Enquiring Ear

Field recording and found sounds

Tag: urban

  • 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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  • Night Football Practice at UCS

    All the training pitches were in use on Easter Monday evening, with the sounds of the church bells behind the sound of the busy pitches.

  • Leeds Victoria Quarter covered arcade

    Leeds Victoria Quarter covered arcade

    Des Coulam of Soundlandscapes had warmed me up that glass-covered markets had a great ambience. He has a whole section dedicated to the Parisian passages-couvertes so I was chuffed to find this one on a visit to Leeds – the old Victoria Quarter.

  • Swifts on a warm summer evening

    Swifts are one of the fantastic soundmarks of summer, and they sound at their best in the city, with their high-pitched screaming resonating from the houses all around. You get them in rural parts too, but the sound needs the hard surfaces of the city when they come in low at rooftop height in the warm summer evenings. According to the BTO they like towns.

    The Devil’s Bird is the devil’s own job to record, too. You don’t try and track them, there’s just no hope to get anything directional on the job, and the screaming groups tend to spread out as they get close too. Just don’t even think of using a parabolic dish or a shotgun mic 😉

    This one is basically the Olympus LS-10 with internal mics propped in a first-floor window, and snipped out of a long trawl for swifts, Then I used a parametric EQ to hit some of the town traffic rumble.

  • Goods Train from Felixstowe, Ipswich St Mary’s

    I have some time to do more recording now. Okay, so it’s not hyper-original recording trains but I liked the screech of the wheel flanges as it rounds a fairly gentle bend. I was at the same level as the track across a dip due to the lie of the land

    goods train through the trees

    Also a chance to see how this Audioboo thing works… which seems to be pretty well 2018 update – they decided to start charging $9.99 a month. You must be kidding, guys, I may as well pay WordPress £33 a year to be able to get audio facility. There’s no low-end offering.

  • Blackbird Fuss

    Pair of blackbirds kicking up a hell of a racket and chipping noise, I was too far to see the offending predator, probably a squirrel

  • Leeds students returning from Fresher’s Week party

    Leeds students returning from Fresher’s Week party

    Happy students coming back after getting hammered.