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:

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