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
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
Egg boiling on stove
I like this sound, it’s calming, in a lumpy and random sort of way. A gas stove is seriously noisy, too, from a six-inches away sort of perspective.
Chalice Well, Glastonbury
This is the sound of the flow inside the well-house at Chalice Well. Two springs rise in this area – the Chalice Well and gardens are home to the chalybeate Red Spring, rising from a deep underground source with little variation in flow or temperature over the years and seasons. Only a few tens of yards away is the White Spring, which rises from theg round closer to the surface. There is a definite tone to the flow – the well-head has a pentagonal chamber underneath it and the resonance of this makes a peaceful steady sound.
From a field recordist’s point of view life is made more difficult by the A361 carrying HGVs down Chilkwell Street, but the wellhead is far enough away and loud enough that this doesn’t impair the recording.
Leeds students returning from Fresher’s Week party
Happy students coming back after getting hammered
Fairground roundabout and another sound recordist at Ipswich Maritime Festival
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 😉
OK kids, knock it off before you end up in Casualty
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, London
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.