Enquiring Ear

Field recording and found sounds

Author: Enquiring Ear

  • Resonant sounds of London’s Museumland

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    iconic Queen’s Tower at Imperial

    I went to university at Imperial College, in the chi-chi London district of South Kensington.  The area has much to offer the field recordist in terms of resonant public spaces. If you want to avoid the rain or simply enjoy the soundscape  you can take the long pedestrian tunnel under Exhibition Road from the tube station to the museums.

    I recently returned to Imperial and went to the Alumni reception who served excellent coffee, gratis. It’s a world away from the machine coffee and plastic cups and ‘coffee whitener’ that fuelled my studies in the Physics department many years ago. The entrance to the College from Exhibition Road is now an enclosed space with lots of glass and hard surfaces, it has an interesting acoustic of its own – I recorded this space from next to the statue of Queen Mary

    Footfall Foley wizards will hear the tapping aren’t high heels which most people would associate with the percussive sound but Blakeys on a man’s shoes.

    South Kensington has three lovely Victorian museums. Massive galleried spaces over several floors and often a curved vaulting ceiling. These are just made for binaural stereo!

    I went to the Science Museum in Exhibition Road, part of a cluster of Victorian Museum buildings. The others are the Victoria and Albert and the Natural History Museum. The latter has an amazing curved atrium and a fine acoustic space.

    In the Science Museum on the ground floor near the space exhibition

    the next recording is from the Energy exhibition on the second floor, looking over the massive open space to the steam engines on the ground floor

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    the sharp snap at 00:32 is an art exhibit marked do not touch, which of course everyone touches, resulting in a spark and a slight shock to the curious.

    I enjoyed the visit and the incidental soundscapes. It is also good that Britain ended its dalliance with charging for museum entry.

  • Installing cavity wall insulation

    A neighbour was having cavity wall insulation installed. This seemed to be polystyrene beads about 3mm diameter blown into a hole drilled from the outside. The machine makes a prodigious racket.

    A truck was parked on the road and a massive compressor started up. The noise increased when the beads were loaded up, from big plastic sacks. Job was done in a day and a bit.

    I still wonder what happens to that sort of thing in a fire. It’s better contained than the ghastly polystyrene tiles people used to insulate ceilings with decades ago. This continued until the fire brigade public service ads on TV about what happened in a fire. Polystyrene still produces nasty fumes, however.

    Probably recorded with an Olympus LS something XY

  • Apple crusher crunching sound

    Apple crusher crunching sound

    There’s a satisfying noise to be had from this apple crusher – the first stages of making cider

    The crunch has some of the biting into an apple sound. The ripping apart sound is ever so slightly ghoulish, one for Halloween…

    After this was recorded a bunch of people joined in with their kids. Kids aren’t usually conducive to easy recording, though they did a grand job turning the handle, so I switched to using a stereo contact mic on the mechanism. My contact mic has a strong magnet on it so it’ easy to get noises from ferrous metal objects.

    I had to EQ out the 3kHz resonance of the mic, but the result is less satisfying than the regular recording to my ears.

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  • Echoes of South Kensington Station

    Echoes of South Kensington Station

    South Kensington Tube station is the gateway to some of London’s famous museums – the Natural History museum, the Victoria and Albert and the Science Museum. To save people getting wet or wrangling the traffic along Exhibition Road, there is a long pedestrian walkway from the station to the museums.

    It has a fabulous acoustic, one that’s enjoyed by small children, buskers and field recordists alike! I went to university at Imperial College and used this tunnel often. Even now, the soundmark takes me back to student times…

    Here’s the sound of a busker using the acoustic well, and some kids enjoying the tunnel later on

  • Robins at Alderman Canal

    Robins at Alderman Canal

    There is a little nature reserve by the canal near the football ground, an oasis of calm. The water is sluggish with green on top apart from where the water seems to well up from the river bed in these gently roiling clear pools. I don’t think the water makes any sound here, there is some background traffic noise which would mask it.

    The nature reserve was improved by the Access to Nature project in 2012. It’s easy to be cynical about some of these projects but this one seems to have worked really well, and there was a lot more birdsong in this part of path by the canal than in the unimproved bits.

  • Walking through evening nightclub crowd at Ipswich Buttermarket

    Wandering through this crowd waiting outside a nightclub to get in. I was on the way to the beer festival, nice expectant ambience

  • Swifts getting ready to leave

    Seems like it’s been a successful year for our swifts, they have been breeding and screaming parties are heard overhead.

    They’re still as hard to record as they were last year, however there are more of them it seems. I got the AT XY mics on the job this time. Maybe next year I will try a seriously long boom pole to get the mic pointed straight up in the air and use the directional pattern against some of the noise and traffic rumble of the town, but I’m still of the view swifts sound best in the city!

  • Whitchurch Town Mill

    Whitchurch Town Mill

    Water passing through the sluice to the Town Mill. The mill is no longer working and has been turned into a house, but the water still passes through the sluices. Blackbird chick sound heard at about 20s

  • Flock of young Jackdaws begging food, Whitchurch, Hampshire

    Flock of young Jackdaws begging food, Whitchurch, Hampshire

    Flock of Jackdaws with young in trees by playing fields and trees by the River Test in Whitchurch. The calls of the young from all around come out in this binaural recording.

  • The sound of ball bearings seizing up

    There’s a characteristic sound of bearings seizing up, and I first came across this with car wheel-bearings – they screech for weeks before going, but car sounds are hard to localise. Feeling the massive heft to the right in the fast lane of the A12 as the driver’s side wheel-bearing collapses and jams means I know that this sound means a bearing on the way out, even if here it is only on a neighbour’s Flymo 🙂

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