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.
AN EMAIL OF the kind I very much like to get has just arrived from Martin Tanton, who was present at the Sonic Art Research Unit’s seminar last Thursday. I hope you don’t mind me quoting from it at length, Martin:
I’ve just been looking at the site and listening to some of the sounds. The river at Erith and Dartford scrambler bikes were sounds I recognised right away [. . .] I also used to cycle along the Thames up to Cliffe and out to Hoo, Upnor, the Isles of Grain and Sheppey, just looking and listening.
There are sounds I remember that have gone for good, trolley buses, trams, the Woolwich paddle steamer ferries, newspaper sellers, horse-drawn bread vans. When I was a kid there were a lot of iron barges on the Thames, and when it was windy they banged together like giant gongs, you could hear them several miles away in Welling, where I lived, if the wind was in the right direction. There wasn’t the constant car noise we have today to block them out. There was a lot of traffic on the river in the 1950’s, and when it was foggy at night I lay in bed listening to the ships’ horns in the distance. It would be great if someone had recorded these sounds.
From the way you’ve described them, I wish those sounds had been recorded too.
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