted by IMR on 15 July 2009

SOMEONE ASKED RECENTLY about what digital recorder to get, and this prompted a quick rummage around the London Sound Survey kit bag to see what’s inside.

The first recordings were made with an Olympus LS-10. It’s very nicely built, and reflects Olympus’s expertise in making other desirable consumer goods. It has excellent battery life too, an easy-to-read display, and an internal 2Gb memory as well as a slot for SD cards. But what it’s not got is good line-in sensitivity, which is important if you’re using external mics with an external pre-amp. Verdict: ideal for journalists and probably good for sneaking into gigs too.

After that came the Edirol R-09HR. Build quality and ergonomics aren’t as good as the Olympus. The screen is hard to read in daylight. It gobbles up batteries. But it’s got adequate line-in sensitivity, less hissy internal mic pre-amps, and better bass response. Verdict: a recorder with a good sound, but try not to drop it.

I use two sets of external mics with the little recorders described above. One is designed to be head-worn, the other can be adapted to the same end.

First up are the Sonic Studios DSM-6S/EH omnidirectional condenser mics, made by Leonard and Debbie Lombardo in the US. They’re designed to be worn on the head, recording in what Leonard calls ‘dimensional stereo’. They’re not placed in the ears, so don’t really count as binaural, but instead are mounted just forward of the ears. At extra cost you can get a combination windshield and headband, making the mics look like a pair of headphones, which is handy. They won’t work on the 9-volt plug-in power supplied by small recorders, so you have to buy one of their own powering options, such as the PA-3SX preamp. Altogether the Sonic Studios set-up does a great job in busy environments. However, the versatile DSM-6S/EH mics have a self-noise level which isn’t suitable for the very quietest auditory scenes. (Sonic Studios also make a different model, the DSM-1S/H, with lower self-noise.)

The second set of small mics is a pair of Shure WL-183s. These are omnidirectional condenser clip-on mics designed for use on stage, but they’re good for field recording and have won approval from nature recordists. They have a sensitivity of 10mV/Pa and, despite their compact size, a decent self-noise rating of 23dB. You can create recordings similar to the ‘dimensional stereo’ of the Sonic Studios mics by fixing one to each side of your head with a woolly hat or pair of specs. Not quite as discrete as the Sonic Studios mics, but they won’t draw much attention in many outdoor situations. However, you’ll have to wield a soldering iron to make the two mic leads converge onto a single stereo jack. This web page shows how to get the wiring right. You’ll need to buy two TA4M mini-XLR jacks; they’re stocked by Bryant Broadcast in Croydon and cost about a fiver each.

Two more recent acquisitions are an Audio-Technica BP4025 single-point X/Y stereo mic and a Fostex FR-2LE field recorder. The mic uses large-diaphragm capsules and so has a low self-noise of around 14dB and good sensitivity of 25mV/Pa. I haven’t used it much yet but results are so far promising. Hopefully it’ll come into its own with a new site section you’ll be seeing soon. The Fostex recorder is a professional bit of kit with excellent internal pre-amps and, as you’d expect, superior spec all round compared to the smaller and cheaper recorders. It’s not pocket-sized, and together with the Audio-Technica mic with its Rode windshield-blimp, can hardly be used discretely. But they can all fit inside a small sports bag, so it’s an easily portable set-up which can avoid attracting the attentions of light-fingered or grabbing Londoners while en route.

The Rode blimp does what it’s supposed to in reducing wind and handling noise, but the build quality somehow doesn’t match the price. It’s in a similar materials and quality control league as one of those daft paint-with-no-drips gadgets you can buy at B&Q. The alternative is to buy a very expensive Rycote blimp, or make your own, as per the guide on Martin Paling’s website; the latter option is worth investigating before the former. The Rode blimp has a screw fitting on the base of its pistol grip, and a Manfrotto 088 adaptor will enable you to fix it to any cheap camera tripod.

Looking across these different setups, there’s a fortunate relationship between the recording quality of the equipment used, and the constraints on size and discretion imposed by different kinds of environment. Small mics and recorders with their higher self-noise do just fine in busy situations with a lot of background racket, and the bigger mic and recorder are ideal for more tranquil settings where being noticeable isn’t a problem.

Categories: Recording equipment

Museum of Techno on Resonance 104.4FM

Posted by IMR on 13 July 2009

Just got an email from London Sound Survey contributor Dave Pape:

That’s tomorrow night as in Tuesday 14 July. 

Categories:

The decline of whistling

Posted by IMR on 07 July 2009

IN DENNIS POTTER’S drama series Pennies from Heaven, Bob Hoskins plays a hard-up sheet music seller. While on his rounds, he tries to enthuse a sceptical music shop owner:

When you did last hear anyone whistle a tune? Despite urgings from the Seven Dwarfs, tuneful whistling is on the way out.

Once, workplace whistling was common enough for some high-class establishments in London to put up signs forbidding tradesmen and staff from whistling. One can still be seen round the back of the Savoy hotel. The only people allowed or, in fact, expected to whistle were the doormen, who had the knack of putting two fingers in their mouths and blowing a very loud whistle to hail taxis.

Despite the disapproval of hotels and their guests, whistling had a popular image. It stood for cheerfulness and harmless self-amusement. Comedies and cartoons often had someone up to no good start whistling and looking innocent if they were about to be discovered. Before his 1975 hit The Last Farewell, the English singer-songwriter Roger Whittaker showed off his skills in songs like Irish Whistler and Mexican Whistler.

The entertainer and famous bird impersonator Percy Edwards, who died in 1996, was able to imitate the songs of hundreds of different bird species, mainly through whistling, and his example had many imitators. One old recording I came across recently is of the sounds of Smithfield meat market in 1993. The recordist noted that it was ‘initially spoilt by silly whistling from a porter’. That said, the porter does a pretty good take on Percy Edwards, even if he was meaning to conjure the spirit of a ‘dickybird’ rather than any particular species.

The decline of whistling is probably because most pop songs no longer have whistlable melodies and, perhaps, is also part of the general trend of public vocalisation shifting from lips and lungs and vocal cords working in real time, towards loudspeakers, recorded sound and voice synthesisers.

Teabreak teaser: How many pop songs can you think of which have whistling in them? Otis Redding’s Dock of the Bay is too easy, and Ennio Morricone film scores don’t count (sorry).

Categories:

Roll up, roll up

Posted by IMR on 01 July 2009

LIKE NEWSBOYS SHOUTING ‘Extra! Extra!’, the popular idea of the circus and fairground barker’s cry of ‘Roll up! Roll up!’ probably originates in Hollywood films. The travelling fairs which visit London these days have no barkers at all; even if they did, their voices would be lost in the din of happy hardcore thumping out of powerful fairground PA systems. Some ride operators add a few amplified words of their own to the music, but they try to copy the style of radio DJs.

To find an old-school barker, you might have go to Blackpool. Otherwise, a few fading memories linger on in popular culture. Fred Heatherton’s 1944 song I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts was first recorded by Danny Kaye, later by Monty Python, and finally appeared in the Disney film The Lion King:

From at least the end of the 18th century, fairground barkers’ patter often had the trick of using la-di-da language and pretend-formal delivery to mock and mimic the high-minded oratory of lecturers and other public speakers. This way the sideshow act could be passed off with a knowing wink as education rather than venal entertainment. The tradition passed into music hall and, as late as the 1970s, the BBC’s variety show The Good Old Days always began with Leonard Sachs addressing the audience:

Another echo is found among the dwindling band of Punch and Judy men, whose stage names begin with the title of ‘Professor’. One of the best examples from America of sideshow entertainment borrowing the clothes of earnest social concern comes from Daniel P. Mannix’s autobiographical Confessions of a Sword Swallower. Here he describes how one showman promoted his walk-through exhibit on the theme of sex:

The exhibit inside amounted to little more than a few caged guinea pigs.

Categories:

Tube announcements wax philosophical

Posted by IMR on 25 June 2009

THE MARKETROIDS AT Transport for London have come up with an effective publicity wheeze: encourage tube drivers to quote celebrated thinkers over train tannoy systems. Maybe it’s a cunning way of telling Londoners to be philosophical in the face of continuing weekend line closures.

Tube drivers are best left to leaven their announcements with their own sardonic humour. Such as . . .

. . . heard on the Piccadilly Line at Russell Square station a few weeks ago.

Tube driver Richardson Green had a puckish sense of humour and a deep, resonant voice. He was interviewed by Dom Joly in 2007:

Mr Green was talent-spotted as a result of one such announcement, and now makes a comfortable living doing film trailer voiceovers.

Categories: Public transport

With some assistance

Posted by IMR on 21 June 2009

ALBERT EINSTEIN, WHO unified the concepts of space and time in a single manifold, gets 31,200,000 Google results. But Joe Dolce, who delighted millions worldwide with his affectionate portrayal of Italian culture, only gets 56,500. Where’s the justice?

The good news is that, in its first three weeks, London Sound Survey has attracted more than the few dozen visitors expected. Many thanks, then, to all those who’ve given a much-needed boost by writing about it, notably the excellent Londonist website, and some blogs which have long been favourites, such as Transpontine.

Finally, thanks to everyone who’s come along and hit the ‘play’ button.

Categories: Site news

Do you want to buy some speakers?

Posted by IMR on 19 June 2009

LONDON IS OFTEN said to be a lonely place, but this is a myth. There are thousands of people out there who are very eager to talk to you.

One case in point is the speaker-out-of-the-van scam. You’re walking along somewhere in central London, a white van slows down alongside you, and a young man leans out of the window and says:

Sometimes the van bears a large sticker with the words ‘Omni Audio’. This is not a very convincing name, too vague and reminiscent of Omni Consumer Products, the sinister corporation in the RoboCop films.

In the 1990s ‘Omni Audio’ placed adverts in the Evening Standard: dynamic people needed, no experience necessary. An acquaintance phoned the number and was lured to a ‘seminar’ in an industrial estate unit in Wimbledon. Around two dozen lads were in a concrete-floored room with plastic stacking chairs, all facing one way. From their conservations, he gathered that at least some of his fellow attendees had recently come out of prison. A huge man like a nightclub bouncer walked in, went to the front, looked around slowly, then clapped his hands once:

The lads perked up instantly and turned to one another with grins. And what do you need if you want to shag birds and snort charlie? Money!

This seems to follow the form, if not the exact content, of sales motivation speeches in general. The former sports commentator Stuart Hall (once described by the Sun newspaper as having ‘Britain’s most irritating laugh’) made a living bounding onto stage at the Birmingham NEC and yelling at the assembled salespersons: Who wants to be mega mega rich?

Energised by talk of sex, money and cocaine, the Omni Audio army take to the road. They explain urgently how the speakers were destined for a recording studio, but there was a mix-up: too many were ordered, and now they have to get rid of them. Mate, these are top quality speakers. They’re worth a grand. You look like you know your sounds so I don’t have to tell you they’re a bargain at two hundred.

The final audible link in the chain of disappointment and deception is: the speakers usually work, but they’re rubbish. With the recession now pushing unemployment past 10% in parts of London, we can maybe expect more vans with young men trying to sell speakers. Any accounts of sightings and, in particular, sales patter, will be gratefully received.

Categories: Scams

Exhibit A: The Whirl-A-Tune

Posted by IMR on 15 June 2009

YOU MAY HAVE had one of these as a kid: a four-foot length of corrugated plastic tubing, open at both ends. They were popular toys in the 1970s and sprouted and flopped from tubs in Woolworths. Whirled around the head it made a hollow, windy piping. I can’t remember what name it was marketed under in Britain, but the name ‘Whirl-A-Tune’ comes up, which places its origin in Eisenhower-era America, or perhaps a bit later.

Someone has helpfully recorded a Whirl-A-Tune in action, and uploaded the sound file to Archive.org:

The NASA Glenn Research Center takes time off from exploring the cosmos to explain how the Whirl-A-Tune works:

You’d expect, then, the same effect to be produced just by blowing through the tube. But I’m pretty sure that didn’t work. Can anyone further clarify the workings of the Whirl-A-Tune?

Categories: Artefacts

Gardens of sound

Posted by IMR on 13 June 2009

A RECENT FRIDAY edition of the South London Press carried news of a sensory garden being opened at a Battersea residential home for people with dementia. Most of the garden’s features engage the senses of smell, vision, and touch, but some of the plant types have also been chosen for the rustling sounds they make in the breeze. There are several similar therapeutic projects elsewhere in London. One which anyone can visit (although you’ll have to pay to get in) is the Secluded Garden at Kew.

A sensory garden in North Staffordshire recommends plants including bamboo, pearl grass, and balloon flowers for their sounds. But it extends its repertoire through other means as well: tinkling streams, windchimes, fountains. Plants haven’t been shaped by evolution to produce auditory signals, so the selective breeding efforts of horticulturalists have had nothing from which to develop pleasant-sounding vegetation. Some projects have also added recorded sounds played through hidden loudspeakers, such as at the Hampton Court maze.

On Oddinstrument.com there’s an article and recording of the Japanese suikinkutsu water chime, in which drops of water make a buried metal pot ring. You might want one of your own for the garden after hearing it.

Categories: Artefacts Good noise

The gadget that helped break Britain

Posted by IMR on 10 June 2009

A TRAWL THROUGH the Daily Mail website finds an article by A. N. Wilson with the alarming title:

The article takes off from the news that Sony are manufacturing a new media player under an old name, and Wilson makes some reasonable if unoriginal points. On seeing Walkmans for the first time in New York:

Transistor radios weren’t regarded fondly by everyone. John Connell, the businessman who went on to found the Noise Abatement Society, cited their use outdoors as one of several examples of noise pollution when he wrote to The Times in 1959. He received around 4,000 letters in support.

Wilson goes on to complain about what he calls the ‘annoying tsst-tsst-tsst’ of music leaking from earbud headphones. Much more entertaining is to hear headphone-wearers unknowingly mutter and groan along to their private tunes.

Categories: Artefacts Bad noise

'Why audio recording?'

Posted by IMR on 07 June 2009

THE INTENTION WAS to write a post about sound recording compared to photography, why the ‘we live in a visual culture’ argument isn’t a very good one, and the challenges in getting people to listen to non-musical sounds over the internet.

But this was plainly just a long-winded way to avoid answering a more personal question: why bother to make sound recordings in the first place? Luckily, Martin Paling gets straight to the point in a post on his website:

That pretty much sums it up for me too. Thanks, Martin.

Categories: General audio

Two dates for the diary

Posted by IMR on 04 June 2009

ON MONDAY 8 June, starting 6.30pm, the British Library’s conference centre plays host to A singing history of London, an event organised by Sing London and the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

The organisers invite you to “take a journey through London’s songs and delve into the stories behind them. Discover the hidden meanings of street traders’ rhymes, learn the songs of illegal professions and find out why so many Londoners left town to spend their summers ‘hopping’. From the tavern to the gentleman’s club, discover how London’s songs tell the story of our city.”

See also the Singing Histories booklet for London in PDF format.

On Wednesday 17 June, again beginning at 6.30pm, the conference centre has Southall: Music and life, examining how, by the mid-1970s, its record shops had become important centres for South Asian music, and the subsequent rise of Bhangra. Kuldip Powar’s For the Record: the social life of Indian vinyl in Southall will be screened, and there’s a panel of musicians lined up including Bhupinder Khambay (Black Mist), Mohinder Kaur Bhamra and Poko (Misty In Roots).

Both events cost £6, or £4 with various concessions, and it’s best to book in advance to avoid disappointment on the night.

Categories: Talks and exhibitions

Coo-eee Mister Shifter

Posted by IMR on 02 June 2009

THE SIGHT OF pianos being dragged onto the streets and played probably hasn’t been seen in London since the Silver Jubilee of 1977. Luke Jerram’s Street Pianos project is promising to deliver 30 pianos to different points around London in June, and then leave them there. As the website says: “Located on streets, in public squares and parks, train stations, and street markets, the pianos are there for any member of the public to play. Feel free to decorate and personalise your piano.”

This is a brilliant, bonkers idea, although the feel free to decorate and personalise your piano bit might not turn out as expected with the one destined for Camberwell Green. Or Southwark Park. Hopefully Luke will get some help lugging those pianos around London.

Categories: Arts projects

A few words at the beginning

Posted by IMR on 31 May 2009

IF YOU’RE ONE of the first few people to come across London Sound Survey, hello and welcome.

Much of what this website is about should hopefully become clear after a quick look through the main section pages or reading the About section. London Sound Survey has only just hatched into its caterpillar stage, but the aim is for it to inch towards becoming more collaborative.

So expect to see a couple more features and sections added as the months go by. Until then, enjoy the sounds and use the comments sections to share your news and views.

Categories: Site news