Young English

The British Library has launched a new webpage featuring some of their recordings of children's games and songs from the last century. Just had a cursory listen and it sounds great.

"The website is the culmination of a two year project in which we’ve been digitising previously unheard and unseen collections including the internationally renowned ‘Opie Collection of Children’s Games and Songs’ and the ‘Damian Webb/Pitt Rivers Collection’ with support from the AHRC Beyond Text programme. These collections feature audio recordings and photographs made between the 1960s and the 1980s. If, like me, you grew up in that period you’ll hear many familiar though long-forgotten playground rhymes with nostalgia and a Proustian sense of recollection."

Here is a more contemporary recording.

Flush

This recording was taken with an omni-directional mic mounted with Blue-Tac to the underside of my parent's toilet cistern lid.

Singing/Rain

Ive become a little obsessed with the Gouldian positioning of voice(s) against noise. Here is yet another recording with this arrangement, this time recorded from our apartment window. The voice in this instance sounds like it might be a Karaoke or pub singer. After making the recording I wandered the streets to locate the source and my ears led me happily astray to a free outdoor short-film screening. The film showing when I arrived had music by Aphex Twin, Brian Eno and John Foxx!

Oh - the animal calling towards the end of the recording is, by the way, a racoon.

Explore the Roar

I got chance to visit Niagara earlier on in the week and so took some recordings. The first is of a quick auditory drift around an amusement arcade. The second is of the falls – I wrapped my recorder and microphone in cling film to waterproof them and took the Maid of the Mist boat with a hundred or so other tourists right up to the foot of the Horseshoe Falls.

Edmonton Sounding

The first recording was taken at Rutherford House on the University of Alberta campus - in the parlor there sits a gramophone. The second was taken five minutes away under the Waterdale bridge. And finally, there's a recording of the periodic spectacle of West Ed. Mall's fire breathing dragon.

Field Noise

My field recording of last year's Bridgwater carnival squib.