Listening to the Landscape

This recording was made on the morning of Christmas Day 2024 in a residential village garden at around 11am. I had wondered if the soundscape would be different on Christmas Day; quieter perhaps? The usual songbirds are captured in full flow, but background traffic can still be heard and planes are still travelling across the sky, so perhaps this recording is not much different to any other made at the same time on any other day of the year. What, if anything, does this say anything about modern village life in the 21st century?

This underwater recording was made at Alton Water reservoir using hydrophones. The recent hot weather had lowered the level the reservoir, revealing tree roots and fine collection of previously lost tennis balls. I suspended by hydrophones from some low hanging branches so that they were around 30cm from the surface of the water. The clicks of underwater creatures and air being released by plants can clearly be heard. As can the quite unpleasant drone of what I assume is a powered boat that was being repaired some 500 metres away. Towards the end of the recording, a feeding fish came along and created some interesting sounds as it weaved around the tree roots.

This recording was made at dusk in a rural garden in the village of Holbrook, Suffolk. Whilst sat indoors with the patio doors open, my ears were suddenly attracted to an amazing array of bird sounds coming from the garden. My bird identification skills are poor, and so my first thought was that the calls were coming from one of our resident starlings. A quick check with the Merlin app revealed that in was in fact a song thrush. I can’t remember hearing one in our garden before and, try as I might, I couldn’t locate the bird visually in any tree. The range of pops, whoops, trills and everything in between was stunning (as can be seen in the snippet of the Merlin App's spectrogram that has been used for the recording's image). I hope the bird returns regularly to showcase its skills. The recording also showcases the return of the swifts to Holbrook for another year. They arrived on the 30th April this year - this was eight days earlier than last year. Initially, there were a group of eleven birds screaming around the road, but now only two or occasionally three can be seen and heard. Other birds featured include a robin, rooks, blackbirds, wood pigeon and jackdaws. You can also hear at least one plane flying over, the 9pm chiming of the automated bells at the Royal Hospital School and the constant drone of a temporary swimming pool, recently re-erected in a nearby garden.

This recording was made in a wooded area in the village of Holbrook between 5:00am and 5:19am on Sunday 4th May 2025 as part of the International Dawn Chorus weekend. Birds identified by the Merlin app include: pheasant, great tit, garden warbler, blue tit, chiffchaff, rook, wren, blackcap, robin, blackbird, song thrush, woodpigeon and greylag goose. There was also something rustling around in the bushes...

This recording features two (or more) Tawny owls calling to each other in the gardens around my house, and was captured just after midnight on Boxing Day 2024. The surrounding area was peacefully quiet with only one solitary car passing. The mist that had covered the country for a few days was dripping from the branches of our garden trees and falling from the guttering, but the evening was dry. The owls couldn't be seen, and seem to be moving around between calls. It was a wonderfully peaceful way to close out Christmas Day.

I have heard it said that Suffolk is the driest county in England (although I have not found any concrete evidence to back this claim up). Trying to grow crops in a dry climate will require irrigation of some kind, and with any farm machinery comes interesting sounds and rhythms. Enter the Briggs Irrigation Hosereel, Mounted Booms and Roto Rainer. This equipment can often be found snaking across fields, irrigating crops without the need for human operation. They deliciously spray, hiss and drip water from the boom end whilst the hosereel drones, ticks and whirs as it winds and coils the thick black pipe back on the reel. Capturing the sounds of modern farming around the village has been hit and miss this year. We were on holiday when the main harvesting was completed meaning that I failed to record any combine harvesters, so it was nice to record this machinery in action. Just before 3pm I positioned my gear around 30 metres from the equipment, hit record and listened to how the system affected the soundscape. Being in quite an open area of arable land, the wind was whipping over the field and a few birds could be heard in the nearby hedges. The area is a popular hunting ground for a few kestrels, although I didn’t see any on this day. This episode was made possible through funding from Arts Council England through their Developing Your Creative Practice grant.

Home to both the village hall and quoits club, the Holbrook village green sits almost slap bang in the centre of the village. With the COOP supermarket, Methodist Hall, Swan public house and an independent butcher all nearby, this area of the village is the central hub of village life. A member of the village community informed me that the old air raid siren was located by the village hall and was sounded to call the members of the fire brigade to action. Some research into this suggests that using sirens was not uncommon in Britain after Second World War, and that not everyone was happy about this. I think that people who had lived throughout the blitz would have been quite traumatized hearing the siren for decades after. There is a village in Suffolk that still maintains its siren and who test it each May. A similar sound can also be heard in Norfolk (near Holkham and Well-Next-The-Sea) to announce that the tide changing. What interests me sonically about the village green in the present day is its flagpole, upon which the union flag is raised and lowered daily like many other villages across the country. Even the gentlest breeze causes the rope to clang and vibrate against the metal pole. I wanted to record the sound of the rope clanging against the pole with both traditional microphones and contact microphones, and hoped that the clanging could be used for the rhythmical element of a composition. On a breezy day I set up the equipment just before noon and sat back to listen. There was a palpable hum of activity as people came to run errands or shop. And, as always, a pigeon could be heard cooing away. Whilst I was recording, the sound of the dustbin lorry approaching could soon be heard. This sound is one of the regular sounds of any community and the hissing and clanking of the heavy lorry can often jar your focus from whatever task you are currently doing to run out and check that your bin is ready for collection (as missing it would mean a lengthy period of time until they would return). I love the sounds of a bin collection: the hissing of air brakes, pneumatic lifting, the drones of an emptied wheely bin wheels on concrete, the slamming of lids and occasional shouts from the workers, and (if you are lucky) the beeping warning sound of the vehicle reversing. This episode was made possible through funding from Arts Council England through their Developing Your Creative Practice grant.

Back in mid-August, a member of the local Greener Holbrook climate action group had commented that they had enjoyed the sound of grasshoppers at All Saints church on a sultry Sunday afternoon. This sort of instant, local information is an amazing resource to have for a sound recordist, and having previously recorded the early morning sounds of the church yard in January and the bee hives in May, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to make a different recording. At around 11am on the 19th of August I entered the churchyard and headed to the location mentioned on Facebook; an area of the church yard left un-mown to encourage wildlife. The weather report had promised a mainly sunny day, but with quite a robust breeze and before long I could hear some faint chirps and clicks coming from the long grass. I positioned my equipment and sat down to listen. There was a steady drone of buzzing and the occasional grasshopper call along with the faint rustle of the dry grass in the breeze and another ever-present sound of the wood pigeon. Researching grasshoppers later on that day I discovered that they are more sonically active in the afternoon, and the hotter and sunnier the conditions the better, but the recording below captures the sound of village insects during only free time I had available on that day.

In an attempt to attract pollinators to visit our small front garden, we had left the lawn untouched by the mower for well over a year. This had resulted in the lawn grass growing over a metre high before it had collapsed and fallen during heavy wind and rain in the spring of 2024. I decided to try something different in the space by building a stag beetle pyramid. Whilst using the mower to clear an area for the buried logs, I discovered that ants had built an impressive nest rising up around 30cm from the ground. I felt guilty that the nest once totally hidden by the tall grass was now exposed to the hedgerow birds, but hoped that the ants would move on (or down) to a new location. Grabbing my Zoom recorder and some contact microphones I was able to explore the sounds within the nest as thousands of ants moved through the soil. I tried to use my LOM Geophon, but it was significantly affected by the gusts of wind whipping along the road. The resulting recording reminds me of white noise used by some people for relaxation or as a sleep aid. By the next day, no ants could be seen on or around the nest so I was able to create the stag beetle pyramid. In future I will make sure to check the long grass before starting work. This episode was made possible through funding from Arts Council England through their Developing Your Creative Practice grant.

Rooks are a wonderful, if inescapable, part of my daily life. At the north end of the village there are at least four rookeries to be found high in the trees, and our home is sandwiched between two of them. The power of their cawing choir is astonishing as they call to both greet and bid goodbye to the daylight. They seem happy in all weathers but my favourite is their aerial display in squalling winds where their sheer number can obliterate the sky. Last year, whilst walking in a neighbouring village, I witnessed two rooks working in tandem to force a much larger buzzard to beat a hasty retreat. Rooks have featured in my previous podcast recordings, but here they take centre stage during a recent thunderstorm. Late one Sunday afternoon, I could hear the sound of thunder in the distance. In anticipation I grabbed my recording kit and set up in a covered area of my patio. For a few minutes the rooks cried hullabaloo before quieting down. Were they anticipating that the storm was moving our way? Who can say, but this recording captures how around each clap of thunder they cry havoc before heavy rain drowns them out. This episode was made possible through funding from Arts Council England through their Developing Your Creative Practice grant.