I hope you had a chance to listen to my attempts at ambient real world sound recordings. If you didn’t read my last post on My Journey Into Sound, you will find links to YouTube playlists I’m curating at the end of it. Please, get your favourite headphones and have a listen.

Sound recordings of the real world fascinate me, in case you hadn’t already realised. As humans, our primary sense tends to be sight, often relegating hearing to a mere backup. In our modern world we are bathed in intrusive background noise most of the time, so much so that our brains just edit it out. I live in a suburban area, not very far from busy roads. Yet, I can stand in what passes for my back garden and listen to a blackbird singing high in a tree and simply not notice the background roar of the traffic.

Allowing myself to be immersed in a well-recorded soundscape is something I find most relaxing. My mind’s eye can paint the pictures, working from sound alone.

If you asked me how I found Radio Lento I couldn’t tell you. As both a blog and podcast, Lento is a growing archive of wild sound recordings. The “magic box” is placed somewhere and left to record the natural sounds of that location. Every attempt is made to record away from intrusive man-made noise – something from which my own recordings suffer, mainly due to where I live. My favourite recordings are the so-called “sleep safe” ones. These are restful, entirely missing sharp or loud sounds, so they can be listened to as you gently drift off to sleep. I find them useful for when my brain simply won’t enter sleep mode.

Another fascinating audio site is the London Sound Survey. This was a web project which collected over 2,000 recordings of everyday life in London between 2008 and 2020. If you find this stuff interesting, it’s well worth your time to explore the site in some depth.

As for my own recordings, I hope to add new locations in time. Life at Snaptophobic Towers is currently a bit complicated, so I’m not getting much chance to go out with the recording gear.