Field recording and found sounds
I was making a binaural recording of this fairground roundabout when another sound recordist arrived to get a clip from the ride itself – he asked the proprietor if it was okay at the beginning of the clip.
The actual fairground organ is a recording played out of speakers either side of the organ facade. The giveaway, apart from no moving parts, was when the operator fiddled with the volume control 😉
An exasperated mother has to take a big kid and a little kid to task after Dad pushes his child’s scooter too fast. Overheard on the way to the Ipswich Beer festival by the docks.
Borough Market is under the arches leading in to London Bridge Station, and this trader was hawking snacks and decent fast food, like wild boar sausages and hare. I couldn’t work out what the heck he was calling out when I was there and I still can’t work out what his exhortation is.
At the beginning of the track there is the shrill call of starlings. I was chuffed, because something really bad has happened to London’s birdlife over the last thirty years, as many once common birds are common no more. There used to be thousands of starlings in London, there was an enormous roost at Charing Cross station decades ago.
Most tragically, the humble house sparrow seems to have surrendered the fight. As a child growing up in London they were everywhere, in the parks you could sometimes see some old boy feeding hundreds, in the ways tourists feed the sparrows outside Notre Dame in Paris.You’d walk past the hedges in suburban London and be chided with the peremptory chirp of a house sparrow. No more – in the last three decades the chirp has fallen silent as the cockney sparrows have abandoned the city. Central London is now pretty much a bird-free zone apart for the ubiquitous pigeon.
Starlings have also abandoned the city, so it was a treat to hear their call. Perhaps these have worked their way up the river, for Borough market is near the river at London Bridge.
Even in Ipswich you get to hear the boat horns sounding on New Year’s day, so this time I went to Shotley Peninsula, between the large container port at Felixstowe and another port at Harwich to record the ship horns sounding the New Year in.
A nice touch was the Shotley residents have a sense of timing. Unlike in Ipswich, where people start releasing fireworks all the time as soon as it gets dark, in Shotley (and Felixstowe and Harwich by the looks of it) they wait for the New Year. In the foreground are the sounds of some Shotley residents celebrating at the pub, but it is the ship foghorns that make this for me.
Note the fireworks are quite loud after the horns 🙂
St Paul’s Cathedral is only a stone’s throw from the tall glass-faced buildings of London’s financial district. I was sitting in the gardens of the cathedral, and the bells sounded really odd, as if there was an organist following on after then about 2 seconds late. This must be the echo coming from the glass-fronted buildings about 0.5km away, it does nothing for the tone
There’s a spinney nearby, so over the holidays I got myself into the tree and rigged a pair of omnis, and stood really still. The first thing I heard was the mournful repeated tone of the collared dove, a steady counterpoint to the recording, with its mournful ho-HOO-hoo, with the stress on the first syllable. Later on the woodpigeon appears, with its ho-hoo-HOO-HOO-ho-hoo, and there are various other birds flitting around in the undergrowth.
It was a very windy day, so there is a lot of wind noise in the trees, which adds atmosphere for me, reminding me of a special moment with the birds
My bike ride to work takes me past open fields and for a short stretch over some sandy heathland. I was surprised to hear a nightingale in the distance – I had to stop and listen to the lovely sound
this was recorded using an omni MP3 recorder so it’s not a fantastic species recording, but it captures the moment for me 🙂 The singing males have come all the way from Africa, and they have scouted their territories. They are hoping to call the females down from the sky as they arrive a couple of weeks later. It feels surprisingly early to hear nightingale song at the moment.
Auction in progress, classic auction patter
The livestock and game auctions at Campsea Ashe bring out a whole much of characters, full of good old Suffolk boys with strong accents. And a few loud cocks too
Loud cocks
Windy recording of the ripples lapping at the mudbanks by the Southwold Footbridge
It was a seriously windy day, good for ripples but not so good for the recording.
