SoundDetritus

A repository of some of my recordings of things. It's better with headphones.

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At the beginning of September, I was passing through Trowbridge town park where they had a country fayre going on. In one section there were some popping and wheezing little engines next to a fairground organ. I rushed home to get my Zoom iQ6 and a dead cat (it was very windy) so I could record them all. I did a short walk around the section and while I was walking a land train pulled up. The recording also features some prime Wiltshire accents and dialect from the old boys gathered round the engines. Best with headphones for the full stereo experience:

[sounddetritus]

Sir David Attenborough: A life in music

Look back through the Archive to discover how sound and music have shaped the life and career of one of the UK’s favourite TV personalities.

A really nice article put together by the BBC as part of the celebrations associated with the 99th birthday of Sir David Attenborough. Of course, he's primarily associated with wildlife documentaries and environmental issues, but Sir David was a pioneer in the broadcasting of folk song field recordings through his work with Alan Lomax and the 'Songhunter' series. I urge you to listen to the album 'Sing Christmas and the Turn of the Year' which was an ambitious live radio pageant linking up the far corners of the British Isles on Christmas Day 1957. The linked to article above contains several memos and messages showing how hands-on Sir David was in running these fascinating shows:

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This is a track I made by recording some things in my flat that make droning noises. This includes, the boiler, fridge, fish tank, bathroom fan, bathroom light and the traffic outside.

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I was really taken by this film directed by Marcus Armitage, using sound collage to lead brief snippets of animation. A hand drawn animated documentary, following the rhythms of a day in Yorkshire. It captures the sound of Yorkshire, from its multicultural and bustling cities like Bradford and Sheffield, to the delicate sounds of birds in the country side and the hypnotic rhythm of the motorways and train tracks.

Made for BBC4's 'Listen to Britain', where 12 films were commissioned to show a modern version of Britain, based on the war time film by Humphrey Jennings.

Animation: Ana Stefaniak, Matthew Armitage Sound: Marian Mentrup

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I used the Lom Geofon to make a quick recording on the Zoom H6, by putting the geofon onto the metal cover. There was a high pitch whine which I've EQ'd out. The floods in Holt have already started, and this holloway has several underground springs and pipes, along with some kind of small water treatement plant on it.

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Here's a recording, directly onto my phone, while riding the escalator at Amsterdam Centraal Station in April 2023. I came up it and loved the sound so much that I went back down and did it again. Luckily there was plenty of time to catch my train afterwards. Great throbs, buzzes and drones, and a little background chatter.

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I haven't posted in a while, but I do have a lot of sound recordings to upload so I'll slowly try and work my way through them. This is a recording from May of this year. Having walked across a field I was followed by a herd of cows, who were annoyed when rather than lead them to food, I led them to a stile. Having crossed the stile I recorded the sound of the cows moving around in the mud, sniffing , scratching, peeing and some low murmerings and moos. This was recording directly onto my phone with no wind protection.

[sixpenceee]

A phonograph that “reads” and transforms a rock’s rough surface into music | source                          

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Valerie Singletone

Here's a drone I created under the monicker 'Valerie Singletone' (that's her in the picture, as imagined by Midjourney. As you can see she worked in an experimental sound studio in the 1960s) It's from her fictional album "14 Monotonous Drones" which is not available anywhere on account of not actually existing.

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Starting off 2024 same as most of 2023 - raining. A lot. This is a quick walk around the block in Trowbridge at night in light rain. It's been raining all day so you can hear water rushing underground under manhole covers, dripping into drains and from roofs. Cars splash through endless puddles. The photograph is the Mercy in Action shop window, which I passed by while recording. I took the photo 10 minutes earlier as I was out posting a letter and took in the soundscape of the rainy streets on the way home. I rushed in and grabbed my H6 recorder and headed down the stairs. I then turned back again and went back to put some batteries in and the memory card. THEN I headed out into the rain. I just used the x/y mounted mics that come as standard, but I was using a JJC case to keep the rain off and some dead cat wind protection. The recorder was held in my hand with a very small tripod used as a pistol grip, there's some noise from that, but hopefully not too intrusive.

[alivehouse]

need to fall down this rabbit hole immediately.

[alivehouse]

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PLEASE listen to these fucking sounds (credit)

[alivehouse]

for anyone interested happysat's current website is here and has a lot about this topic, including recordings (also heres an archived version of the site where you can listen to the audio without downloading it in case anyone does not want to do that). this other site also talks quite a bit about this specific satellite (transit 5B-5) but note that it is in german

ive seen some people in the tags wonder if its possible to pick this up on an am/fm radio or on a radio capable of receiving shortwave, and the short answer is no it is not possible unfortunately, they arent built to pick up frequencies in the ranges that are discussed. even with the right kind of radio you would need a pretty good antenna and to know when exactly the satellite was passing overhead to pick it up anyway, its not simply a matter of turning to the right frequency

and just for fun heres an art project based on this subject that i found. its all in french so no clue what it says yet but its fun to click around

[sounddetritus]

Lovely space flute sounds from these 'dead satellites' that can come back to life given certain conditions, even though their batteries are technically dead.

[reexrco-deactivated20251211]

[vexwerewolf]

reblog if you agree

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I agree!

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I was saddened to hear that my stepmother's friend and former lodger, Christine, had died a couple of weeks ago. She was a harp player, performing at events and weddings. I remember as a teenager playing on the harp at my stepmother's house while Christine lodged there. In August 2021, my Stepmother and I went to hear her play in the open air at The Richard Jefferies Museum in Swindon. I'd only just got hold of the iQ6 microphone set for the iPhone, so I took a couple of very short recordings of Christine playing some well-known music pieces from her wedding repertoire. The first was in mono and the second stereo. I've segued them together here. As I hadn't yet worked out how to use the iQ6, the recordings were a bit muffled and quiet, so I've boosted them a little and added reverb to give the harp more presence. In both you can hear the traffic in the background and a police siren going past. The photo accompanying this post is actually a grab from a low-def video from the day, published to the Richard Jefferies Museum facebook page, as I didn't take a picture of the harp playing myself.

[sounddetritus]

The sound ecologist capturing a disappearing world: ‘70% of habitats I recorded are gone’

Bernie Krause has been recording sounds from the natural world for 55 years. A new San Francisco exhibition of his work offers a moving plea

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It's been a year since I started this sound blog, and Chippenham Folk Festival 2022 was one of the first things I posted. Here's a couple of recordings from Chippenham Folk Festival 2023. It was too windy to get a decent recording of the parade this year, so I went for something different; some harmony singing in Monkton Park and later a snippet of the Irish Music Jam that happens every year up at The Old Road pub. The Irish music jam isn't a gig, the musicians drop in and out - showing each other jigs and reels, and it takes place at the same table in one of the small bar rooms of the pub. The Old Road has a large beer garden and on a warm bank holiday that's where most of the patrons are. Recorded blind on the Zoom iQ6 plugged into my phone (no monitoring)

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I'm currently working on the visuals to accompany the sound collage I've been putting together for Gwyl Ffynnon Garon in Tregaron (March 3-5th 2023). The piece evolved as I was assembling it, and I restarted it several times as a narrative of sorts began to emerge from what seemed very abstract at the beginning. It's a piece linking Wales and Wiltshire, both culturally (via the Stonehenge bluestones) but also personally via my relatives and ancestors. The field recordings were made in Powys, Ceredigion and Wiltshire and most of the images were too, although a couple of Somerset longbarrows can be spotted. Recurring themes are water, sacred springs, stones, trees, earth and pylons. Megalithic sites feature heavily. The sounds are bookended by a combination of Stonehenge Winter Solstice and the Amesbury lantern walk, both recorded in 2022. Tickets for the festival can be found here

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A recording made in Holt, Wiltshire using the Zoom iQ6 plugged directly into the phone and using a dead cat wind protector. It was a very windy day on Friday 3rd Feb and opposite where I work there are some tennis courts. To keep the gulls off, there's a kite in the shape of a hawk attached to a pole. I've seen similar set-ups on the lines of car sales forecourts on the Canal Road Industrial estate and they've been on my list to record for a while. I took the opportunity to nip out at lunch time and try and get a recording of the one in Holt. Needless to say, the strong wind was a problem and the small dead cat didn't quite cut it without the Rycote cage that my more advanced set-up has. It took a few attempts to get a recording which didn't have the mic blown out by the breezes, but even so there was a lot of buffeting sound, which in combination with the quite subtle sounds of the plastic kite vibrating, made for a quite challenging recording. In the mix I've pushed up the low cut and dropped some of the lower frequencies, then upped the gain. The result is a slightly 'zoomed in' effect on the hawk kite which I quite like. There's still enough stereo ambiance to give the recording depth and although the wind is still present, there's more of a hiss from the gusts as well. I don't think it sounds tinny though. Mixing is an area of sound production and recording I would like to learn more about.