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.
THE FIRST proper field recording I made was in April 2008 and it featured the sounds of Petticoat Lane market on a Sunday morning. Since then I’ve tried to come up with a variety of ways both to guide the making of recordings and present them on webpages. I hope my efforts have given at least some pleasure to site visitors over the years.
The website is becoming a bit long in the tooth now, and needs to have its content management system upgraded if it’s to keep working. This will mean it going offline for around a week sometime soon while all the templates are rejigged. The audio players too will need a lot of attention to make them compatible with the ever-growing variety of tablets and smartphones.
Another long-hoped-for change will be a move from field recording to oral history interviewing. Seeking out and presenting the city’s sounds can be very enjoyable but subject to the law of diminishing returns, so that the site ends up like an obsessively detailed theatre set onto which no actors ever emerge. Time for a change of approach.
Interviews for the first oral history project begin in July this year so hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before you can start to see and hear the results.
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