Field Recordings

“Every evening the sparrows would descend onto this bush that covered the walls of the patio. For the first hour or so they would always make lots of noise, sounded like they were arguing!”

“This nocturnal visitor has been right outside our bedroom window these past few mornings, just a couple of miles from Glasgow city centre. At first I wondered if it might be a fox cub. Today I managed to record its call… my bird identification app reckons it’s a Tawny Owl. My friend, who knows about these things, agrees, and says it’s very likely a girl owl, because girls go “too-wit” (more like “ke-wick”) and boys go “hoo-hoo”.”

“It felt genuinely moving seeing this park fill with people gathering to see the changing light. Unified by the same stupid Instagram algorithm, the park was awash with people staring intently into colanders, pushing their faces up against cereal packets and old CD jewel cases, or just wearing large boxes on their heads. It might have been my imagination but as the light grew eerily dark, Greenwich’s parakeets seemed to gather noisily too.”

“John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP composition is being performed on a custom built organ for 639 years at St. Buchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany. Hundreds of people from all around the world packed into the small church for the ceremonial note change – the addition of an A pipe. In this recording, the note changes at ~1:50. This chord will ring out until the next change on October 5, 2027.”

“On the last night of my holidays, I hoped to record the jackdaws that congregate in the trees next to the Basilique Notre-Dame de Délivrance in Quintin, Bretagne. When I arrived there, a concert was in full swing inside the church. I recognised the music from when I sang it more than 20 years ago during an Erasmus in Wales. It was Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, an anti-war composition for soloists, choir and orchestra. I stood there for a while, listening to that familiar and still all-too-relevant music, in the company of the jackdaws. I forgot to take a picture, so this one is from the next morning. “

“At low tide, the beach of Hillion in Bretagne is dotted with rocks full of oysters, sea snails and other clicking, crackling, crunching creatures. One of those rocks was particularly striking and loud. In the distance: a band of seagulls and other waterbirds. Maybe you can even hear the rather spectacular sunset.”

“One night in Cornwall, around 2 AM, I heard a tawny owl outside the holiday cottage where I was staying. I quickly grabbed my Zoom H5 and went out in my pyjamas. As I was standing there, listening, a second sound emerged: a motorcycle, travelling through the hills of Rosudgeon and Goldsithney. The nocturnal duet between these two lone creatures lasted for minutes on end.”

“I woke early on Saturday morning to head to Camden, and then Farringdon, to record the sounds of the River Fleet. It is one of London’s twenty ghost rivers. Ghost rivers are watercourses that once ran through the city in the open air and were later buried: culverted, paved over, built upon, redirected into pipes and drains beneath streets that no longer show any trace of them. They are still there. Still flowing. Just hidden. I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently, in light of what’s happening to this world we’re in, and the damage humans have done, building concrete structures on top of a flowing river being just one small, telling example. Despite it being 7.30am on a Saturday, you can hear a car alarm going off somewhere nearby, a reminder that this river runs beneath a city that has mostly forgotten it’s there. But then, as I lowered my recorder into the drain, the sound of the river crashed forth. A power and a trickle, so strong even in these hot summer days. I tried to listen, and to hear what it was saying.”

“Just recorded this! It’s the choir in the church behind our apartment mixing with fire engines.”

“Love how this vintage pinball spot sounds — you can really hear the rattling of the bells and the smack of the flippers, the whoosh of the ball shooting up the alley and around the bumpers. Alas, too, the agony of defeat. Best game (and date destination) ever!”

“I've been to the top of Signal Hill more times than I can count. But never while there was enough fog to trigger the foghorn. I loved hearing the foghorn call out among the sounds of the ever present, blustery wind and the many tourists. I'll send a photo of the view of the narrows at the entrance to the most easterly harbour in North America.”

“It’s a field recording session from a pond close to Monte Gussa, near the city of Bergamo. In the audio, you can hear various types of insects, moorhens, bees, light aircraft, and bells. I love this place, which is so close to my home.”

“I've got a little recording of some Eider ducks on a rainy Loch Fyne in May this year – the cooling sounds of the water might be a nice antidote to current conditions!  It was a bit windy and the ducks remained always just a little bit far out, but you can just about catch them out there I think.”

“I heard this grey tree frog while biking through Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm late at night this past June 8. I had never heard this sound before and was captivated and scared at the same time.”

“On a quiet, rainy Saturday morning I was sitting under the porch of my studio enjoying a coffee. Despite the rain and wind, birds seemed to be having a very busy time, with a robin leading the racket.”

“Recorded from Woolwich, on the other side of the river Thames. The sound of the factory, along with planes coming and going from City airport, boats and the river all mixed together to form a drone like wall of sound.”

“In a quiet spring morning dozens of bees were frantically collecting nectar from a flowering blackberry bush. They were vey loud and busy.”

“The first real heat is hitting and the frogs are out, the humans are slowing down & the beeps are beeping.”

“Because of the heat (it was 33 degrees or so), we went to the woods. My son and his friend were making music with sticks and trees. One of their sticks snapped and had to be replaced. Then the replacement snapped, and needed replacing too.”

“A horse and foal graze near the roadside by Lough Inagh”

“Standing by the side of the road for the Noise Parade as the Kilfinane Noise Band (made up of the Kilfinane National School 3rd-6th classes) march through the streets at Hearsay Festival making joyful chaos – led by audio producer Mike Williams”

“Sitting in a garden in rural Suffolk on a lovely Saturday morning. The weather was glorious, the birds and insects were incredibly loud. It felt like a spring explosion!”

“One day a year, I turn the quintessential night owl that I am into an early bird and get up before dawn to participate in Reveil. This magical project by Soundcamp broadcasts the sounds of the Dawn Chorus, live streamed by people all over the world. For 24+1 hours, you can hear the earth waking up, as the mix makes a loop around the globe. Every year, I’m profoundly touched by the poetry of this communal listening experience. This year, I streamed from a nature reserve on the Belgian coast: the estuary of the river Ijzer, near the Nieuwpoort harbour. This rainy cuckoo song made me smile. As I sheltered in a birding cabin, a friendly face appeared in the window, as if to ask: ‘Are you awake?'”

“I recorded it with a set of binaural earphones. On the chairlift is this plastic hood that you can drop down if it rains. It was up though and served as this big reflective shield. That is one of the reasons (I think) you can hear the small brook coming from afar quite early on and when we get there it is louder than it has any right to be.”

“Standing in a frosted field watching a couple of rabbits bounce across the grass – geese occasionally fly overhead, you can hear a distant rooster, a tree-ful of crows, some sheep and the steadily waking up nearby road.”

“Recent lambs, their parents, and a helicopter that drones overhead and goes away again.”

“I think I scared the parents off yesterday by standing holding my phone atop the stepladder so I had to stick a proper recorder there and leave it to get you this. Shed interior followed by the thump of an arriving parent with food and then chaos. Enjoy!”

“The Memory Den is a large warehouse converted to a vintage shopping Mall in the industrial area of Portland, Oregon, USA. Trains hauling a hundred wagons pass along the tracks just meters away from the building. This recording is from inside the Memory Den: a passing train sounds its horn and kids play the basketball shooting machine inside the Mall before dabbling on an old piano. Recorded November 2024”

“A recording of a model steam organ playing next to a row of stationary steam engines at the Coleford Carnival of Transport, an annual vintage car fair in The Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. Recorded on Easter Monday, 6 April 2026”

“Busker playing something slowish on guitar, while two old men rocked out to their own huge speaker that they'd wheeled in…”

“I recorded this snippet from the window of my room as I was lying in bed and listening to the Organ being played in the church next door and people walking by.”

“A concrete structure built 100 years ago to detect the sound of aircraft flying over the channel. Did it work? No! But it still stands despite this, and despite the years and the weather since (today: 30mph winds).”

“Five minutes out of the wind while walking along the Kent coastline.”

“Captured from the bridge above the station. You can hear trains passing by, coming into the station and going out, as well as people coming and going. A small, busy station full of London life.”

‘Hold On’ was written by Heidi Wilson, in the wake of a tragedy in Walden, Vermont six years ago. In 2026, people have begun to sing this song in cities around the world, most poignantly in Minneapolis – as groups began singing in the face of ICE’s devastating presence. This recording was made by Will Coley at a Resistance Sing In in New York, a collaboration between Resistance Revival Chorus and Singing Resistance NY. Photo by Ginny Suss / Instagram. Listen to Erica Heilman’s Rumble Strip podcast – https://www.rumblestripvermont.com/episodes/hold-on – to learn more about how this song found its way from a bonfire in a local high school parking lot to resistance choirs in cities around the world. Learn more about Heidi Wilson’s work here – https://www.heidiannwilson.com/ The ‘Hold On’ episode of Rumble Strip was part of Transom’s Listener’s project https://transom.org/the-listeners/

“At the New York City Resistance Sing In on March 19, activists from several groups shared and taught protest songs to a packed Riverside Church. Claire from Singing Resistance Minneapolis brought this song that was written to encourage ICE agents ‘to walk away from the path of violence and take accountability for harm they've caused.'”

“ere’s a field recording of a scrap metal man who comes round my village; Bream, The Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, UK. I had been trying to catch his call for months, and when he drove up my lane I only had my phone at hand. It was recorded in the summer of 2025. You can hear his call as he passed my house, then the chatter of sparrows and the hum of bees, and finally his call from a distance.”

“It was a sunny but windy day, with the wind constantly picking up and stopping. The fence kept moving with the wind and banging, along some creaky garden decorations.”

“The intermittent field recordings series of hedges filled to the brim with birds continues… This is the sound of a mobile phone held inside a hedge that was singing.”

“For the past month I keep being woken up around 4am by (what I think is) an exuberant blackbird. Finding myself awake in the early hours, I’ve been reading about their nighttime singing on birdforum.net (which is honestly delightful). As the seasons change and the light shifts, apparently they can often be heard doing ‘midnight serenades’. Two nights ago I had my recording equipment out for an interview the next day, so when I woke up I went and stood in my flat’s stairwell, listening to the singing in my pyjamas and a big coat.”

“At the beginning of the year the ponds in the park near where we live froze over. One morning we took a hydrophone to a shallow, frozen reflecting pool – pushing the microphone through a hole in the ice. You can hear tinkling fragments, squeaky creaks and the sound of us taking turns to throw large blocks of ice across the frozen surface. Next to us a little boy was having fun smashing a tree branch into the pool, so we gave him the headphones and told him to make a bit of chaos…”