Occasional posts on subjects including field recording, London history and literature, other websites worth looking at, articles in the press, and news of sound-related events.
ON THIS SITE’S About page there are a few paragraphs which try to rationalise the existence of the London Sound Survey. Among them are these sentences:
The poet Philip Larkin put it much better:
What Larkin called his ‘working definition’ of a poem is taken from his 1964 essay Writing Poems, although it was one he’d thought of earlier in his writing career. By the time of the essay Larkin judged it to be under-powered:
Many of the best-known recordists return time and again to the mother-lode of sounds found in the natural world. Other subjects yield poor results: fountains almost never sound as good as they look, rush-hour traffic is banal, wind-noise on the mic is unlikely to make a compelling focus. But what is known to work and not to work must amount to little compared to everything that possibly can be recorded. So much remains to be explored.
Perhaps there are also implicit rules, like the ones of pictorial composition which exist independently of subject matter, and which determine if the arrangement of sounds within a recording is satisying or not. These can be discussed and argued over, but how one makes the choice of what to record is harder to pin down. Larkin thinks it’s a mystery when it comes to deciding what to write poems about:
This is a more interesting question than the one of motivation in general. For amateur recordists it likely comes down to straightforward pleasure, beyond which the reasons become opaque and the hunt for them seems less compelling than finding new sounds in the world.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
The balloonist in the desert is dreaming
The Binaural Diaries of Ollie Hall
The Ragged Society of Antiquarian Ramblers
Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology
World Forum for Acoustic Ecology