Share and share alike

Posted by IMR on 26 August 2010

IF YOU’VE READ the earlier post about William Cheshire’s Sounds Like Leigh-on-Sea sound blog, you’ll maybe have spotted an overlap in the area he’s covering and part of the London Sound Survey’s new Estuary section.

He’s very kindly agreed to allow a couple of his recordings to appear here in exchange for my two Canvey Island recordings being added to Sounds Like Leigh-on-Sea. It wasn’t easy choosing from William’s website, as there are many intriguing sounds collected and presented there. But this one of a game of bowls in Southend seemed like a good choice:

The second recording was made in the woods in Belfairs Park, and nicely captures the delicate sound of a brook:

I’ve often noticed how wildlife recordists in particular tend to have an approachable and co-operative outlook among themselves and towards newcomers. Theirs is a good example to follow, so if anyone else would like to exchange recordings with the London Sound Survey, drop me a line.

Categories:

Chasseur du Son

Posted by Des Coulam on 21 August 2010

SOME TIME AGO, Ian invited me to write a guest post for the London Sound Survey blog. Ian is the sort of guy that it’s very difficult to say “No” to, so I agreed. Some time later I submitted a post, which Ian very kindly published. As it turned out, writing that post was a very useful exercise for me because it made me give serious thought to the type of sound recording that I do.

Living as I do in Paris I can perhaps best be described as a chasseur du son, a sound hunter, endlessly walking the streets of Paris, a promeneur, looking for that Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment”, the prey that the all hunters crave. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and all the other French twentieth-century street photographers searched for that decisive moment in pictures whereas I search for it in sound.

For my last guest post I used the rue de la Huchette in Paris as my focal point. The rue de la Huchette, nestled in the shadows of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the churches of Saint Julien le Pauvre and Saint Séverin, is about as Parisian as it’s possible to get. Hundreds of years of history lie in this street, from the medieval to the modern, through wars to peace, from abject poverty to relative prosperity. Today the rue de la Huchette is a tourist trap, deserted in the winter and full to overflowing in the summer.

Imagine then your chasseur du son spending a summer Saturday afternoon in the rue de la Huchette searching for that decisive moment only to find that it is a sound desert. Yes, the tourist chatter is there but he has recorded that many times before and to record it again would add nothing to his ‘Paris Soundscapes’ archive that is not already there. The restaurants fill and then empty but, beyond the clatter of plates, no unusual sounds are to be heard. Back and forth he wanders, this promeneur, looking, searching, hunting, but the prey is elusive.

A bar and a beer, although welcome, provide little respite from the hunt. It must be here somewhere . . . but where? More walking, more searching, it’s four hours now and still nothing. Dinner in the rue de la Harpe adjacent to the rue de la Huchette, time to regroup, to re-think, to make another plan.

A good dinner and large pichet de vin rouge soften the edges. Time to relax, maybe the hunt is not so important after all, a slow walk back to the Hotel de Ville, the Metro and home seems a good plan.

Your chasseur du son leaves the restaurant but the instinct is still there – it’s got to be here somewhere. The Metro calls but something else calls too, that intuitive feeling, the indefinable something that says keep searching. The church of Saint Séverin is a three-minute walk from the restaurant in a street off the rue de la Huchette. The pull is almost magnetic, the scent is strong and the chase is on.

The door of the church opens and there, at last, is the prey, the pot of gold, submitting to the hunter.

Des Coulam produces the Soundlandscapes field recording blog at: soundlandscapes.wordpress.com.

Categories: Field recording

Thomas Burke, a man in love with London

Posted by IMR on 16 August 2010

LONDON DOES NOT care, London does not threaten. London does not comfort. It does not speak, it does not wake. It does not dream. It does not know, it does not fear. It does not love, it does not hate. It does not encourage any of these qualities.

Michael Moorcock used those words for the opening of his novel The Black Corridor, only with ‘space’ instead of ‘London’. The acceptance of London’s neutrality and indifference perhaps comes more easily to those who arrive here from elsewhere, as in the 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners by the Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon.

Many others prefer the consoling thought of London having a hidden spirit which influences its inhabitants while outliving them. Even James Thomson’s gloomy poem The City of Dreadful Night gives London a purpose of sorts. This post presents some fine descriptions of urban sounds from Nights in London by Thomas Burke, written in 1915. He too wanted London to have a soul, so that he and the city could love each other.

Nights in London is a collection of journalistic essays describing different aspects of the city’s life and Burke’s night-time forays. This is a familiar template for metropolitan books which goes back at least as far as Ned Ward’s The London Spy at the close of the 17th century. But Burke is unusual in the intensity with which he tries to immerse himself completely in the city, describing it as his mistress. He was also a sensual man, alert to the sounds of London. In the first chapter, sound brings about a childhood epiphany:

In the chapter titled ‘A Chinese Night’, Burke describes a visit to Limehouse:

In Burke’s day many of London’s street markets stayed open late, lit by gas and naphtha lamps. Here he describes the sounds and voices of a night-time market in the Isle of Dogs:

Voices like that haven’t been completely wiped out by retail parks and supermarkets. This was recorded in Romford market in 2008:

Yet elsewhere Burke admits to feelings of bitterness in his youth. According to his Wikipedia entry, Burke’s father died when he an infant, and he went to live with an uncle in Poplar. Then, for reasons not given, he was sent at the age of ten to live in a home for middle-class boys from distressed families. While working as an office boy in his teens he rented a room on the busy Kingsland Road in Hackney:

With no family to speak of, Christmas was a lonely time:

Burke overcomes being shut out of the bright circle of family life by identifiying with London, trying to dissolve himself within it and so be in all its places at once. A man who grew up with no secure home of his own now inhabits through imagination every home in London:

Belonging to no-one in particular, he wants to belong to everyone, like the neighbourhood cat. He treats encounters with strangers as marking new friendships. But many of these can only have been one-off meetings. During one trip to Whitechapel he misunderstands the etiquette in a Jewish restaurant and accepts being corrected by the waiter:

His almost indiscriminate regard for others doesn’t mean he worships an abstract idea of London and its people or what they should become. He has little time for the religious and political evangelists who descend on the poorer neighbourhoods wanting to improve others: “all those unhappy creatures who can find no congenial society in their own circles.”

Burke, on the other hand, wants to find congenial company everywhere and thinks most Londoners are just fine the way they are. This, and his powers of observation and description, makes Nights in London a good account of the Edwardian city.

 

Categories:

Sounds like Leigh-on-Sea

Posted by IMR on 09 August 2010

AFTER POSTING ABOUT the last few recordings made for the Thames estuary section, I found that someone else is ahead of the game. The composer William Cheshire has been compiling his Sounds Like Leigh-on-Sea sound blog since late May this year.

It’s subtitled obvious and not so obvious sounds of Leigh-on-Sea and its surrounding areas and is well worth checking out. A respectable collection of recordings has already been gathered, as you can see:

Personal favourites include a series of recordings made in Belfairs Woods, the amusement arcades at Southend, and a soundscape from Chalkwell Beach. There’s also some intriguing sounds captured with contact mics.

Like the wonderful oontz blog from Russia, Sounds Like Leigh-on-Sea shows how important local knowledge is in gathering sound.

Categories: Sound websites

Mad about the buoy

Posted by IMR on 09 August 2010

MORE EXCURSIONS LAST weekend along the Thames estuary or ‘riviera’, as estate agents might prefer to call it. A few years ago at work I got a request from some people looking for a recording of the Tilbury Bell, which was something to do with one of the buoys moored in the Thames. No such recording turned up, but the project went ahead anyway as Soundings from the Estuary.

It still exists on the web with some good compositions by sound artist Dave Lawrence, and in my opinion Soundings from the Estuary compares well with Bill Fontana’s later and similarly-titled installation River Soundings.

Last Sunday the elusive Tilbury Bell was tracked down during a trip out to Gravesend, my favourite town along the widening Thames. In fact, every blue buoy marking the central channel of the river has a bell attached, but it’s hard to hear them ringing unless a boat makes enough wash to set the buoy rolling. It took a couple of hours sitting by the river’s edge like a fisherman to get this 23-second recording:

The day before involved an excursion dodging the showers to Rainham Marshes, where I spotted a huge mass of flying ants issuing from a crack in a bank of earth. Each flying ant was trying to climb the nearest grass stem, often clambering over knots of its fellows, before launching itself into likely oblivion or falling back to the ground again:

Quite a lot of EQ’ing was applied to this in order to make it sound like you’ve gone and stuck your head inside the ants’ nest. Who’d do such a thing? The evolutionary biologist WD Hamilton once crawled inside a vast wasps’ nest he’d found somewhere in the Amazon. But the residents’ committee wasn’t happy about this, and Hamilton spent the next week recovering from multiple stings.

Categories: Field recording

Entente cordiale: Des Coulam's guest post from Paris

Posted by IMR on 04 August 2010

IT’S A GREAT pleasure to have the first-ever guest post on the London Sound Survey, A useful fantasy written by Des Coulam.

Des’s passion is for recording the sounds of street life in Paris and you can hear his recordings and read more of his writing on his Soundlandscapes blog. Des has a half-century of field recording under his belt, and I was immediately drawn to the knowledge and enthusiasm displayed there, both in words and sound. I hope A useful fantasy is the first of many posts from him.

If you too have a good post in you about field recording or related stuff, and it’s craving the electronic daylight, then send an email to admin[squiggly symbol]soundsurvey.org.uk.

Categories: Site news

A useful fantasy

Posted by Des Coulam on 04 August 2010

STREET RECORDING HAS fascinated me for longer than I can remember. The fascination is rooted in the attempt to capture that gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed. The phrase is not mine but that of Robert Doisneau, the great French street photographer, who also said, “There are days when simply seeing feels like happiness itself . . . You feel so rich, the elation seems almost excessive and you want to share it”. Substitute “listening” for “seeing” and that’s pretty much how I feel about street recording.

I have a fantasy. I want to sit outside the Café Séverin on the corner of the Place Saint-Michel and point a microphone down the narrow street, the rue de la Huchette. I will record the sounds of that street for twenty-four hours. I will then turn the clock back ten years and do another twenty-four hour recording from the same place. I will turn the clock back again another ten years and so on until I find myself recording the same street a hundred years ago.

A street which is now a bustling tourist trap full of bars, restaurants, kebab shops and expensive beer, would have been very different then although the buildings would have been more or less the same as they are today. A hundred years ago the rue de la Huchette was also a bustling place comprising two hotels, the Hôtel du Caveau and the Hôtel Normandie, three butchers one of which was a horse butcher, a newspaper shop, a taxidermist, a bookbinder, a yarn and thread shop, a dairy, a bakery, a draper, a barber, a laundry, a grocery shop, a goldfish shop, a music shop, a doctor, a dentist and inevitably, a bordel. Then, as now, a whole community lived in the apartments above the shops.

And what would I learn from this fantasy, from this gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed? I would learn much, not only about the sounds of the rue de la Huchette over a hundred years, but how those sounds have changed and evolved. I would have recorded a changing and evolving atmosphere and sense of place. I would learn how life was lived in that street then, compared to how it is lived now. I would learn that the bordel is now a kebab shop. I would have brought the rue de la Huchette to life in a way that no photograph could. I would have recorded a living social history and, given what has happened over the last hundred years, a National history too.

My fantasy of course will never see the light of day. But if the street recordings I and thousands of other people make today serve as a valuable, living, social history for historians and even sound enthusiasts in a hundred years time then our efforts will have been more than rewarded.

Robert Doisneau was quite right, “You feel so rich, the elation seems almost excessive and you want to share it”.

Des Coulam writes the Soundlandscapes blog at soundlandscapes.wordpress.com

Categories: Field recording

Sounds unreal

Posted by IMR on 30 July 2010

BAD NEWS FOR foley artists in this New Scientist article on advances in computer synthesis of real-world sounds.

For a few years now, even mid-priced animation packages have come bundled with physics modules to simulate collisions, fluid dynamics, wobbling jelly-like objects and rag-doll kinematics. But, according to the article, the sounds that would result from them can now be rendered as well:

Here’s an accompaying video:

It’s hard to imagine a whole street full of sounds being conjured up by software alone. Then again, compare the state of computer animation in a 1992 film like The Lawnmower Man with the CGI sequences routinely churned out today. (Thanks to Nick Hamilton of Lost Steps for the heads-up.)

Categories:

Jack London among the Cockneys

Posted by IMR on 23 July 2010

THE MAN WHO had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with his mother’s milk . . . “An’ ’ow yer feelin’ now, sir?” he asked, with the subservient smirk which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors . . . I never heard a voice I hated so. Positively, he was the most disgusting and loathsome person I have ever met.

So the American writer Jack London described the ship’s cook in The Sea Wolf, published in 1904 and later made into a good film starring Edward G. Robinson.

London had taken a more sympathetic view of Cockneys the year before in The People of the Abyss, his social investigation of life and poverty in the East End. Like J.B.S. Haldane, London was an adventure-seeking alpha male who sided with the underdog. Unlike Haldane, London came from a poor working-class background, selling newspapers in the street at the age of ten before graduating to poaching oysters in San Francisco Bay.

The book is still lively and readable today, ageing much better than contemporary socialist tracts like Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England. London is an outsider in the East End, but more for reasons of nationality than class. He dons shabby clothes to stay in hostels and lodging-houses, and in one passage renders the sounds of a fight in such detail that you know he was fascinated by it:

Many of the people London met assumed he was a seaman down on his luck. He seems able to befriend others quickly and easily, and here some workmen take him to visit their sweatshop:

Tuberculosis is a disease of overcrowding, and in recent years it’s begun to reappear in parts of Tower Hamlets. But in the early 1900s the sound of coughing was surely much more common, not only because of disease, but also the terrible air quality, dusty conditions in the workplace, and the popularity of smoking.

As Orwell was to do thirty years later in Down and Out in Paris and London, so London describes the noises of a night in a men’s hostel:

At the coronation of Edward VII, London witnesses ‘another race of men from those of the shops and slums, a totally different race of men’, strong and well-fed and with overpowering force at their command. Compared to them the people of the abyss are runts, made so by a mismanaged civilisation.

Categories: Historical sounds

Rebranding exercise

Posted by IMR on 22 July 2010

GOT FED UP with the old London Sound Survey masthead, finding that it was looking more odd over time, like when you say the same word over and over again until it sounds unfamiliar and meaningless.

The new font has the resonant name of Decorated 035 OT, and on the old Letraset sheets it was identified as Profil, sounding more elegant than it looked. But why that font?

It looks a little bit like the one used on the cover of a Jam album . . .

. . . and it appears on the sign of a shop in Kingsland High Road, which maybe sells wigs. Also, in an earlier life working for a printers, I used to see it every month or so among the camera-ready artwork for a police staff newspaper.

A regular strip of feeble one-panel cartoons had the single word HUMOUR hanging over it like a grand piano waiting to fall on someone. As for the font – well, you get the idea. Irony? No, not really.

Do also note the array of shiny-looking social media buttons to the right and have a go at clicking on them. Come on, help me out here.

Categories: Site news

A Tottenham soundwalk

Posted by IMR on 20 July 2010

SUNDAY JUST GONE involved giving a brief talk at the new Sound Fjord sound art gallery in Seven Sisters, followed by a soundwalk which they’d organised up to Tottenham Marshes.

Helen and Andy, who run Sound Fjord, couldn’t have been more welcoming, and it was great meeting the friendly bunch of people who turned up for the day. Previously I’d found the typical sounds of Seven Sisters to be along the lines of Alright boss, you got a spare cigarette? But on that day the sun was shining and the area had a more wholesome complexion.

A recent sound development in London is the growing number of West African churches opening in all kinds of unhallowed premises. One on the Old Kent Road even has a nightclub at the back, so that’s body and spirit taken care of. Seven Sisters has its own complement, and we could hear music, song and amplified preaching from a cluster of churches at the junction of Lawrence Road and West Green Road.

North of Tottenham Hale, a path dives down alongside and under the Watermead Way dual carriageway. Here was a neglected void beneath the road which commerce and officialdom had found no use for; a dry place of twigs and birdshit:

Sound Fjord had arranged for members of the Friends of Tottenham Marshes to meet us, including the wildlife recordist David Chapman and an older man whose name I didn’t catch, but who had a relaxed, senatorial bearing and a great deal of knowledge of birdsong. A short distance from their meeting hall, lads were shouting and diving into the waters of Stonebridge Lock.

A woman steered her barge into the lock, then got out and began to turn the winding gear with a windlass to open the lock gates. Everyone around turned to see where the loud squealing was coming from; surprisingly intense and unpleasant at first, then sounding a bit like John Cale’s electric viola:

This was a very enjoyable day out and a good omen for the future success of Sound Fjord.

A week or so earlier I’d visited Seven Sisters and made a recording inside the Seven Sisters indoor market. A recent court ruling had blocked this from being redeveloped into the usual ‘luxury’ flats.

It consists of shop premises which have been given over to a maze of tiny booths, stalls and cafes. Every other little enterprise in there provides its own soundtrack through conversation and music from radios and hi-fis:

Like the West African churches, the Seven Sisters indoor market is fairly recent addition to London’s auditory scene. It caters to a mainly South American clientele, as do other indoor markets in Peckham and the Elephant and Castle. The longer-established Asian-run bazaars in Southall are on much the same scale, and for gadget geeks there are a couple near the St Giles’ Circus end of Tottenham Court Road.

Categories:

Doing anything on World Listening Day?

Posted by IMR on 12 July 2010

THIS COMING SUNDAY, the 18th of July, marks the first World Listening Day. Okay, there’s been a rash of commemorative and consciousness-raising dates recently and I feel drawn to the idea of National Bed Month at least, but World Listening Day ought to appeal to field recordists everywhere.

On their press release, the World Listening Project list some ways in which the Day can be acknowledged, such as organising soundwalks or performance events. I was stuck for something to do until Helen Frosi of London’s new sound art gallery Sound Fjord got in touch, asking if I’d like to speak at the soundwalk that’s being organised from there on the 18th. Here’s the flyer for the event:

The invitation was a kind one, since the London Sound Survey isn’t obviously a sound art project, more like a mix of amateur field recording and local history (or ‘psychogeography’ as some prefer to call it). The event starts at 1pm at Sound Fjord, and you’ll find full details of where that is on their website – the nearest tube is Seven Sisters. Hope you can make it.

Categories:

New Thames estuary section now added

Posted by IMR on 05 July 2010

AS PROMISED A week or so ago, there’s a new addition to the soundmaps pages with a section for the Thames estuary. There’s only half-a-dozen recordings there right now, but the framework is at least up for more to be added.

Please have a look and a listen, hope you enjoy what you find there.

Categories: Site news

33 hours to 1984

Posted by IMR on 29 June 2010

YOU MIGHT HAVE seen Margaret Noble’s Sound Is Art blog mentioned here before. It’s a collection of marvellous sound oddities and curiosities which are added to all the time.

She does a lot more besides that, with an impressive track record in experimental music and sound art, and in her latest project Margaret will be reworking an original 1953 recording of Orwell’s 1984 to help raise funds and awareness for Amnesty International.

Have a look at the project’s fundraising page on Kickstarter here.

The project needs to raise $6,000 to get off the ground, and it’s still short with just 33 hours to go. If you can, help out by making a donation.

Categories:

Two recordings from Canvey Island

Posted by IMR on 27 June 2010

NEW PAGES FOR the sound maps section are being put together and they start with a few recordings made along the Thames Estuary. The towns, villages and marshland along the Estuary have been among my favourite places to visit for the last fifteen years.

Canvey Island is a three-mile-wide patch of Thames floodplain separated by creeks from the Essex side of the river. The western half of the island is consumed by post-industrial scrub and vast liquified gas containers. The eastern half is mainly housing, and between the two is a caravan park and a small seafront resort.

Walking along the seafront this afternoon, I came across a small group of Caribbean men and women holding an outdoor Sunday service on a bandstand. A Communion table had been set up, laden with flowers and fruit, and around this the worshippers sang and danced:

Earlier I’d tramped across the western side of Canvey Island and scrambled over a fence to get as close as possible to the oil refinery at Coryton, thinking the sound of the gas flares might be worth pointing a mic at. Grasshoppers fizzed unseen in the long grass and hot sun, ahead the refinery growled and roared.

Straight after finishing and packing up a siren sounded briefly, an eerie whale-like noise that echoed across the landscape. About half-a-minute later it sounded again, and the time after that the recorder was switched back on:

An hour later it could still be heard from the middle of the island; someone said it was a test. The new Estuary pages should be up this coming week.

Categories:

Roland binaural mics for £20!

Posted by IMR on 25 June 2010

WROTE A FEW weeks ago about Roland’s new binaural mics, but I know at least two people who’ve since got in there quick and ordered their own pairs from Planet Gizmo.

The normal list price is around £80, but somehow Planet Gizmo are selling them for just £20. One friend has already received his, and they’re the genuine article, not something that’s fallen out of a Christmas cracker. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for mine to arrive direct from Roland. There’s a reason for middlemen connecting the consumer and the manufacturer – they’re often better at it than the manufacturer.

More news on the cheap gear front courtesy of the gadget blog Wirefresh: Zoom are releasing a new digital recorder, designated the H1, with a list price of only £89.

Roland’s new R-05 digital recorder is also now available from some UK retailers, priced around £180.

It looks like a slimmed-down version of the reliable R09-HR, although it’s not clear what functions have been reduced or omitted to achieve the lower price. Hopefully some retailers will get round to tempting buyers with bundles including both Roland’s new recorder and binaural mics.

Categories: Recording equipment

The walk won't do you good

Posted by IMR on 19 June 2010

LITERARY REFERENCES CAN give important clues to how London sounded in the past when the author’s intentions are understood. In an epic poem such as Derek Walcott’s Omeros, artistic effect is expected to come before realism:

This post will look at two works emphasising the theme of silence in nineteenth-century London: James Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night, first published in 1874, and Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, published in 1907 but set in the 1880s. Solitary walks through the city are central to both.

The City of Dreadful Night is an allegorical journey, like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, with London as Giant Despair’s castle. The city is often described as noiseless:

The few sounds which disturb the thin air of Thomson’s London are jarring and abrupt:

Thomson must often have come across street preachers in London, and the sight and sound of one is reworked as an atheist with a revelation of the world in collapse:

Thomson spent four years writing The City of Dreadful Night while under the thumb of severe depression. The London he depicts is his own mind as metropolis and its silence reflects Thomson’s isolation. The poem’s odyssey, however, may have been inspired by long, penniless walks in real life. Even the indifference of London’s streets would have given Thomson a break from the company of empty chairs at home.

The Scots writer Tom Leonard describes it as a great poem, and you can read his appreciation of James Thomson here.

Conard’s The Secret Agent is set among emigré Anarchists in late nineteenth century London. Direct references to city sounds are uncommon, and Conrad’s goal as a writer was ‘before all, to make you see’. When silence and muffling of sound are described, they aren’t meant as representative of the whole city, but of that part experienced by the Anarchists and those sent to pursue them.

The secret agent of the title, Adolf Verloc, runs a shop with his wife in a poor district outside the main business of London life:

Early in the novel, Chief Inspector Heat confronts the Anarchist known as ‘The Professor’ in an alleyway:

Conrad also makes inarticulacy and weakness of voices a recurring feature of the Anarchists and their associates. Michaelis, who years before had been gaoled after a cack-handed attempt to spring some comrades from a prison van, has a voice to match his failure:

Verloc’s brother-in-law Stevie, whom he exploits, struggles to express his sense of the world:

Even the bell in the Verlocs’ shop is imperfect:

No such problems for the Home Secretary Sir Ethelred, whose ‘deep, smooth voice’ announces his power:

The major thoroughfares of the city are described as loud with traffic, either when bordering Mayfair or in the ‘the sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy night of South London’. The Assistant Commissioner of Police leaves that sound-world when he follows the Anarchists into their furtive and unfamiliar domain:

As his begins his solitary journeys, the Assistant Commissioner has ‘a pleasurable feeling of independence’. But he is only a visitor. When Ossipon the Anarchist walks the streets, it is through a silent London which belongs to him as much as The City of Dreadful Night does to James Thomson:

Categories: Historical sounds

Eight decades of recording

Posted by IMR on 16 June 2010

ONE OF THE pleasures of running the London Sound Survey is getting emails from fellow field recordists. Recently I’ve exchanged messages with two sound-hunters who’ve been sharing their work through the Freesound Project and their own sound blogs.

Lawrence Barker’s Audio Field Recorder’s Blog contains recordings made across a thirty-year-long fascination with sound. They range from early capturings of the mechanical music of fairground organs to current recording experiments.

A particular favourite of mine is this close-up recording of a morse code machine. Even when heard through a pair of small desktop speakers there’s a great sense of the device’s presence. Other subjects include nature and soundwalks, and there’s also a seasonal sound portrait conjured from four years of recording in the town of Diss in Norfolk.

What began with ‘a steam driven Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder’ when he was just ten years old has led half a century later to Des Coulam’s Paris-based Soundlandscapes blog. There are some beautiful recordings of Parisian street life here: have a listen to Chinese New Year and Singers at the Église Saint-Séverin.

Des also shares considerable recording wisdom with post topics such as Street Recording – Some Tips and The Importance of the Sound Map. These and others are well worth reading at length.

A combined and humbling total of eight decades of recording experience can be encountered just by visiting these two blogs. I’ll end with a quote from Soundlandscapes:

Categories: Sound websites

World Cup horns of Africa

Posted by IMR on 12 June 2010

WATCHING ENGLAND PLAY USA on the telly right now and the droning of massed horns is as distracting as the USA just scoring. Every other fan seems to have one and you can barely hear any chanting or singing through what sounds like a wasps’ nest being poked with a stick.

These plastic horns have already been deemed newsworthy in their own right. According to this Associated Press report:

The loudness of the vuvuzelas must help even a modest-sized crowd of people feel like a mighty army, quantity having a quality all of its own.

Horns of more diffident homegrown proportions were at Wembley during the last England vs USA World Cup match in 2008. Here’s an early London Sound Survey recording of the approach to Wembley with a throng of horn-sellers giving it the World of Stereo wow factor at the beginning:

 

Categories:

Sounds from the Sonic Tuck Shop: interview with Felicity Ford

Posted by IMR on 07 June 2010

WHAT HAVE SHEEP, sweets, tape recording clubs, domestic routines, knitting and the A4074 got in common? They all fall into place in Felicity Ford’s original, inventive pattern of sound art interests. For a while now I’ve enjoyed reading her reflective and playful blog The Domestic Soundscape, and wanted to write something about it, but couldn’t summarise her work without missing something that seemed important.

So, taking Mark Peter Wright’s Ear Room interviews as inspiration, I emailed five questions to Felicity, and here are the answers she very kindly sent back.

– What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on several things; the main project is a radio/podcast series about my commute along the A4074 road between Reading (where I live) and Oxford (where I study.) I drive along this road regularly, but the sound of my engine drowns out anything else which may be heard along the route, and the 60mph speed limit prohibits any detailed examination of the environments I pass through en route. I am interested in using the radio-making process as an opportunity to discover all the sounds, places and communities that I miss from within my car, and in seeing how this endeavour changes my relationship to the journey.

As part of this, I am developing a sound walk for World Listening Day on July 18th and I intend to release a knitting pattern for a LISTEN HAT; a hat designed to remind the wearer to think about listening.

I am also developing The Sonic Tuck Shop book, based on the sounds of food and cooking. This book is going to extend the idea of the graphic score to forms like recipes and shopping lists, and celebrates the idea that we can all be making music all the time, through performing everyday tasks such as buttering a piece of toast or opening a sealed jar of jam. I currently have an installation based on this book in the window of an old shop in Reading.

Academically I am working on my PhD thesis and on a paper for a conference at Bournemouth this September. I am also working with Martin Franklin and Paul Whitty on the Sound:Site conference, scheduled for October 2010 at South Hill Park.

Finally, every day I try to write about a specific sound for my ongoing text/print project, SOUND BANK.

– What does sound give to your work that text and images can’t?

Sound describes space and time in ways that images can’t. You can frame a photograph in such a way as to make a small room look big or a cluttered room look tidy, but it is much harder to create comparable illusions in sound. For instance if you record something in a large, echoey Church, it is difficult to remove the resonant acoustics from the resultant recording. Similarly, sound recordings are durational and contain moments of time, and this I think has an interesting relationship to memory. Listening through to my sound recordings, I often find myself remembering whole sequences of events or specific situations because of details in the sounds that I would never have thought of documenting with text or images. I once went through some files and found a recording of my tent zip opening, and was immediately transported back to that tent, to the light inside it, and even to the specific smell that I associate with camping. I don’t think any photographs or words could evoke so immediately that physical memory of being somewhere, and I think this is because things take exactly the same amount of time in a recording as they do in real life, whereas a text description or an image can happen in a different time frame.

Perhaps because of these connections to physical space and real time, I find sounds far more tactile and corporeal than images or text. Sounds describes textures in incredible detail, conveying information about how substances behave and feel, and I think that images can often fail to fully communicate this material aspect of reality. Consider for a moment the difference between the sound of greaseproof paper and the sound of tinfoil and you will know immediately what I mean. In a flat image or even in a description, it would be difficult to give a sense of the precise qualities of those two materials, whereas a few seconds of hearing tinfoil flapping about immediately describes its fine, brittle, metallic constitution and you only need to listen to someone packaging a sandwich up in greaseproof paper to mentally imagine its crisp, impermeable qualities.

I also like the physical experience of listening. Someone whispering very close involves a literal intimacy which I think would be difficult to recreate through imagery; the sound travels a very tiny distance and physically resonates inside my head. I can see someone very close up – like the faces in a Sergio Leone movie – but I never have the sense of images physically touching my eyes, whereas soundwaves can very definitely be felt.

What these aspects of sound give to my work is an enhanced appreciation for the material world and the details of what Georges Perec has dubbed ‘the infra-ordinary,’ or things which seem so obvious and fundamental to us that we never deeply examine or explore them. I think that working with sound adds physicality, time and space to images and text; I use images and text all the time so I don’t want to discount their power either, but there is something distinctively textural and tactile about sound which draws me again and again to working with it.

– Photography used to be a heavily male-populated medium, and sound recording still seems to be so. Have you had to make your own world, so to speak?

This is a complex question to answer!

In some ways I identify with Bobby Baker when she talks about being an artist in the 1970s and making the decision to work with cake in an art world overwhelmingly dominated by men making abstract, highly formal metal sculptures. Like Baker, I am interested in redeeming situations, materials and contexts that we generally deem to be worthless (such as storecupboard ingredients, the home and housework.) Like Baker – who developed a whole work out of the idea of celebrating her technique for peeling carrots – I am interested in revising how we view everyday things and actions, and in dismantling the established hierarchy that dictates what we should consider worthy of artistic contemplation, and what we should not.

I do find that sound recording is a realm largely populated by men and at the risk of making grossly sweeping statements, I have observed that this means sound recording is often compartmentalised away from everything else in life as a unique ‘category’ of activity, and that talk of shiny, expensive equipment sometimes dominates conversations!

However, these trends have never been a barrier to my making work or finding inspiring exceptions, and whenever I have had specific ideas or questions the online sound recording community has been very generous and forthcoming with answers. I don’t know a great deal about recording equipment because 1. I can’t afford to buy much fancy kit and 2. I’m far more interested in context, content and methodology than in abstract issues relating to equipment and technical specs. Also, it is crucial to me to decompartmentalise sound recording in my own practice and to contextualise it as an activity within a broadly creative approach to living. In these respects I suppose I work against some prevailing trends within the male-populated medium of sound recording, but I am certainly not alone in taking this approach and I do not see myself as having created a kind of separate ‘world.’ Even when working principally with context and content, a degree of technical recording expertise and competence remains essential if the work is to be comprehensible, and as better equipment is increasingly available for me to borrow from my University, I find I am more interested in understanding its capabilities, so I am not totally disinterested in technical talk when I can put it into practical use!
 
I guess my blog – The Domestic Soundscape – is a kind of ‘world’ or imaginative thinking space, and I would say it is different from other recording blogs because it is full of things that are not at first glance specifically about sound. Contemplative writings and sound recordings are jumbled in with accounts of my life, my relationships, recipes I have cooked, knitting projects I am working on, etc. It is enormously important for me to contextualise sounds like this – as part and parcel of ordinary reality – but the development of the blog has not been so much about dealing with the male-dominated nature of sound recording, as building my own distinct language for describing and critiquing the world around me, and making a conscious decision to integrate an appreciation of everyday sounds into an overall imaginative approach to being alive.

– The critic Milton Shulman believed the ‘ravenous eye’ was dominant in the age of electronic media. What are the prospects for the appreciation of everyday sound?

I am optimistic and would say the prospects for the appreciation of everyday sound grow better by the day – especially in relation to electronic media. Sometimes I feel everyday sound has even become a bit fashionable, with the likes of Jarvis Cocker teaming up with the National Trust to produce a sounds album! The British Library is another National Institution fostering a greater appreciation for everyday sounds with their sound map project, and massive projects like Bill Fontana’s River Sounding at Somerset House build the profile of everyday sounds in the public imagination.

Also platforms like Audioboo plus greater access to recording technologies mean that the sharing of sounds online is a more and more feasible undertaking for non-specialists and the general public. I think an appreciation of everyday sound grows in relation to access to recording and publishing technologies, because I think that everyday sounds become more interesting when we are able to document and discover them through amplification.

I was recently excited, for instance, to see how many people recorded or commented on the silence of the skies when the volcano ash prohibited flying temporarily; Audioboo contains a few really evocative recordings and commentaries by various users. To me this is exciting news; it says people are imaginatively contemplating and commenting on our relationship to everyday sound, and I am interested in how electronic media is facilitating that process. 
 
– Which other sound artists or sound-based projects would you like people to know more about?

There are some blogs which I think are worth subscribing to for some interesting perspectives on sound. I love Alun Ward’s commentary on marathon training, and the early morning recordings that he makes when he is out running: http://www.alunward.co.uk/marathon/. I also love the recordings on Michael Raphael’s blog – he adds some nice explanations to his sounds, and they are always really beautifully recorded: http://sepulchra.com/blog/. And I have recently come across Denis De Bel, whose work I really enjoy for its sonic treatment of everyday objects like crackers and vacuum cleaners: http://www.dennisdebel.nl.

PS: I totally forgot to mention Jennifer Walshe, whose scores and approach to sounds is a major inspiration to me! This is her website URL: http://www.milker.org. And since I mentioned her, Bobby Baker’s website is well worth a look for context, though her work is not strictly about sounds: http://bobbybakersdailylife.com.

Categories: Sound websites

From the Isle of Dogs to Southall

Posted by IMR on 31 May 2010

A COUPLE OF weeks ago, Cafe Oto hosted a make-your-own hydrophone evening class under the genial tutelage of composer Duncan Chapman. Occasions bringing together field recordists don’t seem to happen very often in London.

More on the hydrophones soon. Duncan brought to my attention an Isle of Dogs sound map, put together by him and students at the Trinity College of Music.

It’s got an attractive interface and clicking on both the yellow buildings and magenta dot-trails opens all sorts of sound files to play. Children shout and laugh, an ambulance drives by, water laps on steps going down into the Thames, and there’s an intriguing time-lapse recording made in the courtyard of the Trinity Music College.

Equipment is no substitute for local knowledge in finding distinctive and meaningful sounds to record. The Southall Story is one of the two best local history websites I’ve yet come across (the other is Harold Hill: A People’s History). Southall is a suburb of west London with a large Asian population. Many Londoners might think Southall to be a good place to go for their dinner, if it didn’t seem so far from the city centre, but there’s a lot more to the area’s past and present than that.

The Southall Story is mainly told through words and pictures, with many different sections covering music, politics, history, film and other subjects. Luckily they’ve also included a small number of field recordings of local life on a soundscapes page.

There’s a recording made inside an Indian sweetshop, a soundwalk from St. Anselm’s to the ‘Little Mogadishu’ district, lunch at the Jalebi Junction restaurant and a visit to Southall market. I hope they keep adding to them.

Categories: Sound websites

More weird and wonderful online sound collections

Posted by IMR on 23 May 2010

ANOTHER QUICK PLUG here for Margaret Noble’s ever-fascinating Sound is Art blog.

Margaret casts a wide net to catch all sorts of intriguing recordings, and this one of the Solar Wind Harp has a weird and grand sound. It’s of real-time solar wind data gathered from satellites and used to ‘play’ a virtual harp.

Also ferreting out unusual sounds worldwide is Trevor Cox’s Sound Tourism blog, subtitled A travel guide to sonic wonders, and which uses Google Maps. There are some great entries on the map, including this one of a whistled language used in the mountainous interior of La Gomera in the Canary Islands.

There’s an example of the Great Stalacpipe Organ in action, built in the 1950s by a US engineer named Leland Sprinkle. It uses stalactites, and thanks to one of my old science teachers I know which ones they are: tites come down, then mites grow up.

The Singing Ringing Tree metal sculpture makes a hollow droning in the Pennine winds near Burnley, and there’s a brief mention of the High Tide Organ in Blackpool, although sadly that project’s website only has photographs of the structure, no sounds.

Categories: Sound websites

Sounds of hearing lost and recovered

Posted by IMR on 20 May 2010

RECENTLY I’VE BEEN helping to put together and produce a promotional CD for Deafness Research UK, the medical charity whose logo and link appear on the London Sound Survey home page.

The CD features some field recordings from the collection, and what’s of real interest is how scientists from the UCL Ear Institute have modified them to simulate a range of hearing loss conditions.

On the following track, UCL Research Fellow Dr Bradford Backus introduces a simulation of hearing loss with pure tone tinnitus. (The original recording of a pub singalong at the Duke of Kendal can be found here.)

Cochlear implants are devices which turn sound into electrical signals, and conduct them directly to the auditory nerve. Damaged cochlear hair cells are thus bypassed in the process and a semblance of hearing is returned to profoundly or completely deaf people.

Deafness Research UK are supporting the development of more effective cochlear implants, as well as services such as assessment, fitting and rehabilitation procedures for children. The following is an extract from a simulation of how a busker playing the saxophone would sound with the aid of such an implant (the original, unmodified recording can be found here):

The results may sound rudimentary, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless. Cochlear implants can be particularly helpful in regaining some ability to hear and understand speech, and improvements are being made to extend the range of auditory information they provide.

If you want to play a part in supporting such research, then visit Deafness Research UK’s website and find out about the different ways you can help.

Categories: Site news

New binaural mics from Roland

Posted by IMR on 16 May 2010

MOST MAKERS AND marketers of binaural microphones are cottage industries who adapt mic capsules made by other, much larger firms. So it’s interesting to see Roland getting in on the act with their own binaural model, the CS-10EM. It’s available in Britain starting this month, costing around £80.

As you can see they’re nicely finished and could easily pass for earphones. In fact, they have earphones integrated into the design, so you can monitor what you’re recording while your ears are otherwise bunged up. Rubber O-rings lodge the CS-10EMs in the ear canal, and also effect isolation to help prevent feedback. But, according to the manual, feedback may occur ‘if you turn on a recording monitoring function and raise the recording level or headphone volume [or] if you cover the unit with the palm of your hand.’ No doubt users will quickly become highly motivated to avoid such mistakes.

Foam windshields aren’t included in the package, and the manual claims that the mics are designed to minimise wind noise, before conceding cautiously that ‘wind noise might be heard in conditions of strong wind’. Open circuit sensitivity is -40dB 1V/Pa or 10mV/Pa. The signal-to-noise ratio is stated as ‘greater than 60dB’, meaning self-noise should be below 34dB, but probably not by much.

The mic specs are nothing out of the ordinary for the price. The plus points are a smart and discreet appearance, easy ordering for UK-based customers (for example, from Sounds Live), and built-in earphones for you to monitor what’s going on and gloat or fret over your recordings on the way home.

Categories: Recording equipment

The London Nobody Sings

Posted by IMR on 10 May 2010

IF THE BEST ideas for blogs tend to focus on a single topic, then someone had a brainwave when they came up with The London Nobody Sings. This is a brilliant blog which collects songs about London.

Since June last year a new song has been added at the rate of about one a day. Here are a few entries at random.

27 January 2010: The ‘Ampstead Way, from the 1946 film London Town;

28 September 2009: GLC by punk band Menace (one of the first singles I ever bought); and

4 March 2010: Linda Lewis’s Old Smokey, released in 1974.

Every post has a picture or video and some scholarship to go with it. The amount of work that’s gone into the blog puts to shame the majority of books you’ll see for sale on the ‘London’ shelves of any bookshop.

The only bad news is that The London Nobody Sings is meant to be a one-year project, so this month’s songs might be the last to be added. Hopefully it’ll stay up for a very long time after.

Categories: Sound websites

Out and about on May Day

Posted by IMR on 02 May 2010

ON MAY DAY I mooched around with Nick Hamilton, who produces the quality Lost Steps programs for Resonance FM. We started by heading up to Clerkenwell Green to check out the May Day rally.

There were the usual papersellers and a few trades unionists steadying their banners, but it was a large contingent of Turkish communists who made the most noise. Some banged drums, others chanted slogans, someone’s voice squawked over a PA, and here and there were intriguing snatches of droning music from some bagpipe-like instrument. But we weren’t able to find the source of the drone.

Recording marches once they’re underway isn’t that interesting, unless you’re able to occupy a spot where the marchers stream past you on both sides. This wasn’t possible, so we headed to the Lamb pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Holborn.

In a corner of the pub was an old Polyphon music box in a glass case. Its ten-inch-wide metal disk bore patterns of holes corresponding to two different tunes, March Militaire and Danse Parisienne. A sign next to the music box stated it could be played if you put some money in the charity collecting tin on the bar:

The occasional snaps you can hear in the recording came from the music box itself, the disk flexing and shuddering as it turned. For modern-day equivalents, have a look at these online Whitney Music Box simulations.

Categories: Field recording

Nocturnal emitters

Posted by IMR on 02 May 2010

LAST THURSDAY EVENING was spent at a Bat Conservation Trust training workshop in the Wildlife Wetland Centre in Barnes. After being taught how to identify four different bat species by their sonar clicks, we trainees were led on a walk around the Wetland Centre, bat detectors pointing hopefully this way and that.

Five different species were heard that evening: Common and Soprano Pipistrelles, one or more Leisler’s bats hurtling crazily around a hide, the plodding clicks of a Noctule, and the geiger-counter rattle of a Daubenton’s bat as it skimmed over a lake like a puck. Two recordings turned out okay.

This brief one is of a Soprano Pipistrelle, so named because its sonar clicks are squeezed out of its small body at around 10kHz higher than the Common Pipistrelle:

The Liesler’s bat (or, possibly, bats) put in a good performance near a hide, and its silhouette could be seen tumbling across the cloudy night sky:

The bat detectors pick up a fair amount of noise, but somehow that sounds right, like you’re listening to some unfathomable short-wave radio station. The bat detector used was a Magenta Bat5, which you can buy directly from the manufacturer for about £90. You can use it for recording other animals as well: some grasshoppers, crickets and moths, as well as rats and mice, use ultrasound for signalling.

Categories: Wildlife

The sounds and history of Caledonian Road

Posted by IMR on 27 April 2010

CALEDONIAN ROAD RUNS north for a mile-and-a-half from grimy Kings Cross to Holloway. Traditionally it’s been a place of junk shops, greasy spoon cafes and lively English and Irish pubs, becoming more varied as you approach the Cross.

One of the paradoxes of London is that some archaic habits survive longer the nearer they are to the city centre. On Caledonian Road you’ll find: KC Continental Foods, an old-fashioned Italian delicatessen; the Abcat Cine Club, where the curious convention still exists of having straight porn films shown in a gay cruising joint; the Flying Scotsman, one of the few traditional strippers’ pubs left in London; and Housmans radical bookshop, again one of the last of its kind in the city.

Gone are the Ancient Black record shop, the Beano cafe, the Den pub, and T. G. Lynes and Sons, which had a window display full of pump motors neatly halved to show their inner workings, the cut edges painted red.

On the Guardian newspaper website there’s now a great little sound map of the Caledonian Road, put together by the oral historian Alan Dein and producer Francesca Panetta. The commentary reaches once for the estate agent’s stock phrase of ‘an almost villagey feel’, which isn’t the right way at all to describe the road. But otherwise Dein’s done a good job with this and both his friendly interviewing skills and commitment to local history are in evidence.

Alan Dein also played a major role in the Kings Cross Voices oral history project, which well deserves to be a website in its own right, rather than tucked away among Camden Council’s pages.

The so-called regeneration gaining pace in Kings Cross will probably gentrify the southern stretch of Caledonian Road, meaning a dull and exclusive monoculture of faddish shops and overpriced bars. Enjoy what’s there while you still can.

Categories:

Two south London dawn choruses

Posted by IMR on 25 April 2010

AS THE SUN rises ever earlier the dawn chorus grows richer and more intense, and it’ll reach its peak in May.

This recording was made a few weeks ago in Hilly Fields, an area of mainly open parkland in Lewisham:

Blackbirds and Great Tits comprise most of the players in that orchestra, and the hilltop location means traffic noise is fairly noticeable, even at half-past-five.

The next recording was made early this morning in the middle of the Sydenham Hill Wood nature reserve, and there’s a greater array of species to be heard:

The peacock’s screeching wasn’t expected and thanks to the trove of fascinating knowledge that’s Transpontine there’s a good story behind it. In brief, a wealthy eccentric turned her huge home nearby into a fetid ark with horses, peacocks, and over sixty alsatians. The dogs attacked and mauled passersby, in response the authorities acted, and she fled the country.

The dogs and horses were removed, but it sounds as if the peacocks were simply left to go free-range. How they survived being among dozens of dogs is a mystery; maybe they’re not as dumb as they seem.

Categories: Site news

Volcano makes London plane-free

Posted by IMR on 15 April 2010

THE VOLCANIC ERUPTION in Iceland has flung enough ash into the sky for Air Traffic Control to stop all flights over Britain until seven o’clock Friday morning.

Not so great for Icelanders having to flee their homes, but this is good news for Londoners living under flight paths. The last time London had some measure of noise reduction imposed on it was for Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997, when traffic was barred from the city centre and flights to and from Heathrow were suspended.

Categories:

Quiet please

Posted by IMR on 12 April 2010

LONDON’S PUBLIC LIBRARIES are not always the best places to get work done, if you expect silence. Listen to that old man over there, coughing and wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his Lord Antony anorak. What’s he reading? Ah yes, Sven Hassel. And you, madam, kindly stop your kids running around. You’re not in Dr Chessington’s World of Adventures.

Here are a couple of library ambiences collected last Saturday. The first was recorded in Hackney Central Library, a modern, well-lit building near the Town Hall in Mare Street. To the left, you can just hear a man scribbling furiously on a pad with a ballpoint pen.

That was in a noisy, busy spot, but there are some secluded corners where those with high expectations of quiet can retreat to.

Westminster Reference Library is just south of Leicester Square on St Martin’s Street. High ceilings and decorative features give it the dignified municipal atmosphere of its time. The downstairs reading room had its windows open on a warm afternoon, letting in the sounds of passing cars.

If you decide to visit, have a look at the Orange Street Congregational Church just round the corner. It seems to preserve a curious set of beliefs into the 21st century, that of British Israelism. A glass-fronted ‘wayside pulpit’ contains a lengthy handwritten rant about the state of the nation.

Categories: Site news

Bill Fontana at Somerset House from 15 April

Posted by IMR on 11 April 2010

THE OHIO-BORN sound artist Bill Fontana has a new commission called ‘River Sounding’ opening at Somerset House from Thursday 15 April. (Last year a group of London-based artists ran a project called Soundings from the Estuary, also about the Thames and including field recordings; the word ‘sounding’ is an obvious choice for inclusion in any river sound-art title.)

According to the email from Sound and Music, Fontana’s work “will create an imaginary acoustic map of the Thames, taking visitors through Somerset House’s atmospheric subterranean spaces, normally closed to the public, and out to the Great Arch on the Embankment.” Worth a visit, I’d have thought.

Categories: Arts projects

The sound grid is done

Posted by IMR on 11 April 2010

THE LONDON SOUND Survey’s sound grid came to an end last week after more than a year of intermittent work. The grid involved plotting a series of regularly-spaced but otherwise arbitrary points on a map of London, then going to wherever they happened to fall and recording what was there.

The last few points on the grid have proved unreachable, and going about everywhere on foot has its drawbacks. What look like quiet country lanes on the map turn out to be high-speed luges for glossy black Range Rovers to hurtle along. After having to leap twice into hedgerows to avoid being hit, I’ve come to think of them as off-limits to pedestrians. Hardly ‘The Hay Wain’ is it? But those missing grid points all land in fields, so it’s not too hard to imagine what sort of sounds you’d have heard.

Otherwise it’s been enjoyable making the grid recordings. A few fences and walls had to be scrambled over to get onto golf courses and the grounds of a fishing lake, and the mic windshield with its furry cover often proved a good way of getting talking to all sorts of people, from fairground showmen to suburban householders.

Although the grid is a very low-resolution map indeed, the results aren’t completely random. Ring-necked parakeets are shown in the areas of south-west London they’ve inhabited the longest, and parts of the main aeroplane flight paths can be seen. (Some of the plane symbols over north-west and south-east London are for light aircraft flying from the aerodromes at Northolt and Biggin Hill.) You can see the signature of traffic on the North Circular and the A12, and well-off neighbourhoods in north London have more sounds of building and house renovation work.

As for what’s a typical London sound, have a listen and decide for yourself.

Categories: Site news

New homes for your sounds: Audioboo, Ipadio, Soundcloud

Posted by IMR on 02 April 2010

VERY FEW INTERNET users actively seek out field recordings. If you want to increase the chances of your recordings being noticed, a good way is to find several different homes for them. Of course, if you’ve already collected some London sounds, then the London Sound Survey DropBox is like the open beak of a chick clamouring to be fed. It’s also well worth considering the excellent Freesound Project and SoundTransit websites.

However, none of them provide embeddable players for you to stream your sounds through to your own blog or website. This post is going to look at three sound-based services which let you use such players: Audioboo, Ipadio, and Soundcloud.

Audioboo has a clean and attractive-looking website with the slogan ‘Because sound is social’ on its homepage. It began life just over a year ago aimed at iPhone users wishing to record and upload their favourite sounds. These are encapsulated as individual entries called ‘boos’. It’s like Twitter with sound files. Audioboo recently added direct uploading from hard drives, which is what makes it of potential interest to field recordists. You can enter a title and tag words, and add geotags using a small Google Maps window.

The embeddable Audioboo player looks and sounds like this:

The artefacts at the beginning indicate a high compression ratio for streaming. In fairness to Audioboo, that initial blast of almost pure noise is untypical of pretty much any recording that’s likely to be uploaded there, and hardly any of their users will be bothered by the compression. The player is stylish but doesn’t provide an embed code for anyone wishing to stream your sounds elsewhere.

Audioboo makes effective use of word-of-mouth and social media like Twitter to promote itself. On the Everyone’s Boos page, entries were appearing this afternoon at the rate of about twenty an hour. Users can set up a personal profile, follow and be followed by other users, and make comments on entries. Radio broadcasters and other media professionals seem to get by far the most followers and comments.

Ipadio is similar to Audioboo in that it’s free, allows you to upload sound files from a PC or a mobile phone, displays all the latest uploads on its website, and also has a name for its users’ entries that sounds like a tribe of furry beings from In the Night Garden: ‘phlogs’. The Ipadio site is cluttered and busy-looking as it goes after potential paying customers in a more direct way than Audioboo. You can enter a title, tag words and Google Maps data. There’s also a field in which you can type some descriptive guff about your recording which is carried over onto the Ipadio player:

While the player maybe isn’t as smart-looking as Audioboo’s, an embed code is provided, and it’s this which could help your recording of the weekly emptying of the Sidcup bottle bank go viral.

On the Latest Phonecasts page, it’s clear there just aren’t as many people using Ipadio as Audioboo. Your recording will stay on the first couple of pages for longer, but with a smaller audience to notice it. How the tradeoff compares between Ipadio and Audioboo isn’t clear: Audioboo doesn’t yet show how many people have listened to your track.

Audioboo and Ipadio are free to their small-fry users, but neither of them yet offers the ability to assert your own Creative Commons licence. Field recordists may also feel at sea among what is a very different recording ethos. The field recordist’s aim is usually to remove their presence as much as possible from the recording, like the way photographers avoid putting their fingers over the lens when taking a picture, and in so doing become the hole-in-the-wall through which the listener can hear a different time and place.

This plainly isn’t the goal of many Audioboo and Ipadio users, and it takes a little marketing stardust to suggest that some kind of community is being built, although in fairness no more so than with any other form of social media. By necessity Audioboo and Ipadio are cultivating audiences which can be sold either to advertisers or to big players forking out for their own dedicated channels.

Soundcloud is aimed foremost at musicians and it has a range of features and an eclecticism in its users which makes it more appealing than some of the competition. Not only can you upload to your own named channel, but so can anyone else if you give them the URL to your DropBox. When you upload a sound file you can specify the level of rights protection, including Creative Commons options. Three different embeddable players are offered. First, the stripped-down mini player:

Next, the standard player:

The third option allows you to include artwork in a 300x300 pixel panel. The colour schemes of all the players can be customised and 128kbps MP3s (it says here) are created for streaming. Soundcloud has a lot of other features to enable the sharing of recordings among its users, and a tiered system of memberships from a basic free package to premium ones aimed at record companies. The ‘Lite’ version at €29 a year offers good value for money.

If Soundcloud is so good, why waste time with Audioboo and Ipadio? First, they’re both free. Second, the rolling pages of entries do expose your recordings to an audience who would otherwise be unlikely to come across them. Third, the Ipadio player displays a description of your track. Finally, and slightly unfortunately, Soundcloud is occasionally a bit buggy when it comes to uploading.

Verdict: sign up for the free version or 14-day trial of the Lite version of Soundcloud, and try out uploading to Ipadio and AudioBoo.

Categories:

The solar system music box

Posted by IMR on 31 March 2010

HERE’S A NICE example of information graphics from Information is Beautiful:

Click here to play it.

Categories: Sound websites

History's history

Posted by IMR on 25 March 2010

THE HISTORICAL SECTION has been very buggy the last few days, and many visitors will have found themselves rewarded with a blank white screen of ignorance when trying to view it.

Every reference count was contained on a single webpage, and although they’re not all visible at once, the content management system has finally had enough. So the sections of ‘economic’, ‘social’, ‘ambient’ and so on are now being hived off onto their own individual pages. This should make browsing the references a lot quicker, and it will be finished tonight.

Categories: Site news

Finch sound art at the Barbican

Posted by IMR on 22 March 2010

IF YOU HAVEN’T yet been, it’s worth checking out Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s sound art installation at the Barbican. It’s the one with the finches ‘playing’ amplified guitars and cymbals.

The finches go about their affairs in fast-forward. They pluck grass stems to make half-hearted nests on the guitars’ fretboards, or huddle together briefly before going their separate ways. They seem self-absorbed, like Londoners.

They’re semi-tame and don’t mind the presence of people, although I never saw a bird land on anyone. The finches are as mindful of us as we are of the passing of clouds.

Here’s a recording made this afternoon:

At every step there are creaks from the wooden decking that’s been laid down. Perhaps it’s to get visitors to wander around slowly and carefully. The event is on until late May, and it’s free to get in – more details here.

Categories: Arts projects

London Sound Survey now supports Deafness Research UK

Posted by IMR on 20 March 2010

BERTRAND RUSSELL ONCE observed that if you sought advice from a doctor, an optician, a dentist and a nutritionist, there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to do all the things they’d told you to.

Yet anyone with an interest in sound ought to be especially concerned with protecting their hearing. It’s easy to discount the future when the effects of noise on hearing are stealthy and cumulative. Nor does the prospect of going deaf arouse quite the same fear as going blind. All the more reason not to take hearing for granted.

A week or so ago I met people from the charity Deafness Research UK to discuss how the London Sound Survey could help promote their work. They’re Britain’s national medical research charity for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. They fund scientific research which includes the early detection of deafness, treatments for tinnitus, cochlear implants to help people recover their hearing, the genetics involved in some forms of hearing loss, and much else.

They’ve agreed to recognise the London Sound Survey as what they very kindly call a partner, although a supporter would be much more accurate. You’ve probably already seen the Deafness Research emblem plugged on the front page, and they’ll be getting mentions on promotional printed literature coming out next month, plus a few other things further ahead. But that’s like throwing a pebble into the sea. So why not consider lending them your support as well?

In the meantime, have a look at their website – there’s lots on it. A research section describes the scientific work they’ve supported into deafness and hearing loss, there are articles explaining the different forms and causes of hearing loss, plus some useful pages on looking after your ears.

Categories: Site news

Sounds of the modern age in Orwell's Coming Up for Air

Posted by IMR on 19 March 2010

GEORGE ORWELL DESCRIBED the English as like a family with the wrong members in charge. George Bowling, a self-educated salesman who’s the central character of Coming Up for Air, is the kind of man Orwell thought should be in the driving seat, if only the barriers of class could be dismantled.

The clever, articulate Bowling is almost a prototype of the gathering class of technicians, draughtsmen and engineers which Orwell saw in the new towns and industries of 1930s south-east England, and to whom he believed socialists should appeal. But Bowling is fat and forty-five, and when he returns to his Thames Valley birthplace he doesn’t fit into the new world of tea shops and housing estates. Between Bowling’s nostalgic memories and dismay at the present Orwell draws a path which points towards the Two Minutes’ Hate of 1984.

The sound of a milk bar’s radio is the grit in the oyster for Bowling’s dislike of the machine age:

Other modern noises disrupt the peacefulness of the Thames in Bowling’s home-town of Lower Binfield in Oxfordshire:

As with gramophones and radios, so with propaganda cranked out by a guest speaker at the Lower Binfield Left Book Club:

The ideologue as player-piano reappears in the ‘duckspeak’ of 1984:

Then Bowling decides to listen in a different way:

It takes a conscious effort to hear the truth hiding behind the duckspeak. Only in nature and a vanished way of life can you trust what you’re listening to:

Wetherall can be his own man at church and among his neighbours, but Bowling and, later, Winston Smith have to find their inner truths while alone. The struggle to hear what’s true must be waged not only against propaganda but also the collective voice of fear and awe, the ‘roar of the human shingle’, to borrow the words of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Near the end of Coming Up for Air, an RAF aeroplane accidentally releases a bomb over Lower Binfield:

It is this depersonalising sound which reappears at the end of the Two Minutes’ Hate, carried from Lower Binfield into a new civilisation as different and unnerving as that of the impassive stone heads glimpsed in the jungles of Burmese Days:

Categories:

New mics and clever parrots

Posted by IMR on 13 March 2010

LAST FRIDAY A new set of grief detectors arrived all the way from Microphone Madness in Florida. It’s nice getting things in the post that aren’t bills.

The mics are designated as MM-HLSOs, and you can read their specs on the budget headworn mics page here. They’re based on Sennheiser MKE 2 lavalier mics, and it looks like Microphone Madness may have altered them slightly, boosting sensitivity from 5mV/Pa to 10mV/Pa, while increasing their self-noise from 26dB to 29dB.

The mics are very small, which means they can be inserted in a Croakie mount, also supplied by Microphone Madness. What’s a Croakie mount, and isn’t it a bit irritating when product names have an -ie suffix? It’s a spectacle retainer made from two tubes of stretch fabric which slip over each arm of a pair of specs and converge at the back of your neck. The mics and their leads nestle unseen inside the tubes.

One of the nice things about being middle-aged is that while you can no longer wear shiny clothes, you can get away with a wider range of hats and with spectacle retainers, both ideal for stealth recording purposes, even if they make you style-kin to the tribe of antique dealers and racing pundits:

A first recording was made inside the Pembroke Arms pub in Primrose Hill. This pub is high-ceilinged and, like many modish London watering holes, has bare floorboards instead of carpet, producing the acoustics which are peculiar to that kind of place. The recording isn’t anything special, but the mics do a decent enough job:

The mics, their mount and delivery all came to $300. This is good value when compared with the price of a single Sennheiser MKE-2 from British-based retailers. The items was despatched promptly by Microphone Madness and came with an instruction leaflet. The Croakie mount does nothing to reduce wind-noise though, so it’s pretty much an indoor set-up. Later that afternoon the Sonic Studios DSMs with their handy windshield were used for a walk around the Stables market in Camden:

The MM-HLSOs were given a second go while wandering around the ground floor departments at Harrods:

I’ve always liked department stores, going back to childhood visits to an uncle who worked at Swan & Edgars in Regent Street near Piccadilly Circus. But there was one ritual at Harrods which, like Swan & Edgars, is now no more.

Harrods’ owner Mohamed Al Fayed is a parrot-fancier who keeps a large flock in his own private aviary. So the Harrods pets department was beefed up to include several different parrot species, some of them rarely seen in this country. An employee was designated as parrot-keeper, and most afternoons he put on a performance which drew large numbers of wealthy ladies of a certain age.

The parrot-keeper would begin moving among the cages, naming and describing each occupant, before opening one of the cage doors and putting his hand inside. A gaudy sun conure shuffled up his arm. Now he began to lay it on thick, telling his audience that the parrot was an emotional animal with “the intelligence of a four-year-old child”. On cue, the bird bowed its head, clucked quietly and the parrot-keeper tickled the back of its neck.

Sighs of sentimental pleasure rippled through the crowd, and one woman spoke for them all when she cried aloud: Ohhhhhh! That’s what he wants!

It would have made a good recording.

Categories: Recording equipment

George Gissing and the Nether World

Posted by IMR on 09 March 2010

GEORGE GISSING WAS a late Victorian writer who 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. Starting 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 has a prison to run in book form, and no-one is allowed out.

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