Blog
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.
19 March 2015
The average of the average
A FEW WEEKS ago I went out with Paul Tourle from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology to record around Bowes ward in Enfield, north London.
This site’s slowly-evolving 12 Tones of London statistical project has identified Bowes as the most typical council ward within the least remarkable cluster of wards. If you want an unreasonably condensed answer to the journalist’s question of So, what is the sound of London? then it’s not a bad place to start.
Paul took along his film camera and I’m pleased to be able to reproduce here some of his photographs from our trip.
Bowes is mostly comprised of residential streets of terraced and semi-detached houses. The ward boundaries plot a sausage shape with an east–west axis and it’s sliced up along its length by a railway line, the New River, and Green Lanes. There also seems to be a wealth gradient running from west to east mirroring the traditional one of London as a whole.
It’s curious to wonder if this pattern of self-similarity occurs above chance levels across council wards and even boroughs. Well-to-do people likely always preferred to live upwind of industry or have their smoke drift over poorer areas in the parishes and villages which eventually became engulfed by the city.
By the railway line is a small path called Wishaw Walk that leads past an electricity substation and some allotments. All the recordings and pictures were made on a weekday afternoon.
Apart from the New River, the other waterway in Bowes is Pymme’s Brook. The stretch of it immediately north of the allotments off Chequers Way amounts to little more than a convenient rubbish tip for some locals. Tangles of fallen tree branches make it reminiscent of a bayou in the Florida Everglades provided you look away from all the beer cans and plastic fertiliser sacks. Further downstream Pymme’s Brook is confined to a grim concrete culvert.
The afternoon shuffled along the mundane streets like a pensioner coming back from the post office. Tottenhall sports ground in the south-east of the ward was deserted except for gulls that lifted and settled on the football pitches in a light breeze.
These are some of the sights and sounds of the most demographically-typical part of London, the city with its edges shaved off. What’s left is someone putting the rubbish out in a wheely bin, voices from behind garden fences, distant trains and planes, a car door slamming somewhere down the street, the chirp of sparrows in a hedge, a dog barking from far off across a sports ground.
It’s not a bad world to live in. I belong to it. So do you, probably.
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Sony PCM D100 recorder review – May 2020
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Street Cries: London Lickpenny – February 2020
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More January street cries – January 2020
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Street Cries: January 2020 addition – January 2020
Sounds of the London Loop – December 2019
LMA talk: thank you – November 2019
Recordings: November 2019 additions – November 2019
November talk – November 2019
Street Cries: October 2019 additions – October 2019
New guestbook – October 2019
Rutting season – October 2019
The clattering bridge – October 2019
London Metropolitan Archives – March 2019
Street cries now being added to Pinterest – January 2019
Social media – January 2019
Recent site upgrades – December 2018
Hiatus – August 2018
BBC sound effects plotted on a map – July 2018
In memory of Richard Beard, wildlife recordist – June 2018
New section on historical street cries – April 2018
Long in the tooth – June 2017
Acoustic baffle – January 2017
MixPre-D clamp – November 2016
New York Times – August 2016
The EU referendum and the silence of the streets – June 2016
Media chancers – April 2016
New feature: Sounds of the Musical Museum – February 2016
The soundscape of Oxford Street – December 2015
Tim Hunkin – November 2015
The reverberant city – November 2015
New! Old! More historical recordings added – November 2015
Sounds of 1960s Las Vegas – November 2015
Five fundamental stances in recording – October 2015
The trouble with sound maps – May 2015
The average of the average – March 2015
The sounds of sectarianism – March 2015
Which sex does a computer sound like? – February 2015
Why girls shouldn't run away to London – February 2015
Arthur Machen: the sounds from beyond the veil – February 2015
Vanished City: London's Lost Neighbourhoods by Tom Bolton – January 2015
Sound and Music's Creative Data Club – January 2015
Out of town: Whittlesey Straw Bear festival – January 2015
The Bird Tree – December 2014
Down with noise: first impressions of Sennheiser MKH 8020 mics – December 2014
The Block: making a simple stereo baffle – December 2014
Thanks to everyone at the Marlborough and the Social – December 2014
The London Sound Survey as a full-time concern – August 2014
Thanks to everyone who came to Earshots 4 – June 2014
Edgelands: Staines Moor – June 2014
Guest post from Cities and Memory – May 2014
Darwin among the earthworms – May 2014
Up with the lark: soundCamp in Rotherhithe, May 3–4 – April 2014
Coming this April: Field Studies 2014 – March 2014
Hello and welcome to Mail Online readers – January 2014
Sensing Cities back on Resonance 104.4 FM from this Friday – January 2014
Sounds in poetry: 'Adlestrop' and 'Death of a Naturalist' – January 2014
Sound and the Law: Sounds you must and must not make – November 2013
Sound and the Law: What are the limits on recording? – October 2013
Permanent present – September 2013
Ships' Opera at the Thames Festival – September 2013
Quiet please #2: Peabody estate, Victoria – September 2013
Extra! Recordings of English newspaper sellers – August 2013
Quiet please #1: Lincoln's Inn – August 2013
All systems go – July 2013
London Sound Survey LP progress report – June 2013
What does London really sound like? – May 2013
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Street noise and the taming of Victorian London – April 2013
Here soon: the London Sound Survey vinyl LP – March 2013
Crossing the Thames at Woolwich – March 2013
Sounds of disaster in peacetime London – February 2013
Reverberation and Authority – January 2013
London on Christmas Eve – December 2012
Beware the Cat: auditory overload in the 16th century – November 2012
Jez riley French in Soho – November 2012
Coming up! Second batch of vintage BBC radio sounds – November 2012
The resurgence of religion in London – November 2012
Searching for unearthly sounds – October 2012
Sound, hallucination and the moment of epiphany – September 2012
London voices: outline of a new sound map – September 2012
One-track mind – August 2012
Yeah, yeah, industrial estate – August 2012
Rudyard Kipling and sonic warfare – August 2012
Field recording and Philip Larkin on poetry – July 2012
The man who heard the flowers scream – July 2012
Motorcycle Wall of Death – July 2012
Casanova in London – June 2012
Third annual report – June 2012
Hello to Wire magazine readers – June 2012
A quick thank-you to Sound Network – May 2012
Mapping London's subterranean rivers – May 2012
Time off in the Scottish Highlands – April 2012
Absence of sound – April 2012
A taxonomy for field recordings – March 2012
Victorian cage-bird fanciers of Brick Lane – March 2012
The slow movement – February 2012
Thoughts on classifying field recordings – February 2012
Building a field recording system 3: recorder accessories – January 2012
Building a field recording system 2: the compact recorder – January 2012
Building a field recording system 1: introduction – January 2012
Where Londoners come from – January 2012
Nice to meet you, London Historians – January 2012
Thanks, Londonist – December 2011
James Greenwood's 'The Wilds of London' from 1874 – December 2011
Our synthetic sound environment – December 2011
Making engine noises with a jam jar – December 2011
Spam attack! – December 2011
Five compact XLR-enabled audio recorders – November 2011
Some recordings from the Waterways sound map – November 2011
Victoria coach station in 1935 and 2011 – November 2011
London sounds from 1930s and 1940s BBC radio – October 2011
Your recordings from Embankment and Dalston – October 2011
When the planes stopped flying – September 2011
Sound and health – September 2011
New recordings in from Sam Appleby and Craig Barrett – September 2011
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Sound-mapping London's waterways – August 2011
Looting the Iceland store in Rye Lane, Peckham – August 2011
East London Line recorded by John Bingham Hall – August 2011
Wind-powered sound art in Cumbria – July 2011
Sonic pleasures of the landline telephone – June 2011
Les Passages Couverts – English Style – June 2011
Shopaholic – June 2011
Sounds of the Thames estuary remembered – June 2011
The London Sound Survey at SoundFjord, 12th June – June 2011
Two years old today – May 2011
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Howling wolf – March 2011
Cuckold's Haven – March 2011
Willesden Junction at dawn – February 2011
Mug-house riots and a short history of hissing – February 2011
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Make the darkness your friend – January 2011
New uses for old London maps – January 2011
Real sounds of Lagos – January 2011
Sound maps from Inukjuak and New York State – January 2011
The All-in-One London Map is now online – January 2011
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Three recordings from Greenwich and its peninsula – December 2010
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???????????? ? ????? ?????????? ? ???, ??????? ????????? – January 2010
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Doodlebugs – November 2009
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Sounds of the Chislehurst underworld – November 2009
Kenneth Williams and the Mayor of Garratt – October 2009
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Birds and police whistles – September 2009
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Doves from above – September 2009
London Sound Survey on Radio 4 – September 2009
New wildlife section – August 2009
The Elephant and the Submarine – August 2009
These are the warning sounds – August 2009
Gypsy buskers on the Underground – August 2009
The train beggar – August 2009
1892: Grisly sounds in a London church – July 2009
From the Crystal Palace to Bluewater – July 2009
The decline of whistling – July 2009
Fairground barkers – July 2009
A few words at the beginning – May 2009
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