Tag: soundmark

Chalice Well Bell sounding for a Silent Minute’s reflection

At noon and 3pm a bell in rung in the Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury  to invoke a minute’s silence for reflection. A wren breaks the silence, and the bell is sounded again at the end of the minute.

The bell was the old school bell, the school buildings were cleared in the 1970s which opened up the bottom of the gardens a lot.

The ritual of the Silent Minute was instigated in WW2 by Wellesley Tudor Pole, who was a key figure in the founding of the Chalice Well Trust.

OKMII binaural microphones

 

Swifts on a warm summer evening

Swifts are one of the fantastic soundmarks of summer, and they sound at their best in the city, with their high-pitched screaming resonating from the houses all around. You get them in rural parts too, but the sound needs the hard surfaces of the city when they come in low at rooftop height in the warm summer evenings. According to the BTO they like towns.

The Devil’s Bird is the devil’s own job to record, too. You don’t try and track them, there’s just no hope to get anything directional on the job, and the screaming groups tend to spread out as they get close too. Just don’t even think of using a parabolic dish or a shotgun mic 😉

This one is basically the Olympus LS-10 with internal mics propped in a first-floor window, and snipped out of a long trawl for swifts, Then I used a parametric EQ to hit some of the town traffic rumble.