Fed by Birds

To help you escape from the rumble of traffic and the squelch of your shoes filling with floodwater again, here are some sounds I recorded in a Cornish fishing harbour, before the weather turned apocalyptic.

A near miss by two little dinghys leading to some fisherman banter:

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Birds and gentle waves:

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and mysterious gurgles:

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Sea swirling in the cauldron of rocks next to the harbour:

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The sounds of people at work: loading boats, vans and the coastguard's helicopter going over:

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Packing a huge net and chains into a crate with the help of a forklift truck:

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And peace on the cliff path above the sea, with distant waves below:

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Posted by at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Really enjoying poking around the British Library's UK Sound Map, where people all over the country can upload sounds from where they live. The most fascinating are the real local ones that capture an atmosphere, like the haunting Coryton oil refinery siren at Canvey Island, or the 'Time and Tide bell' on the Isle of Lewis, or 'Dunrossness Croft House Shetland speaker'. Or 'A lonely office' near Peterborough, with just the sad sounds of a solitary chair squeaking and occasional pen scribble.

(On the other hand, can I tentatively suggest that people recording their own young children in their kitchen isn't as interesting as they think it is? And I'd say they have enough trains...)

Posted by at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Away from the main scrum of the Trocadero etc, Piccadilly has interesting backstreets. Here are some sounds from a walk around it - obviously this is the main one, rain pinging off an umbrella:

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Here is a walk through Fortnum & Mason, going down in the lift and through the foodhall, past a tour, people having tea in the restaurant or choosing between rows of bisuit tins and jams, and what sounds like secret shoppers being trained:

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And away from all that, the peace of pigeons and ducks in St James's Park:

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Posted by at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A few sounds from a night excursion into the depths of the wood. There is one track through these woods, which are pitch black at night, miles from anywhere, with nothing around but trees, stars and mysterious rustling creatures.

So you may have to listen on headphones to catch this first one, because the whole point of the Norfolk woods is that they are very quiet, apart from the distant hooting of owls.

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And your own footsteps.

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In the middle of the wood is a single, sinister cottage.

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Admittedly made slightly less sinister here by its occupant, my niece's rabbit Ning.

Posted by at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The BBC has just put up a selection of recordings of suffragettes from its archives. Many of these were interviews in the Fifties and Sixties for programmes such as Woman's Hour, which ran a piece on the collection today. Dame Ethel Smyth remembers a window-smashing campaign with great relish: "Mrs Pankhurst was not a cricketer," she observes ruefully, of the suffragette leader missing the window of number 10. Schoolgirl Winifred Starbuck talks about pupils running wild in support of an imprisoned teacher. Many describe the horrors of their treatment in Holloway: one recalls the constant "awful sound of the choking of women" as they were forcibly fed.

Most fascinating is dancer Lilian Lenton (below): "My speciality was escapes." She was known as the tiny Pimpernel for her frequent dodging of the police who were set to watch her: her schemes included dressing up as an errand boy, and one very elaborate plot involving the scattering of 50 veiled accomplices. She also seems to have been a keen arsonist.

(Radio Times image from here)

Posted by at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here are a few sounds recorded on the Cote Basque last week.

The waves breaking on a long sandy beach, with a husky-voiced Frenchman of a certain age chatting to his friend on the sea wall:

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Corks popping and cutlery clinking as people eat their lunch in the cafes in the square:

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Church bells floating across the water, boats chugging past, and a bit of flirting on the quayside:

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And the harbour in the middle of the night - tied-up boats making a strange ringing sound, and a fishing vessel bringing its catch into the small docks:

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Posted by at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you're stuck at work this summer with no relief in sight, why not take a one-minute vacation, courtesy of the Quiet American? Listen to a parrot sing in Cohasset, Massachusetts, the ice breaking on Lake Superior, a steam train travelling through the Australian bush, or, my favourite, chomping cows in the Bavarian Alps.

Posted by at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I was invited to contribute to Paul Ramsay's Consemble sound/mail art project, which, as he points out, is doing its own bit to automate the creative process - leaving composers free to do the sort of things they do best. His site also pointed me towards the amazing Zadar Sea Organ, an installation in Croatia that uses stone stairs on a seaside promenade as the pipes of an organ which is played by the waves. You can hear it in action here.

It seems that San Francisco and Blackpool also have sea organs, although I can't find any recordings online - some comments suggest the San Francisco one may have become clogged up with sand and crabs. Quickly, San Franciscans - buckets and spades to the rescue!

Posted by at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The part of Wapping where I occasionally have to go to work is typical of London in its squashing together of incongruous things. Wailing bankers mill around the bottom of the Lloyds building, Tower Bridge swarms with confused tourists - then on the other side of the river, beyond all the restaurants, there's a completely different atmosphere.

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It reminds you that being on a massive tidal waterway near an estuary, this bit of London is basically by the sea. It even smells of seaweed.

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Tourist boats and speedboats go by, creating waves that clang the garden barges together, and geese fly overhead:

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Small Londoners appreciate the wildlife:

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Adult visitors have more important things on their minds - where to eat:

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Of course, there's no escaping the essential city sounds - ye traditional London surveillance helicopter, plus drills, sirens, planes and other people's mobile phone conversations:

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Posted by at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here are some sounds brought back from a misty Norfolk marsh in December. The wind in the dry reeds:

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Ducks landing splashily, with shots just audible in the distance - perhaps some less fortunate ducks about to become Christmas lunch:

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And a full-scale bird battle, with seagulls attacking ducks and getting the best of it at first, but gradually beaten back by force of numbers, with some crows calling from the sidelines - a sight so weird you might just be able to hear a whispered "Jesus" from the sound recordist:

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Posted by at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

1,000 Postcards is a short radio piece by Rene Gutel, about how her father, a bus driver, finding his job sometimes dull, decided to write her a postcard every day while she was away at college. I like the fact that after a while the whole campus became fascinated by the postcards, and she found herself having to read that day's instalment to student after envious student. Funny and sweet.

Posted by at 4:50 PM | Permalink

Back from the West, with some sounds of autumn on the Cornish coast:

Birds on the cliff path above a bay, with the sea below:

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Dry leaves rustling in the breeze:

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And church bells floating from across the river, as three pirates or possibly smugglers trudge up the hill complaining about how Paul broke the dredger:

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Posted by at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Go to Bluebell FM now to hear the brand new story of Bluebell's grudges. It's been a bit of a long gap, I'm afraid, but you know how it is: you can't hurry a robot.

Posted by at 6:20 PM | Permalink

Delia Derbyshire has received quite a lot of attention in recent years as a pioneer of electronic music, but Daphne Oram has been unfairly neglected. She was the one who persuaded the BBC to set up the Radiophonic Workshop in the first place - although the direction it took wasn't cutting edge enough for her, and she eventually resigned to work on her own music in a Kent oasthouse. This included inventing the Oramics machine, a system for converting pictures into sounds. "To me she was a kindly, rather eccentric aunt. But she had a very clear vision of how the computer would revolutionise electronic music," said her nephew in the BBC's obituary in 2003.

You can listen to some mp3s of her music or buy the CD here, and if you're in London, the Southbank Centre is paying a long overdue tribute to her next Friday. See you there.

Posted by at 1:01 PM | Permalink

The important thing on a Monday morning is to keep an open mind. So when you've set off to do some work, and a voice in your head says, "But the sun's shining. Why not go to Brighton instead?", maybe you should listen. After all, you can write on a beach just as well as in a library, can't you? (No.)

What I like about Brighton pier is that it has its brash sections:

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and it has gentler sections, where people sit each side of the glass partition and gaze out to sea:

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At the very end you have the rides:

This is the sound of the rollercoaster above. The squeaks you hear are a group of teenage boys, trying to maintain their cool and not quite succeeding:

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Sadly Ivor wasn't in evidence, but he has an impressive list of corporate clients.

But of course the best sounds are these:

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Posted by at 11:06 AM | Permalink

For those who want a more complete picture than that given in this earlier entry, here is the great Stanley Unwin to explain further. (Found via enthusiasm.)

Hope that's all straight now. On the subject of Stanley Unwin, I never realised that he was the star of a very peculiar Gerry Anderson Supermarionation series, The Secret Service. Apparently every week Father Stanley Unwin foiled someone's evil plan by talking nonsense, and sometimes taking the form of a puppet.

Posted by at 8:25 PM | Permalink

I came across this little sound piece called IF on the WNYC Radiolab podcast. Australian sound artist Sherre DeLys takes us into the delightful world of Andrew, an imaginative boy at the Westmead Children's Hospital, as he speculates on scuttlefish, crocodiles and problems with drawing. Like a lot of the work on Radiolab, the result is somewhere between music and speech - and short but extremely sweet.

You can hear more of Sherre DeLys's work at Ubuweb.

Posted by at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Mystery humming noises have plagued the inhabitants of various locations over the years, from Taos, New Mexico, to Largs in Scotland to Bristol. Explanations have varied, often involving the electrical grid, power plants or military experiments. But in the case of Sausalito, California, where a community living on houseboats was driven mad by a persisent hum for several summers, as described in this great BBC radio series The Sound of Life: The Underwater Chorus, the mystery was finally solved when biologists decided it was caused by a fish. The drone caused by a gathering of male midshipman fish all competing for mates is truly uncanny:

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Not only do they hum, but they're also bioluminescent. You can hear more of their sounds here

Posted by at 4:15 PM | Permalink

Did you know that glowworms glow green and fireflies glow yellow? And both are beetles. Radio 4 has a fascinating little documentary about bioluminenscence and nature's "lamp of love" - part of a series called Nature's Magic, which also covers glowing jellyfish, electric rays and flies' eyes. Listen again here. Thanks to Speechification for pointing the way to the BBC nature department's impressive archive.

Posted by at 1:52 PM | Permalink

If you've always wanted to know what your name sounds like translated into nightingale language, this site gives you the chance. Via Metafilter.

Posted by at 7:44 PM | Permalink

Lucky Fed by Birds was given an Edirol R-09 recorder for Christmas and so is able to bring you back the authentic sounds of coastal Norfolk in winter.

Firstly, the sound of someone learning to use their new recording equipment:

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The noises of the marshes - wind, water, birds and the crunch of an approaching pensioner:

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More wind, this time in boat masts:

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And a log fire:

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The gold clutch bag thoughtfully provided as a case also turned out to be ideal for transporting this find back to London in one piece:

Posted by at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you nip over to Bluebell FM, you can hear Bluebell's essential predictions for 2008. Don't start the year without them...

Apologies - it seems there's been a problem with the RSS feed which means it hasn't been updating with the latest episodes, but that's all fixed now, I hope.

Posted by at 7:33 PM | Permalink

These extraordinary sounds from Saturn were sent back by the Cassini-Huygens mission (found via Mrs Deane). Thus proving that Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were completely right about what other planets would sound like.

Posted by at 2:48 PM | Permalink

You are cordially invited to the grand opening of Bluebell.fm - the home of robot folk tales. If you like Fed by Birds, or are generally fond of enjoying yourself, then this is the place for you.

Time: Now
Place: Here

Posted by at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This starling seems too articulate to be genuine, but apparently starlings can be big talkers: here is a website devoted to starling chat. Theirs sound a bit frightening to me, whispering endearments in a sinister way. Not sure I could live with that. The starlings outside our house just make a lot of electronic squeaks and squawks, possibly from being forced to listen to far too much bleepy music.

Posted by at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

We are the number one appreciators of birdsong – but sometimes it's nice to hear a wolf howl. Or growl, or even a sorrowful wolf chorus. More sounds and links here.

Posted by at 2:26 PM | Permalink

The Language of Birds is a section of the British Library sound archive where you can find out that 'There are only two species of bird that use sound to convey to man the unique message: "Follow me and I'll lead you to a bees' nest" ' and listen to them doing it (Windows Media Player required). The cunning black-throated honeyguide flies to the nearest village, makes a sound like a beehive, and lures a villager to come and open up the hive for it. Then they divide the spoils between them. A rare example of man and bird working in total harmony.

You can also listen to Sparkie Williams, the 'most famous British budgerigar', trained by Mrs. Mattie Williams of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who had a six-year working life as a character actor (two accents: "Geordie" and "refined"). Here he is reciting "Jack and Jill' in a voice which I would guess is the refined version: sounds a bit like a middle-aged woman from Newcastle playing a polite Dalek.

Posted by E at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Records to teach your underachieving canary to sing properly – as collected on this site, which also has mp3s of canaries singing with marimba bands, crow-calling records ("the trick is to create as much of a riotous bedlam as possible") and a stern woman telling you how to train your parakeet to talk.

Posted by E at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)