Radio Lento podcast

Whilst out along the Kent side of the Thames Estuary on Saturday, aiming to capture the sound of skylarks and reeds, we met a walker with a very friendly border terrier. She told us there was talk of a nightingale not too far away at RSPB's Northward Hill Nature Reserve. We aren't strictly speaking wildlife recordists, the Lento box is designed like a wide angle camera to capture panoramic landscape sounds, but we thought it might be worth a visit to the reserve to see if we might be able to find it. Unusually for us public transport devotees, we were able to travel on to Northward Hill easily thanks to a magnificent Lento supporter. He'd driven us and the Lento box out from Brockley station in South East London to explore another corner of the Hoo Peninsula, and was keen to visit the reserve. We didn't feel hugely confident about actually hearing a nightingale. They are the kinds of birds you don't expect to find on demand. We rolled into the reserve's car park and quickly headed down into the woodland. We descended a rough flight of bare earth steps under the dark shadows of dense tree canopy, surrounded by glorious birdsong. All the usual suspects of course, familiar if you regularly listen to Lento - chif chaf, blackbirds, black caps, jackdaws, robins, various others plus trusty wood pigeons.  After turning right and proceeding further into the woods over a few hundred yards our ears pricked up. I found myself saying "and there it is" before I had even properly heard it. We continued for a few steps and, fortunately, there it was again, this time much more clearly, and without doubt a nightingale only about thirty yards away! Up on the tripod went the Lento box. I turned it to face the sound of the nightingale, and pressed record, bathed in the rich tapestry of spring woodland birds, coming from all around us.  Here's what the box captured. It's only twenty minutes. The passage of time is from around 5pm on 24th May. There are some people vaguely audible and a horse (louder) somewhere to left of scene. A road must pass the reserve too because some level of vehicle noise is distantly audible, but not so much as to spoil the overall effect. We capture whole landscapes from one fixed position, so what you hear is the nightingale just as we heard it from standing on the path and facing into the reserve. Wildlife recordists find ways to post their microphones very close to their subjects and as such we are all used to hearing nightingales proportionately far louder than anything else. In reality though these are not birds that like being approached, so few people can ever actually hear in-person, the bird singing as loudly as they do in specially focused recordings.  With a pair of headphones though this episode provides a realistic woodland soundscape with a nightingale almost dead centre of scene. You should be able quite easily to hear it between the other birds which are spread out to the left and to the right of scene. Listen out for a wonderfully special coincidence that happens a few times where a distant cuckoo comes into earshot too. It is pretty well dead centre, behind the nightingale.  There must be a farm nearby because several cockerels crow towards the end. The whole scene is in fact very busy, and whether a connection or not, I note how the nightingale seems to become more active when the chif chaf is in full voice. Coincidence, or not? This bonus episode is shared with big thanks to our trusty supporter and to the dog walker we met. 

At this spot, high up on The Warren, in the dead of night, live the crickets. They're everywhere. Stridulating, like tiny minute hands etching the moments, of this night's time passing. Crisp. Unwitnessed. They're probably dark bush crickets. The Lento box records the scene alone, on a warm night last August. Tied to a very difficult tree. Difficult because it was very spiny. And off the path, part way down a precipitous drop. Why not an easier tree? Because of the view. This tree looks out over the valley, over all the tree tops, towards the hushing sea, far below.  Time passes. Somewhere in the valley, an ocean breeze lows in. Shifts a bank of trees into a state of gentle rustling. Countless crickets mark the moments. Then from nowhere a nocturnal train materialises in the bottom of the valley, right of scene. It glides across, and into the left horizon. Further and further. Until finally, it dissolves, and becomes just another part of this place's subtle, and natural murmurings. Perhaps a hedgehog is moving in the bushes. And a hint of a plane, heading south east towards France. * This 50 minute section is from a 48 hour recording we made in Folkestone Warren last August. It captures a deeply peaceful scene of this green and tangled place, by the sea, and the endlessly breaking waves of the Channel. Listen carefully (with headphones or airpods) and you may catch sound of a lower pitched cricket to left of scene. We still aren't sure what exactly it is, but it sounds like the cicadas in old films from 1950s America.

Pett in Sussex. A 'small peaceful seaside village'. Here you can visit a little timber chapel on the beach with an open door to a kitchen. You can take a seat, absorb the atmosphere, then make yourself a cup of tea if you like, choose a book from the shelves and drop your donation into the honesty box. Before heading out to explore the wild pebble beach, crashing waves and sea defences. All perfect for blowing away the cobwebs.   But this is one of those places that makes you think too. Yes there's the village, the chapel, the wonderfully exposed coast path and beach, but there are other significant things too. Things that make the past resonate.  The end of the Royal Military Canal culminates here. A 28 mile inland channel linking Pett Level to Hythe. It was built as a defence against the possible invasion by Napoleon. Above on the hill a pillbox, a relic from WWII, looking out to sea. Back more. Back and back. Far into the mists of time. Not old history, not human history. Ancient history. The Pleistocene. Before the last ice age when there were no humans about to even know this coastal place exists. Or to witness its wild crashing waves. Dinosaur footprints left in the rock. At low tide the stumps of ancient trees can be seen. One day we'll travel back at low tide, and hopefully capture the sound of the waves as they break over these ancient stumps of oak, birch and hazel. And as we set up the microphones, we'll imagine ourselves deep in a forest, immersed between hushing trees and echoing birdsong. -------------- Come with us on a walk on this February day. See the sites around Pett. 

This week we're staying on the uplands of rural Derbyshire to hear a passage of time from the dead of night. We captured it last month, from a location very near to last week's episode, About half a mile upstream, high above the valley pastures where the sheep live, hides a watery dell. It's shrouded under tangled trees, who no doubt thrive on the plentiful supply of water. An iron age track slopes steeply down before fording the stream. Beyond the stream is an area of dark moorland forest. We've recorded here many times over the years. It's a location that possesses richly varying sound-feels, not just from season to season, but often from hour to hour.   Overflights from aircraft heading into Manchester's Ringway Airport heavily impact the natural soundscape here. To get round this we leave the lento box out recording for very long periods of time. When the flight path moves, the sky clears of human-made noise, and we are able to hear just the natural environment again. The Lento box records through the quiet hours of the night. Tied to a tree only a few yards from where the track fords the stream. To right of scene a cool pool of moorland water shallows onto stones over which people have crossed with their animals and carts for countless centuries. Centre of scene the stream flows down into another pool, before continuing on its way down into the valley. The trees, now in leaf, create an acoustic space inside which the sound of the stream reflects. Through long listening, the wide spatial presence of the valley beyond can also be heard. Or perhaps we should say felt. Valleys, from an aural perspective, transcend any obvious aural description. -------------- Please help us keep Lento ad-free - buy us a coffee on Ko-fi.

Left  of scene, a steep uninhabited valley, shrouded under dense woodland. Right of scene, rough pastures and grass meadows sloping gradually up, towards a distant horizon. Centre, a silvery glimpse of the moorland stream that's flowed down into this valley for as long as rain began to fall.  Spring has arrived. The valley is verdant green, and alive with song birds, sheep and lambs. The air is so still, and soft. The scents of hawthorn and cow parsley rise on sun warmed eddies. Bees, from plant to plant, appear. Then disappear. Then appear again. Hovering. Manoeuvring. Speeding away. A lone goose in the mid-distance, is flying gracefully up the valley. Is following the stream. Its calls echo, across the vast empty space.  How over time the sounds of this valley form naturally into a portrait. A spatial depiction, of life on an upland pasture. Clean. Fresh. Uncluttered. Unconcerned. And it is there. And with headphones, and a bit of time sat still, we can be there too.     * This segment is from a long-form recording we made of this valley several years ago in the Peak District. We visited again only a few weeks ago, we can say things sound very much the same on the ground. What is changing though is an increased intensity of air travel. The skies are noisier now, preventing us from being able to share more recent recordings. 

Last week we visited Burgh Island in Devon on the south west coast of England. We made two overnight recordings, both looking out towards the island from Bigbury-on-Sea. The island is connected to the mainland by a sand causeway. This passage of time is from the second unaccompanied overnight recording, midnight to 1am.  The darkness is solid. A landscape only sparsely inhabited. Low tide was several hours ago, but you can hardly tell that the sea has started to come in. Weather conditions are extremely mild with wind speeds of only 1 to 2 knots, gusting 5 to 6. After the first few minutes, the wind that's been audibly rustling the leaves of the palm tree holding the Lento recording box, drops to virtually nothing.  The stillness reveals an aural expanse of true pristine quiet. The beach, stretching from far left to far right. The sand causeway, directly ahead, leading up onto the island. The sea, a split view with crashing waves audible both on the left side and the right side of scene, with the island a silent space in the middle. It's very rare we discover a landscape that possesses this level of peace. Such quiet enables the most delicate and the most spatial qualities of the aural environment to be perceived. A scene of an island, asleep, between two seas, at low tide.

Last summer when we were stuck at home, and when heavy rain was forecast between midnight and three, we decided it'd be nice to capture its sound. The idea is enchanting. Rain, falling, on a little suburban garden, verdant with plants and shrubs of various kinds, as they quietly and invisibly sleep through the night.  Hearing this scene though, is only possible by staying up and getting very tired and wet. But this is where the Lento box comes in. By leaving it out all night to do the listening and capturing, in natural spatial detail, we can then re-experience the sound of time passing through a pair of headphones or Airpods. It's a much more comfortable way to appreciate what a place sounded like, when there was no one around to witness it. If you've listened to Lento before, you'll know we usually capture the sound of falling rain from underneath a large tarpaulin we have stretched across our back yard. This time we decided to try something new. Right at the end of our little garden there are lots of plants and shrubs huddled against an old brick wall. Along the top of the wall is a wisteria plant that's got very big over the years. So many different types of leaves, we thought, to catch the rain drops as they fall. Just before midnight, and as the first rain began to fall, we placed the Lento box on a short tripod directly underneath the wisteria, and left it to record. Water was already pouring down through the leaves. A test for the box's weatherproofing, we hopefully muttered to ourselves, as we closed the back door and shuffled off to bed. * The recording location was north east London in July 2024. We have carefully chosen a segment of time where the least traffic noise and human activity is audible. Some micro-editing was needed though to ensure unavoidable noises such as heavy raindrops landing directly onto the microphone baffles and the occasional crump of cars rolling over local speed bumps have been softened out. Some planes overfly but they are very soft and gentle in tone. We have tagged this episode sleep safe due to the minimal impact of these non-natural sounds.

Sat back, looking onto Rye Harbour nature reserve. There, to the ear, is the sea. From here it's out of sight, somewhere below the long shingle ridge. From this point across the reserve, it could to the ear be an aural sunrise. A wall of natural energy, lighting up the horizon with clean, white, spatialised noise. On the intervening  land, stray gusts of wind swish swathes of sea grasses. Press whispily through thin wire fences. Lift circling seagulls even higher. Billow shapeless banks of cloud, from left to right of the gradually illuminating sky, water and air.  In such an exposed panoramically vast space, come the timeless calls of sea birds. Animated brush strokes on a canvas that stretches from far left, to far right of scene. Each stroke, is an individual. Each, a living thing. A soul, for whom this wild open place is home. * This early morning hour is from an overnight recording we made last month from the edge of the nature reserve at Rye Harbour, East Sussex. It captures the sound-feel of wide open emptiness that you get when out and about on the reserve. It's also a rich source of naturally spatialised blue-grey and dark grey noise, produced by the sea and shaped by uninterrupted expanses of gently contoured shingled land.  ** Lento is 5 today! Happy birthday to us! Thank you for listening, sharing and supporting us over five years. More here > https://ko-fi.com/radiolento

We found our way to record this remote location late at night, and in near total darkness. A sheltered dell, with a fresh running stream. Earlier in the day, when everything was bathed in bright grey light, we'd walked through this secluded place on our way down from West Quantoxhead, and decided it might be a perfect spot for the Lento box to make a long overnight recording. There's a branch just above your right shoulder, my partner quietly calls up from below. Can you use that to lever yourself up? The height I'd just gained had markedly improved the spatial clarity of the wrilling stream, so just a little higher, I thought. We really need to be able to properly hear the full width and detail of the water, as it flows through the dell. How still this place is. How perfectly balanced it sounds, nestled within the wildness of this wide open West Somerset landscape. To reach the branch I had to work my way through a mass of prickled twigs in the dark while holding the Lento box in one hand. After some not insignificant effort, the branch, and my elbow, connect. I haul up, wedge in, and tie the box onto the trunk. To be sure this spot meets the criteria we've evolved over the years, I try to match my head with the box, and hold completely still. Listening. Absorbing the scene. Slightly adjusting the angle of the mics, so they can capture as much as possible of what it is I'm actually hearing. Good, I quietly call down, this is it.  We head back to where we are staying, leaving the Lento box to record alone, non-stop through the night. Without us or indeed anyone else about to witness, time passes. Looking down from the tree, the stream wrills, and the landscape murmurs its nocturnal murmurings. Sheep can be heard, sometimes moving vaguely, through the dark. And one seems to come to rest beneath the tree holding the mics. From time to time it makes the softest, most gentle noise, that a sheep can surely make.

Twelve strikes the clock, of St Mary's Church in Rye, East Sussex. Midnight. A sound that for anyone left awake, opens a new page. It's a new day, captured by the Lento box perched high above the churchyard, one night in mid-February. The new day reads like this. The gnarled limb of a winter tree beside the churchyard creaks against an undulating wind. The flagpole at the top of the belfry tower, rattles, like the mast of some windswept sailing ship.  The sky is heavy with cloud and dark. Coastal air ruffles and catches in the rooftops of huddled 14th century cottages. They look gathered in around the church, like a solid congregation. Time passes. Banks of wind rise, then subside. Creaks and rattles punctuate the night air. And the Quarterboy faintly chime out the quarters.  St Mary's has a good clean bell. It echoes off the huddled houses beautifully. Sonorous tones, that seem to ring out with the same golden grey hues of the stones from which this ancient coastal town is built. The skittering leaves blowing and the almost too faint silvery ding dongs of the Quarterboys.  * We captured this sound-view of St Mary's Church Rye last month on a freezing cold windswept night. We rested the Lento box on the outer ledge of a second floor window that looked over the churchyard and straight at the church itself (with a chain to stop it falling). Do let us know if you can hear the quarters being struck, they are subtle but just about audible. ** Explore more from Rye. Listen to the sound inside the belfry in episode 200. That was a windy night too.  *** We're building up to our 5th birthday. Watch this space! 

What a long-form sound landscape recording of the Derbyshire hills reveals, is space, weather, and birds.    A buzzard. Mistle thrush. Song thrush. Great tit. Geese. Wren. Robin. Jackdaw. Pheasant. Black cap. All present in their different ways. Buffeted by strong spring breezes under grey skies.       Ahead, down the fields, mid-left of scene, the rushing river fills the valley with soft white noise. Its sound is quite subtle, yet so present. So wide. And so constant. Over the thirty five years we've known this place, through all weathers, and all seasons, it's the river that's never changed. * Over the years we've shared many sound landscapes from this rural location in the Derbyshire hills. This until now unpublished segment comes from a 14 hour recording we made in mid-February 2022. We haven't been able to get there this month, so we're sharing this audio as a reminder of how the valley sounds now the spring is nearly here, as morning gets going.

Sometimes, when persistent rain is forecast overnight, we place the Lento box out in the back garden on a long battery to capture the sound. Falling rain is always enchanting, especially at night when the city is asleep.  We leave a large tarpaulin stretched across the yard to catch the raindrops as they fall. We position the microphone box centrally, angled up, so as the rain falls at random across the 4 metre by 3 metre surface. It captures a widely spatial sound-image of the rain.  Somewhere very high up in the clouds, there is a special place. It's directly above the tarpaulin. The droplets that form here will not fall unwitnessed, as rain normally does. The droplets will instead fall down into this episode. To soothe and calm many ears. This night rain. Under a large tarpaulin. 

It is almost high tide on Winchelsea Beach. Old timbers, buried in the shingle berm, point up into the hazy winter sky. You scrunch over the stones. Rest your hands on their sturdy weatherworn tops. And begin to take in the scene.   Clean sea air cuffs against your face. It smells faintly of salt, of sea wetted rock. The beach rakes sharply down into bright white froth. Then just blue-grey, out to the horizon. Nobody is about. Only distant shapes, of coasting sea birds.    Each wave comes and breaks onto the shingle. Some roll in straight. Others from the side. Some cross. Some break twice. Some rise slowly up, overbalance and crash in one thunderous crump onto the hard shingle. Others race furtively towards the land, as if they can't wait to meet it. Together, over time, they paint a picture in sound, of this mid February beach, under a wide open, winter hazy sky.  * We took this sound capture of the beach between Winchelsea and Rye Harbour a few days ago. The scene captures the weight and detail of the tidal breakers, and is best "seen" through headphones or Airpods. A little propeller plane flies over, and almost at the end a curlew can briefly be heard flying from right to left of scene, towards the Rye Harbour nature reserve.

This spatial sound-scene of dawn birdsong was captured from deep within the Kielder Forest, a huge wilderness of fir trees in the far north east of England almost at the border with Scotland.  Along with almost all of our 257 episodes, this audio was produced by leaving the Lento box to record alone on-location , over a long span of time. By listening back to the captured audio we pick out sections that best convey the aural richness and presence of what it was like to be present in that place. These sections then become the episodes. What you hear sounds strikingly real. We designed the Lento box to capture sound binaurally, in an unprocessed and realistic way. It lets us experience that aural sense of being present in the landscape. Ear-witnesses to the authentic passing of time. This unaccompanied recording method means we can "hear there", but not "be there". Being there affects animals, birds and insects. By not physically being there they can behave normally. They move about, communicate, sing, forage, free of being alarmed or inhibited. Thanks to the Lento box, we are able to witness what it sounds like to be in their world.   This recording was made last May, amongst tall fir trees growing beside a rough track that runs into the forest, East of the reservoir. Willow warblers are most prominent, along with wrens, song thrush and other woodland birds. A cuckoo is just audible at 15 minutes.  At 38 minutes two heavy creatures lumber by and scramble into the cover of the trees. Hearing how they traverse the space reveals just how careful they are being to avoid detection.  One of the main reasons we travelled up to the Kielder Forest last year was to capture the evocative sound of wind moving through vast areas of fir trees. While the wind was not particularly strong at the time of this recording, the tall fir trees can still be heard in the wind, and producing that richly restorative and evocative hushing sound. If you're new to us, before you listen, here's a few tips about getting the most out of listening to Radio Lento. If you have listened to a few episodes, please could you buy us a coffee? We are an independent and ad-free podcast, powered by our listeners.

(Hello! We're a different type of podcast. If you're new to us, before you listen, here's a few tips about getting the most out of listening to Radio Lento.) The Creel Path, used by generations of fisherman to get from Coldingham to the coastal fishing village of St Abbs in the far south east of Scotland, is a thousand years old. It crosses an exposed coastal landscape, with rough pastures lying either side. Over the last century the addition of a telegraph wire, strung out along timber poles, may be one of the only significant changes to have been made to this narrow stony path.    The Lento box is tied to a squat broad leaved tree along the path. It's facing east into a wide open field, and beyond that is the sea. Mid left of scene about a third of a mile away, a sense of the waves can be heard rushing into the harbour of St Abbs. To right of scene fields stretch inland with distant sheep and late season lambs. As time passes the engine of a fishing boat softly thrums the air. Gulls almost constantly wheel and circle across the emptiness of the sky. A quiet sky, free of human-made noise. A sky sounding like it must have always sounded, over centuries.  * This sound capture is from an overnight recording we made in the summer of 2022 when we last visited St Abbs. This section follows on from the nocturnal scene captured in episode 208. Now morning has broken, and the gusting wind that swept over the path in the night hours has settled. Gentler gusts occasionally blow through the tree, revealing its presence to the listener. Rain clouds are coming, but for now the air sounds bright and clear. 

A wide open landscape, under a dark October sky. Remote. Naturally quiet. Witnessed from behind a lone cottage hidden between tall graceful trees.  It's just rained. Drips are falling from the old slate roof into an overfilled drain. Time passes. Somewhere far off, mid-right of scene, an owl hoots. It's call, carried on the wind from rolling fields below.  These late season leaves, so present in their rustlings, have seen the whole year through. They're soon to drop. Join the soft damp ground, and turn, slowly, to soil. For now though, while they wait for the weather to brittle them dry, their last job is to give voice to the ever-changing wind. The Lento box listens, takes in the scene, beneath the trees, on a garden table made of iron. The table is surrounded with ornate iron chairs. We have left it to record all night while we are asleep. To capture the aural essences of this Quantocks landscape, as time passes, with nobody around. * The first segment of this overnight capture is available in episode 245. Thanks for listening and if you are a new subscriber, welcome! Find out more about the podcast and how we make the recordings at radiolento.org and if you would like to become a supporter Radio Lento is on Kofi.  

Follow the path with the sea on your left side, until you reach the trees. It's only a small outcrop, just beyond the banks of tangled shrubbery and before you get to the location of a 19th century harbour of Lilstock in West Somerset, now long-gone. Step off the path. Lean against one of the smooth bark trees, the one closest to where the pebbles start. And listen.  We captured this aural scene one afternoon last October. It was an almost breezeless day. Bright, and clear. The conditions produced a pristine sound landscape. So crisp you can hear in full detail the movement of the longshore drift. Gentle waves, gambling over rocks and pebbles, from left to right of scene. A few robins sing from the shrubs nearby. A low hum mid-left of scene undulates from time to time, a marine vessel, moored off the coast. Ahead is the open water of the Bristol channel. To right of scene the landmass of Wales stretching away to the West, and the setting sun. It felt like a landscape at rest, under an almost quiet sky.  * This recording is the second segment of an 80 minute take, with the Lento box tied to a tree facing out towards the shoreline about 30 yards in front. The first segment can be heard in episode 244 'Rocky West Somerset beach'.

Quiet sky. This is how one sounds. Above Looe, on the Cornish coast. Thousands of cubic miles of empty air. No planes. No cars. No lorries to throw up their noise as they haul loads along dark country roads. Just gusts, and sea breezes. And a fleeting low whistle from a high chimney pot. Many steep tiled rooves, catching, and reflecting, and handing on their view of this sky's whisping sussurations. Roof, to roof, to roof, to microphone. To ear. To mind. To sleep. At first you may sense there is nothing to hear in this long-form night recording, and it is, as an audio recording, sparse. Or maybe not sparse, because the more you listen, the more you tune into the way the rooves catch and reflect the sound of the sky, the more your definition of what sound is shifts. People talking, and planes flying, and cars whining, and music playing, and things banging are of course what we are used to hearing everyday, and in the night too. But layered behind, usually far too soft to notice, is a whole world of different sounds. Sounds that are more like textures, and fabrics, and reflections, and perhaps shadows. We believe listening to these sounds, in the right setting, can help bring about a state of mind we think of as vigilant restfulness, where you feel aware of the environment, yet part asleep at the same time. This hour of captured night quiet is how Looe sounded, a few hours before dawn, back in April last year. The sea is near, and is subtly contributing to the background of this place. The sound-scene is rich with many other textural and fabric-like sounds.  We left the Lento box to witness time passing through the night, on some wooden decking, surrounded by shrubs, a loose tarpaulin, and the peaceful atmosphere of a Cornish coastal town as it sleeps under a quiet, wide open sky. * Looe is one of the locations we have found with a very quiet sky. Having said this, towards the end of this recording, there is a plane vaguely audible, somewhere far away. We decided despite this we would go ahead anyway and share the segment because compared to much of the rest of the UK where we have recorded, this hour from Looe does convey a palpable sound-feel of being under a genuinely quiet sky. To us quiet skies are of equal importance as dark skies. The latter is much more talked about than the former, but we hope to do what we can to change this. 

This barmy afternoon in Holme-Next-The-Sea has gained a stiff undulating wind. It hurries past the sheep in the paddock next to St Mary's church. Whisps through banks of unmown grasses, sifting up their scent. Shakes dry-leaved hedgerows so they sound as summer dry as the baked mud looks by the lane. Yes, today certainly feels like it's the first day of late summer.  Sit then on the bench underneath the fir tree. Rest back from the deep blue sky. Feel the sun's heat radiating off the parapet wall of the church. Hear the changing wind. How it hushes in the fir's needles. Rustles in the broad leaves of the deciduous trees. Rises, then calms. Causes the landscape to shift between near, and far. Surely this is how to best enjoy such a day as this. With sheep, grazing in the field nearby. And wood pigeons, roosting along the church roof and above, in the trees.  Spending time on this bench, taking in the day and the various kinds of warmth that it seems to be made of, might lull you into a daydream, and a thought. How are the animals around considering this first day of late summer? Are they enjoying the scents of the grass too? The hushing of the wind in the fir tree? The yellow orange heat rising from the sun warmed ground? Maybe they too have let go their plans, and are just basking in the sensations of what it is to be conscious of everything that's presently, and pleasantly around. * We made this recording in late July 2024. It was the way the wind sounded in the fir tree that caught our interest. Finding somewhere to locate the Lento box wasn't easy but we eventually managed to find a fence post that let the box capture the fir tree as it is in the wider landscape, beside the church. Sometimes the presence of the church can be felt as it reflects bird calls and other nearby sounds. At around 26 minutes the low rumble of a distant military jet plane can be heard for a short time. This part of England hosts various very active military airbases. We were in fact lucky to capture as long as we did before more and much louder jets flew over, producing intense low frequency rumbling.

Portland. Southeast 4 or 5 increasing 7 or 8 veering South 4 or 5 later. Occasional showers. Good, becoming moderate.  The Shipping Forecast marks its centenary on the BBC today. Happy birthday from Radio Lento! ----- Take as a seat one of the large flat stones under a tree. It's a lone tree, full of sparrows. Watch the ocean boats. The high tide is on the turn. Shallow waves rolling about between the rocks. They're playing that game of colouring in. Darkening the boulders to show where they've been. Surge, break, wash, dissolve.   Rest both hands on the sun-warm stone. Follow the ships and boats as they sail the shipping channel. Marine engines are felt as much in the chest as in the ears. Slowly each slides from view. Keep still though, so as not to frighten the sparrows.  Sparrows, and softly breaking waves, and humming boats, and time in a coastal edgeland space, and no interruptions, might be good for a bit of thinking. That kind of thinking best done without notes. Without words or screens, prompts or lists. And without talking. Flow time thinking where thoughts and ideas and worries and inspirations surge, and break, and wash, and dissolve, just like the waves.  * Happy New Year! Episode 251 is our first for 2025.

For Christmas Eve we're sharing this nocturnal hour of sound landscape time captured by the Lento box in the high peaks of Derbyshire. Bare leafless trees, sighing together, in strong undulating mid-winter wind. We feel this is one of our most atmospheric overnight recordings of landscape trees.  To far left of scene across a field there's a strip of woodland made mainly of tall established conifers. To centre of scene, stretching along a shallow ridge to the far right, trees of varying heights, beech, sycamore, elderberry, conifers. The exposed contours of this section of moorland tend to channel banks of moving air along and over the ridge, creating wonderfully spatial surges of energy that the trees convert into deep brown sound. For listeners using headphones or Airpods, the wind in the trees is sometimes so deep it is almost a sensation more felt than heard, as it gracefully moves across the aural landscape. * We made this recording high in the Derbyshire hills over Christmas 2023 during a period of unusually strong winter gales. There is only one overflight of the area as well that you may not even notice due to the wind. Such a quiet sky is also very unusual so near to Manchester's ringway airport. **This is our 250th episode! Happy Christmas and thanks for listening to Radio Lento.

With the stream to our right, we headed down from the exposed uplands of West Quantoxhead and into a shallow valley. Sky whitish grey. Air still. It smelled of rich late Autumn undergrowth, and faintly of mushrooms.  As we descended, the landscape changed. Became tucked in. Shapes of sheep shifted against dark thickets below. The grass got thicker too, and taller. And the stream got fuller, and more sonorous, with every hundred yards. Eventually we found ourselves in a completely different landscape. A watery, secluded dell. The sheep magically disappeared. Dissolved into the thickets and behind the trees. Running down over shallow stones, the stream flowed through the dell without urgency. Its sonorous wrillings reflecting perfectly off the leafy surroundings. Bright, but not too bright. With a fresh spatialness, audibly illuminating the contours of the natural space.  Here, set below high steep banks of dense undergrowth, far away in the Quantocks of West Somerset, sound and time melded. Unified, into one well tempered flow.  * The Lento box captured this scene tied to a tree during an unaccompanied overnight record in late October. We spent a long time in near total darkness testing out how different angles onto the stream sounded from various trees. We chose one set back from the stream, preferring this well balanced aural composition rather than a closer angle where the noise of the stream would drown out the subtle acoustic reflections of the space itself. The ambient sound levels were incredibly low. Listening back, we can sometimes hear the sheep, quietly moving about. After 17 minutes into the segment they wonder off, leaving only the stream to be heard, and the passing of time, in this natural secluded place. 

Kilve beach is edged by sheer cliffs and is made of rocks. Mostly small ones the size of oranges, up to medium sized ones the size of sofa cushions. To cross over them is unstable and you have to move like a penguin, which must be fun to watch if you aren't the one trying to stay upright. Jutting up between the smaller rocks are huge mattress sized boulders that are either massive flat topped rocks of unimaginable weight, or maybe if you could look below have no underside at all because they are the exposed surface of the Earth's crust. They make excellent resting points where you can temporarily stop from awkward walking and admire the amazing view. Having progressed some way along the beach we reached a smooth ridge of rock that ran for a long stretch perpendicular to the sea. It afforded us a path to walk on for a while. Either side of the ridge pools of stranded seawater had gathered beside piles of tangled seaweed. The atmosphere at this point had softened considerably, and there was in addition to being able to hear the sea a kind of silence too, immediately around us, so pure you could hear tiny bubbles popping in the rock pools.  It had something to do  with the rock cliffs of Kilve. They were doing something interesting. Cupping and reflecting sound, acting like the back wall of a theatre. Ahead the shoreline, though only about fifty yards away, was below the sound horizon owing to a very steep rake on the beach. This has the effect of mellowing the breaking waves, emphasising the weight of the waves rather than the brightness of the turbulent water. Occasionally a seventh wave breaks over a rocky outcrop directly centre of scene sending a plume of foaming suds high into the air and for a few moments above the sound horizon.  * Far left of scene you can sometimes hear children playing on the beach with their dad, maybe looking for fossils. Some hardy birds that make a peeping call swoop around too. As the episode opens a tiny microlight aeroplane crosses the sky from left to right, going almost directly overhead. For some reason we love this sound, it seems to reflect that free feeling you get on a wide open beach. You may notice the tide is very gradually coming in over the episode, yielding more splashes and watery details from the breaking waves as time progresses. 

This is segment II from a 6-hour sound capture we took earlier this year at Kielder Forest in Northumberland. Recorded in spring, the environment is rich with birdsong, mainly willow warblers whose song is a short and very cheerful descending scale. We'd been walking along one of the rough paths that thread through the forest below the Kielder Observatory and had found exactly what we'd travelled up to this specific area to record. The hushing sound of wind in tall fir trees.  Of course these are no ordinary trees. They are Grandis Firs. Vertically vast. Each the size of a 15 storey tower block, with huge drooping boughs draped in billions of tiny pine needles. Every needle catches in the wind and converts the energy into audible sound. Individually it's hard to imagine one could hear anything produced from one needle at all, but heard altogether, the sound is powerful. Deeply moving. Akin even to a spiritual experience. After finding a suitable tree to rest the Lento box against, we left it behind in the forest to record the scene alone, hoping the wind would not die down.  The wind continued to blow in slow undulating waves. And the willow warblers continued to sing their lovely droopy songs, no doubt perched on the droopy boughs of the giant firs. But the trees and the birds were not the only aural presences in this part of the forest. There's a rushing stream, flowing from left to right of scene. It issues its own fresh bright sound to the interior space of the forest, as it rushes down into the valley to join the city-sized reservoir below.  * At 18 minutes into this segment a plane flies over, but don't worry, it's relatively soft and gentle, flying high up above the clouds. It may initially be hard to tell whether the white noise is from the stream or wind in the firs in this recording. Over time, and as your ears adjust to the aural environment, the distinct qualities of the stream and the wind in the firs may resolve out. Both are highly spatial and texturally different. They often blend into one another, then part, like vails woven from different fabrics, billowing together in currents of air. ** Follow us on Bluesky or Ko-fi to keep up with Lento news. We recently celebrated a big Lento milestone!

Turn right off the towpath beside the Military Canal, cross the footbridge, locate the stile that leads onto the hill, then follow the rough footpath up into some impressive edgeland. It's rough. Grassy. Very thistly. And as you ascend it feels hard. Increasingly wild. It's somewhere up here, we say, striding firm against the gradient. But the thing's not marked on the map.   The Sound Mirror of Hythe is a large concrete parabolic dish. A giant ear, pointed out to sea, designed a hundred years ago, pre-RADAR for the early detection of incoming aircraft. Surely, we puff, a structure like this must stand out like a sore thumb? Well no. The steep ground has twists and folds. Ridges and bends that have to be walked. And no military installation worth its salt, however obsolete, is or should ever be easy to find.  We eventually see huddled low in the grass a squat blockhouse. A derelict radio receiving station, according to one historical website. Then we see the dish itself. A concrete shape, nestled against a steep bank, sadly now in a terrible state, trees growing up through its collapsing sections. Up close the dish is behind substantial chainwire fencing and surrounded by what amounts to a moat of evil shoulder high stinging nettles. Whatever evidence there may be of the 'listening chamber' said to reside at the foot of the structure, is not possible to see. It may indeed be buried under broken concrete.  We stood for a long time. Taking it all in. Despite its state, this dish is still active. Still reflecting and to some extent shaping the aural soundscape around it. Of course only from the listening chamber could one be an ear witness to what this structure was properly designed to do, but knowing that on some level it is still working, still channeling the soundscape from the sky above the sea, is, in a quiet way, thrilling. We found some shelter for the Lento box behind the radio receiving station, angling its view up the hill to capture both the near and far soundscapes. Near, wild wind whips through the edgeland grasses, a few crickets are cricketing. Mid-distance left, the sound mirror, about 40 yards. You can hear the wind when it catches in the trees growing in and around the dish and sometimes a yellowhammer. Right of scene is the hill rolling down into the valley. At the bottom the military canal. What filters in from behind the Lento box is from the coast and the ocean view. Toot toot of the steam railway that runs from Hythe, Dymchurch, Romney and Dungeness. Occasional distant echoes from circling seagulls and a construction site. Listening back we think some of these sounds at least are being reflected off the dish itself. 

It was late. Everybody had gone to bed. The remote cottage where we were staying in the Quantock Hills still felt warm, even though the oil burner had knocked itself off a while ago. Despite this, the place had started to feel, well, a bit strange and I wasn't quite sure what the feeling was.  I put the kettle on and the strange feeling went away. I made the tea, set the kettle back on its stand, stirred the pot, replaced the lid, forgot about the feeling. But then it was back. Intriguing.  I stepped up out of the kitchen into the back porch where the burner room emitted a faint electrical hum and a rich smell of heating oil. Was it coming from in here? No. The snug lounge then. No. It was coming from behind where I'd just been, the back porch. I stood, stock still. Listening.  The feeling was real. It was the presence of something. Not a thing or a spirit or anything like that. It was space. The feeling was of the hint of a space beyond the confines of the cottage. My hand went to the latch of the little back door. One bolt. Another. A chain too, all needing undoing. I lent back my weight and the door eased. With a woody squeak it jerked free from its jam.  Swinging the door gently open, I stepped out. And there it was. The raw source of the feeling. The space that I had somehow sensed was enveloping the cosy and near silent cottage. A whole landscape. Audible by its near trees and far contours. Aural presences, stretching from the back door over miles up into the Quantocks. A night world shrouded in almost complete darkness, brushed by rain, and autumnal wind. This was the moment. This is what I heard. 

We found this quiet place in West Somerset. Afternoon waves softly breaking along a rocky beach under October sunshine. The low landscape of Wales visible across the water. Lilstock. A port in bygone times, according to someone we met coming the other way. Now disused. A landscape of stony footpaths. Dense patches of shrubbery around outcrops of trees. Endless meadows and dry ditches. Fresh water streams and in the far distance on the clifftops, the boxy structures and cranes of Hinkley Point.  Human made sound was present but what really drew our ears were the long periods of near pristine quiet. Quiet lets the aural detail of natural landscapes be truly seen. Here, a beach not of sand or shingle, but of piles of rocks and small boulders. We tied the Lento box to a tree off the footpath about thirty yards from the shoreline, and left it to record the breaking waves alone. A little cricket was cricketing in the grass to the left of the mics. For late October we were surprised. As we walked away we saw a large plastic blue barrel, captured by high tide rocks, roll its way loose and into the water. Then we watched it for a while set sail in the onshore breeze whilst exploring the rocks and boulders in the fresh afternoon air. When we returned an hour or so later to collect the Lento box we could still see the barrel. It'd floated up the coast past the mics. Listening back to the recording we could  picture it, moving with the waves, from left to right of scene. One empty barrel that'd taken itself to sea, for a slow, silent voyage. * Let us know if you think this episode is sleep safe. We know there are sounds of people (mainly us) playing distantly on the beach and for some this sense of the presence of people may feel sleep safe, but others perhaps not. 

It isn't often we hear strange calls coming out of our long overnight captures, but this was one. The dead of night deep in the Forest of Dean, and a call that from the quiet emptiness begins to echo. Human?  Dog?  Muntjac deer? All three, or none? Muntjac deer are commonly heard repeating a single harsh bark across rural landscapes at night though this sound doesn't quite match the sound signature of muntjac, nor indeed dog, or human. The calling persists over ten minutes, seemingly human, then changing into something very much not human. What it is we can't know.  The sound comes from mid-left of scene. Whatever is making it is some distance from the microphones, which are tethered to the trunk of a huge oak tree growing beside a trickling brook hidden beneath dense undergrowth. To mid-right of scene is a country road that bisects the forest. Nocturnal cars occasionally speed through. The effect is curious, like a sudden wind is gathering in the trees, only to just as suddenly disappear. As the calling continues a tawny owl joins in. It hoots in that nervous kind of way they do sometimes, but then changes. Becomes a wavering quivering bleat, something like a new born lamb. It is fleeting. Then it is gone.  Building ideas of what is in the world around us from this kind of highly spatial binaural soundscape, especially from times and locations few of us are used to being within, can lead our imaginations into strange places. Notions of the supernatural. Happenings and occurrences beyond the normal boundaries. However to the eye, and if it weren't pitch dark, the scene would bear no comparison to what the mind perceives of this forest through hearing. There'd be no overwhelming sense of wide open space, no possibility of reverberances or echoes or happenings going on far away. Indeed no concept of distance at all. This is because what surrounds the oak tree is of course more trees. Lovely huge trees, draped in broad waxy leaves so green and so numerous the eye simply accepts the image as one vast surface of textured colour. A vail. The green vails make this huge forest place, from an eye-s perspective, just what is close. A walled garden. Safe, because it is completely hidden from view.  These very different perspectives of the same place reveal how hearing and sight fulfill substantially different roles when we are immersed in natural places. The hearing and sight we have was evolved in forest environments over millions of years. Within a world of green vails and visually obstructed views, sound travels freely, passes through leaves and around the solid structures of trees. Sound is spatial as sight is, has depth, width, and many other spatially sensitive qualities. It affords us with detailed information we need to gain a three dimensional spatial image of the world beyond what we can see. These complex interleaved vibrations land on our eardrums and are modelled spatially to alert us to the presence of things, what they are doing, and their location in space. But what sound also does, and what we as Lento are most intrigued to capture, is to convey and confirm to a vigilant mind that nothing is also happening. Not nothing as in silence. Instead, it is that sweet, soft, murmurating texture of half meaningful sound, like billowing fabrics, that simply say yes, the world is all there.  * This segment is from a 72 hour non-stop recording we made in May 2022 in the Forest of Dean. After the callings and the owls are gone, a little creature can be heard scuffling and making tiny quivering tweeting sounds as it goes. Soft planes pass over this area, helping to dispel any notions that this strange sounding place is anything other than the familiar world we all live in. 

Daytime contentedness can be found here. Between the rustling leaves and trees of Folkestone Warren that rolls greenly down towards the sea. We couldn't have known when we set up the Lento box under hot early August sunshine that the next day of recording would bring such strong breezes.  This strip of natural Kentish land is made of green plunging wilderness. It has a campsite next to a rocky and sandy beach. There's a cliff top cafe too, from where you can see France on a clear day. After stopping for a cup of tea, follow one of the steep paths, down into a sea of green. Find a gap between the trees. Try listening for the actual sea. For echoes of children, distantly playing on the beach. For a passing train on the hidden railway. The buzzard. Slowly circling.  Wind that waves in the branches, shakes and rustles the leaves, may not to the eye look particularly calm. And yet to the ear, these movements sound calm. We definitely feel a physical response to strong undulating breezes as they press and sigh through banks of trees. This daytime section capturing the sound-feel of this place reveals how time passes here, an ordinary weekday in early August.

An hour of uninterrupted white noise. Naturally occurring and fully spatial. Captured by the Lento box last weekend from a tree overlooking the beach under Folkestone Warren. Low soft rumbling of the crashing waves. Mid-range curtains of dark grey-blue backwash, that seem to billow and shimmer like hanging fabrics. Fine layers of crisper whiter noise, formed from the frothing and fizzing sea water as it is churned and blown by the night wind. The subtle hiss as countless leaves catch in the undulating wind.  The scene is of the wide open beach. And of the tide, very gradually going out. A breeze, quite firm at around 18 knotts, is whisking up the waves. The place is entirely deserted. It's around 4:30 am. Several hours until dawn breaks. Being a raw location recording there are a few planes that traverse the sky, though their sound easily dissolves between the waves. Something, perhaps a small mammal, pads up to the tree holding the mics, then carries on to wherever it's going. A dark bush cricket occasionally starts up as well. It's quite late in the season for them.   The ground underneath the tree holding the mics is layered in dry leaves left over from the summer. Just ahead, down a steep drop, the ground transitions into large jumbled boulders. This strip of loose rock is in range of the high tide, and probably is semi-submerged when the spring tide coincides with a North Sea surge. During the day people pick their way over these rocks in search of fossils. Folkestone is so we're told a fossil rich area. Our objective for travelling back to this beach location in Folkestone was to capture the reflected sounds the high tide makes as it laps around the boulders under the trees. We witnessed these sounds earlier in August, but ran out of time to properly record them. Returning last weekend to try again we found there was an 18 knott wind whipping everything up, and a different and wilder seascape. What we have managed to capture though is how the receding tide in this particular location produces a rich and very stable source of uninterrupted natural white noise. Naturally occurring white noise sounds so simple and yet is infinitely complex. These seemingly contradictory qualities may be why natural white noise from real places like this promote both wakeful concentration and vigilant restfulness, that unconscious conscious state of mind where you seem to be able to perceive  everything around you as one fulfilling thought. A thought so in and of itself complete, it frees you from the need to think of anything else.

Last week we shared wide time captured from a North Norfolk beach as night fell. This week it's wide time from the vast interior of the Kielder Forest. Human-free night vastness is an experience so out of reach to us, and indeed to most people, that travelling with the Lento box to bring it back in the raw is always top of our list. Kielder is a mostly uninhabited landscape made of hills, trees and water. It is England's largest fir plantation on the north east border with Scotland. You may remember we travelled there in May to find and capture new episodes. This section of time is from around 3am. The Lento box is recording alone laid against the trunk of a fir tree on the east side of the 9 mile long reservoir.  The sound landscape of Kielder at night is extremely spatial and delicate. Made up of subtle changing movements of air over miles of fir trees. Of occasional nocturnal flying geese. Of echoes, layered upon echoes. Of tiny twigs and branches shifting as the trees gradually droop their boughs in response to the night cool. But these sounds though precious are not of themselves what makes the experience of being immersed within the Kielder Forest so special. And they are not the main aural presence we left the Lento box out alone to witness.  What we wanted to capture from within Kielder above anything else, was the phenomenon of wide time. Wide time is not of itself audible. It's made of nothing. Or more accurately, emptiness. To gain a sense of wide time you have to allow yourself to mentally tune into it. And that takes time. And a quiet place to listen. And decent headphones or equivalent. And a long form spatial audio recording that comes directly from the natural emptiness of Kielder Forest at night. A place where wide time happens. 

Holme Dunes, Norfolk.  At low tide, and with night approaching, we finally managed to set up the Lento box on a tripod on the sand, mics facing out to sea. It was the curlews at dusk, framed within the vastness of the empty beach, that we wanted to capture as a photograph in sound. It felt good to have reached a spot to record, after a lot of walking. It was though still only the mid-point of the intertidal zone. A very low tide.   The mid-point proved interesting. Such a low tide leaves exposed an enormous area of flat hard sand. The landscape seems to guide the sound of the sea into your ears over long distances, and from very wide angles. It's what we love the most. That feeling of being very very small in a vast open and entirely naturally formed space. Naturally formed, naturally murmurating, and with magical fleeting calls of curlew. We explored the area around the box for a while, then realised we had a problem. Light. The levels had been dropping while we'd been walking. Ten minutes into the record we turned round from the end of the sunset and realised the land behind us had gone almost completely black. Getting up the beach would be ok but finding the narrow and indistinct footpaths where we'd come through the dunes was definitely not going to be ok. There were no street lights or navigation points.  But the atmosphere was so exhilarating, so precious, we let the box record for just a few more minutes. We then scooped it up and hastily began the next mission, to find our way back. This is why episode 239 is shorter than usual. Shorter but we feel important to share because it conveys some of the sound-feel of being out in a vast intertidal zone, empty other than the curlew, with night fast approaching. 

On the breeze, rich scents of hot Norfolk farmland. In the air, tiny wippling birds. Some swallows? Across the field, and across the next, a combine harvester large as a house. And quick as a car. It sails low over the far meadow, like a paddle steamer on a bright green sea. Standing on the Peddars Way, Lento box in hand, we've stopped to take in the heat, and to listen. Wide carpets of crickets are cricketing all around the meadow grass. They're happy. Baking like us, under a hot midday sun. We search for a tree. For a natural tripod. We scan the thickets that line this ancient route. It is quite a silent process, and the box swings gently. It's waiting for us to find it a good spot. The spot it needs is specific. An aural point in the landscape where everything meaningful can not just be heard but heard in a spatially balanced way. An aural meeting point where the box will "see" the whole landscape as a sound photograph. Eventually we find a very old oak tree completely covered in hairlike moss. It's amazing. Very carefully we rest the box between two intersecting boughs and check how the sound photograph is going to "look" through a pair of stereo headphones. Good we quietly say, providing this breeze doesn't ruffle the surrounding leaves too much. The weather seems fair and stable, so we leave the box to record alone.  * We captured this sound-scene (our 100th unique location and 25th county) on Norfolk farmland on a hot July day. The old oak tree stands on the Peddars Way, a 49-mile National Trail which follows the route of a Roman Road. Tiny birds flit and flutter amongst the thickets under the wide sky where rumbles of distant military jets can sometimes be heard. A combine harvester is at work far right of scene. If you're able to hear high pitched crickets, their sound sometimes wafts in an out too from the meadow. Red kites overhead too.  Thanks for listening, and to Lento supporters who've helped us to bring 100 UK landscape locations in high definition spatial sound to this free podcast service.

It is first light. Birds are waking. Beginning to fill the air with sonorous sounds of life. A few dark bush crickets are still cricketing, just, though soon they'll go quiet for the day. The view is of green. More green. And yet more green. A whole valley of thickly growing thickets, trees, and dense shrubs, slowly emerging into visual reality under an increasingly luminous dawn sky.  Another form of energy that illuminates this steep verdant valley, is from the sea about a third of a mile down from the recording location. It's acoustic presence perfuses the air, just as light does from the sky. The aural daylight if we can call it that, is brightest at high tide, and darkest at low. Sea light does not flow evenly as light from the sky does. It flows in slow undulating breaths. Follows every contour of the ground. Brushes through every tree, branch, leaf and shrub. Reminds us that like the sky, a huge mass of something unimaginably huge, is there, and moving, beyond our view.  * This is the third segment from the new series of sound landscape recordings we made last month at The Warren in Folkestone. Episode 235 was from the dead of night, and this segment is how dawn sounded at the same location.   ** NOT sleep safe due to noisy gulls and wood pigeons!

Capturing the experience and 'sound-feel' of crashing waves is always a challenge. Strong on-shore breezes and the unbridled energy of thousand ton waves breaking over unyielding rock can simply be too much for sensitive microphones. Yet as we sit on the concrete sea defences, bathed in hot afternoon August sun, waiting for the first tingles of cold sea spray to land on our legs, the experience is as serene as it is thrilling. How can this be? Something huge, heavy and aurally overwhelming is also serenely calming and relaxing? Our ears hear the landscape around us and let us feel its space and physicality. Hearing, in a way, is a kind of touching. Given the power and tumult of these waves as they break over the rocks, it isn't possible to be bodily touching them, but we can touch their weight and mass through our ears. Layers of white noise produced by crashing waves, rising and falling, folding over each other, straddling us with their weight, reveals how mere vibrations in the air that land on our eardrums are instantly sensed and translated into physical responses. Responses that are felt as a result of being heard. This is what we mean by 'sound feel'. We might say the thrill is the head's response, the excitement that comes with loudness and chaos. The serenity is the bodily response. Nerves, bones and muscles, relaxing, as they do when massaged.  So sitting on the sea wall facing crashing waves, hot in the sunshine and still in earshot of the odd cricket hiding in the seagrass, is a bath and a massage. Wild sweet peas dancing in the breeze on an empty path. Buzzards circling overhead. We feel drawn to this ragged edge of land and to capture it as an audio experience that can be re-experienced when we cannot physically be there.  * This piece of time we captured in early August from a nearby location to last week's episode (235) from Folkestone in Kent. This stretch of exposed beach at the foot of The Warren. Two perspectives on the same stretch of coast called the Strait of Dover. Without the sea, The Warren would not exist in the aurally rich way it does. 

Welcome back to a new Lento season of captured quiet. Sound landscapes from real places. This segment of spatial audio, best through headphones, was captured on the Kent coast in early August from beside a winding path in a steeply wooded area of Folkestone called the Warren. France is visible from this elevated spot. Around half a mile below, is the beach and the crashing waves. It is midnight.  The ground here is sandy and dry. The only way through is the path which winds down and around and down again, almost endlessly, between trees huddled behind thick shrubs and blackberry bushes. Eventually you come out by a railway line. It seems out of place so close to the sea. Before you reach the beach, there's a cluster of tall trees with long rope swings. The environment is so green and steep and tangled that it has a uniquely soft sound feel.   Here, on this August night, dark bush crickets form the main sound-scene against a back drop of distant crashing waves. One stridulates close to the Lento box. Another type of cricket, lower in tone, is audible over to the left. We have not heard this type of night cricket in England before. A few trains pass in the valley below, and a few planes too, though Folkestone has generally quite a quiet sky.  To get the true aural essence from this audio, which is from an exceptionally soft and quiet location where you'd need to strain your ears to hear everything that is there, try to listen with headphone volume set so you can just hear the murmurings of the sea below. Find somewhere quiet to listen to this episode and you'll get more from it. 

Welcome to this final intermission of August 2024, a specially blended episode of soundscapes from wild and exposed places taken from the last year of Lento. The first three sound-scenes reveal aural views of the outside world seen from within interior places. A coastal hotel room, the belfry of an ancient church, and inside a bird hide. The final sound-scene is of an exposed estuary by Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, and a slow passing ship. Each portrays the essences of wild places.   214 Storm over hotel peninsula A birds ear view over Plymouth in the far south west of England. This is how Storm Kathleen sounded from behind the huge plate glass window of a comfortable cushioned room on the fourth floor of a hotel. The hotel overlooks a district called The Hoe, where one of the original Eddystone Lighthouses now stands. the wind was fierce, whistling almost singing through the window seals. A blended soundscape, formed from the interior acoustic of the hotel room and the wide open windswept night beyond.  200 Windswept night in the belfry of Rye Church Up steep ladders on the top platform of the belfry inside Rye Church, the ancient clock counts through this small night hour. Its regular sound blends with long and undulating gusts of fresh sea air. Air that's travelled, over miles of sand, shingle and marshland, from out on the open sea. Moving air sighs between the shuttered rafters and rattles the steel flagpole outside on the castellated parapet wall. Knocks the dead weight of a loose slab of stonework out on the belfry roof.  194 Inside a bird hide The atmosphere inside a bird hide is quite unusual, as interior spaces go. Low wind moaning in the drooping wires between telegraph poles. Whispering rushes and siffing seed heads of marsh grasses. Indistinguishable shifting murmurings, of the surrounding landscape, blown in through low letterbox windows. To the ear there is a lot of outside to be heard inside a bird hide. A fleeting curlew. A humming propeller plane. A distant pair of passing footsteps on the gravel towpath.  196 Estuary bleak passing ship Warm inside an all-weather coat and facing out across the water. Sat, boots wedged against the top ridge of the slanted seawall. There's rain in the air. Time to take in this wild estuary place. Right of scene the small Essex town of Burnham-on-Crouch. Directly ahead across the water Wallasea Island. Left of scene wild swirling water stretches seven miles to the North Sea. Sit tight, here on the seawall. This is empty time, to listen to the landscape and a slow passing ship.

Welcome to intermission 3 of 4 and another specially blended soundscape taken from the last year of Lento. The theme is rain. Gorgeous, refreshing, soothing rain. Four sound-scenes that reveal the way falling rain varies in texture and feel across four different locations.  204 Rain falls on steep craggy woodland (*sleep safe)  Fresh rain. Fresh woodland rain, from Miller's Dale in Derbyshire. From a hedgehog's perspective. Low on the forest floor, amidst the leaf litter, and the tangled ivy. As the new day began to dawn, the Lento box listened, Faithfully capturing the aural experience of the falling rain on dense woodland in the Derbyshire Dales. This rain can be heard falling onto wide waxy leaves against many layers of more diffused rain falling onto hundreds of tall trees, and a white noise vail rising up from the river flowing over rocks in the valley below.  228 Summer rain under the wisteria (*sleep safe) Nocturnal rain falling over many little back gardens, in waves of varying intensities. we wanted to hear what rain sounded like when the city had fallen completely quiet, and the Lento box was exposed, sheltered only under plants. We waited for a night where persistent rain was forecast and left the Lento box out, beneath a large wisteria plant, close to an old Victorian brick wall. This sound-view of rain is shaped by the way each drop lands on the wisteria leaves immediately above and around the microphones, the intimate reflections caused by the garden wall, against a backdrop of more diffused rain landing over shrubs, a yard to the left, and many gardens beyond.  197 December rain light to moderate (*sleep safe) Captured from only a matter of about ten yards from the previous segment, this rain sounds entirely different. Different because the gardens are in deep winter and the air Temperature was only around 7 degrees. Enough to drift the ice cold raindrops and ruffle the leading edge of the wide tarpaulin that we'd stretched over our back yard for shelter. You can really feel how each falling drop heightens the spatialness and emptiness of this calm city night scape.  189 Night rain falls on a drystone wall (*sleep safe) This rainy sound view was recorded from the top of a drystone wall overlooking fields of nocturnal sheep, in the North Yorkshire market town of Settle. Rain comes and goes. It's a very ordinary field in many ways, and not far from a very ordinary sounding B road with some occasional night traffic on it. Combined with the odd soft arching plane, the sound view exudes a pleasantly harmonious aural fabric that is soporific and sleep safe. This segment last about fifteen minutes and in contrast to the previous segment is centred in a huge and dramatic landscape of plunging moors and lushous green meadows. 

Welcome to intermission 2, the second specially blended soundscape from the past year of Lento. This week's theme is waves and shorelines. There are four sections that blend effortlessly into each other. The sound-view into each watery place lasts around eleven minutes and enables you to compare and contrast the wide variations in aural detail from place to place, beach to beach, and at different times of the day  and night.  185 Onshore breeze on Chesil beach  Chesil beach has an astonishingly powerful aural presence. The Lento sound camera is pointing directly out too sea, about fifteen yards from the breaking waves, capturing the deep visceral sound feel of this steep and stark Beach. The heft of the receding waves, as they haul back huge quantities of heavy spherical shingle. The advancing waves, curling and then breaking into white sound walls of spray. And the ever flowing on-shore breeze. Through listening you can feel the weight, shape, and rhythm of this 18 mile long beach on the Jurassic coast of Southern England. 216 Sat on the sand of East Looe beach A perfect spot for an uninterrupted cinematic sound-view of crashing waves on East Looe beach in Cornwall. Waves in all their crisp textural detail. Can you hear which way the longshore drift goes? It can take a few minutes. The waves feel powerful in this spot on the sand. Sometimes thunderous. Thunderous, and yet calming at the same time. the presence of the seawall (behind) and pier (to right of scene) gives this beach an unusually enclosed sound feel.  188 Rock seat on Rye Harbour beach Near a limpet covered wall, beaten into shape by high tide waves and squally weather, are some rocks submerged in shingle. Rye Harbour shingle. Advancing waves keep rolling in. Splashing and breaking, as much onto each other as they do onto the smart grey contoured shingle. Rye Harbour feels as wild as it is panoramically empty. So enjoy some empty time, just listening to the crashing waves as the tide slowly goes out.   211 Nothe Fort at night - quiet swirling waves These are lazy waves. Rolling and slooping over half submerged rocks. Being the dead of night the quiet in this place is Pristine. The Lento box is recording from a tree looking out over the water beside Nothe Fort in Weymouth. The sound view of these waves, against such a perfect backdrop of solid nocturnal silence, is highly spatial and aurally clear. It's why we've travelled back to this precise location twice to capture their sound.

Welcome to our first intermission episode. August is an especially busy recording month for us so while we are away, we want to share with you some specially blended soundscapes from the past year of Lento. This week's theme is streams and rivers. There are four sections that blend effortlessly into each other. The sound-view into each watery place lasts around eleven minutes.    209 Downstream of the old mill Steep meadows all about, sloping down into a water meadow in the Derbyshire hills. The water's running fast. So much rain. The woodland birds are singing across the valley in their full spring song. This is dawn, on a wonderfully bright spring morning.  184 River rilling through Millers Dale  Here's the night sound of the river Wye flowing through Miller's Dale in the Derbyshire Dales. Open country water. Cool. Refreshing. Consistent.  226 Perhaps a perfect upland stream  This stream follows a country road high in the empty hills above the small town of Ceri in the Welsh county of Powys. We've shared many sections from this 2019 recording over the four years of Lento. The area feels magical, being very near to the Ceri Ridgeway (Kerry in English) an ancient route used for trading between Wales and England. This section of time is from the dead of night where no wildlife is audible, the entire focus is of the stream, and the acoustical properties of the hidden dell ankle deep in dry leaves.  203 Dartmoor stream  Below a stone circle high on Dartmoor called the Nine Maidens there is this racing stream. It threads down through steep sloping pastures, enters an area of dense forest, and Becomes enmeshed with the sound signatures of tall, reflective, overhanging trees. 

Fir trees don't have what you might call normal leaves. Their leaves are needles. Each tree possesses many needles, too many to count. Especially when the height of these trees ranges from 12 to 23 stories high. Concentrated in these myriad tiny needles, is a wonderful and special power. Position yourself deep within a fir forest, with even the slightest of breezes blowing high above, and you'll feel it.  You'll notice it first as a sound in your ears, but that is only where it starts. The softest, the most velvety, the most spatially rich sound imaginable. Without realising it, the sound passes from your ears to become a sigh In your chest and lungs. Further it flows, permeating through your whole body. The more you tune yourself into the sound of the fir trees, the more you still your own motion, the more you detach from the need to think of anything else, the more the waves of relief flow. The sensation is real, a palpable response to the aural awe diffusing down into the  spaces beneath the firs. Fir trees we feel create such powerful and yet enchantingly delicate sounds, that since experiencing them high in the hills of Dentdale last summer we knew we had to try to capture more. More fir trees in more different contexts, across more ground. That meant we had ultimately to go to the Kielder Forest, the largest fir plantation in England.  This sound capture is from a location in the Kielder Forest called Forest Drive. After reaching the area and then following rough tracks cut through the forest over several miles, we reached a place where a huge section of plantation was visible processing down the valley. Row, after row, after row of tall fir trees. The effect was enchanting, and fixed us to the spot. As we stood looking the wind began to rise in the treetops. The sound came. Velvet brown waves, of physically rejuvenating sound. It took our breaths away.  If you are able to find a quiet and still spot to listen to this episode with a pair of good headphones or Airpods with noise cancellation, the Lento microphones have managed to faithfully capture quite a lot of the aural perfection that existed inside this huge forest, on that warm and blowy spring day earlier this year. 

On a warm May evening deep in the Forest of Dean, the sound of dusk is alive with birdsong from many different species. The air literally fizzes with the energy produced by avian communications. Their calls and songs echo over long distances, they reflect and bounce from tree trunk to tree trunk, reverberate and dissipate. It's the sheer quantity of solid surfaces that give this aural environment the quality of being inside a cathedral. A cathedral of trees.  As dusk advances the light levels drop. The soundscape thins, and simplifies. Many species stop singing, leaving aural space for the wood pigeons and song thrush. The lower overall sound levels mean the humming of countless bees and other insects can be heard. Noise from human activity seep and filter into the inner forest space too. It's a sound environment that's now leaning, to one side, and starting to reveal the tawny owls.  Night nearing, the strange call of the woodcock on its roding flight enters into your sound view. Half way between a quack and a call and ending with a squeak. Now the forest is wavering on the edge of reality. Rumbles from passing planes are captured within the cathedral like voids, and continue to reverberate as if the trees are purposefully holding onto the sound. Perhaps these old and ancient trees aren't sure what these sounds are? Maybe the trees are rolling the rumbles around within their leaves and branches, as we do with our hands and fingers to better understand a strange textured stone we pick up on a beach.  After darkness falls, reality falls too. Nothing makes sense anymore. The forest has become a hall of sound mirrors. The rumbles, the echoes, the distant hoots of owls, the shapeless calls of animals, billow thinly like floating vails of grey. There are the crisp trickles of a stream, hidden under tangled vines. And the heavy movement of several ground hugging creatures, perhaps badger, perhaps wild bore, grubbing about and snuffling for bits and pieces to eat. But what seems to be there, throughout, or perhaps issuing from underneath the land itself, is a deep, cavernous smouldering. Could this be the sound of the Earth itself? 

Earlier this week we left the Lento box out to record overnight. Persistent rain was forecast from midnight onwards after a spell of dry weather. We never lose interest in the sound of falling rain. Being outside during a shower invokes strong feelings that must have evolved over millions of years.  To make these local rain recordings we normally set the Lento box on a tripod underneath a tarpaulin that's stretched out over the back yard. The tarpaulin acts like a horizontal cinema screen, catching the drops on an X Y axis and producing the type of rainscape sound that we've shared in many other episodes. This time though we wanted to hear what the rain sounded like when the Lento box was exposed, sheltered only under plants.  We set the Lento box beyond the yard, close to an old Victorian brick wall. The space immediately around the box was dense with leafy foliage from a wisteria plant growing along the top of the wall. It provided good shelter, or so we thought.  The recording worked. The Lento box, while completely soaked, did reliably capture the wide and shifting soundscapes throughout the night, perfectly. Falling rain, as it came down over many little back gardens in waves of varying intensities and droplet sizes, determined by atmospheric conditions high above. But being so exposed to the elements, and sensitive to all kinds of sound, large heavy rain drops hit the box that fell between the wisteria's abundant leaves. Each drop landed on the box with a sharp tap. Hundreds of taps, maybe more than a thousand. Each drawing the ear's attention to the microphone box itself, which as with a camera should never be in shot.  Our choice was to scrap the recording, make a better overhead rain absorption solution and try again another night. Or listen through every second with a keen ear and a micro editing tool to unpick each drop that struck the box.  Of course we did the latter and it took six hours. Crazy perhaps, but as we cleaned off ten seconds, and then half a minute, and then two minutes, then five, the process developed a momentum of its own. Like restoring a damaged painting bit by bit, gradually restoring to clarity the spacious and detailed sound image of the night. The countless raindrops as they fell onto the wisteria and the leafy shrubs. A meditation on one unique night, of falling rain. 

Being out on a headland is an experience as fresh as it is freeing. Fresh because these steep craggy places resound continuously, without end, with the effects of ocean and wild weather. Freeing, because they let you feel with all your senses, the reality of the world. A world seven tenths covered in water. Like bathing in forest sound created by the micro-turbulances of air moving through countless leaves and branches, a headland soundscape is also formed from panoramic layers of natural white noise, created by the movement of water over countless rocks. Or should we call it white sound? Noise is usually associated with what is unwanted. These noises are wanted. So good, so therapeutic, that we feel it's worth travelling long distances with the Lento box to find them, and record them. The tricky bit is capturing the layers of white sounds from the landscape when we get to it. Headlands are windy locations, and the noise of wind cuffing in the microphones is what we work to avoid. The sound has to be from the landscape itself, and not from the microphone baffles. Here is another passage of time we recorded earlier this year at the headland in West Looe, Cornwall. Light rain falling delicately, and spatially, onto new green leaves, against a wide panoramic backdrop of well dispersed ocean breakers. It is a night landscape entirely free of human made noise. Between the slow undulating washes, a passing seabird can be heard mid-way through the capture.  * You can hear daybreak from this same location in episode 221. ** Our last four episodes have been *sleep safe*. If we have helped you rest this month, could you buy us a coffee? 

Perhaps it is, though you may know of one even more perfect. This stream follows a country road high in the empty hills above the small town of Ceri in the Welsh county of Powys. We've shared many sections from this 2019 recording over the four years of Lento. The area feels magical, being very near to the Ceri Ridgeway (Kerry in English) an ancient route used for trading between Wales and England. This section of time is from the dead of night where no wildlife is audible, the entire focus is of the stream, and the acoustical properties of the hidden dell ankle deep in dry leaves.  We often think about what it is that makes the sound of a perfect stream. The particular combinations of musical tones maybe, as the water flows down over uneven rocks. The spatial details that make it one coherent sound-scene, panoramic, from far left to far right. The unique blending of white noise properties, acoustic reflections and other phenomenon created by the complexity  of the physical space itself. Every one of these audible aspects are seen by our listening mind to form the sound image we hear. Every detail matters in the composition of the audible image, and aural phenomenon of a perfect stream.  if you've not yet tried listening to Lento through headphones or Airpods how about giving it a go. Phone and room speakers can't convey the spatial content central to Lento recordings and that are key to the sound-feel that we call 'captured quiet'. The quiet is what hangs between the voids in a long-form spatial soundscape. It is only perceivaable with headphones or Airpods and it can take ten minutes or more to begin to sense its presence.  

Night rain, as it falls onto a quiet suburban garden, has a cool and spacious sound-feel. It seems to help focus the mind's eye onto the presence of objects and surfaces that without the rain would simply not exist, to the ear. Even to the eye, in such murky darkness, these objects and surfaces are not things that make sense in and of themselves. This nocturnal suburban soundscape, stippled with falling droplets, reverberates with the ever-present ever wide city rumble. City rumble is not a warm nor a cold sound, and has no shape other than always to be the same shape. It's always there. Always present. Permeates every inch of outdoor space with a steady unchanging and strangely indeterminate aural glow. It has something to do with all the buildings. Something to do with all the distant machines that whirr and whine as we travel about, keep warm, keep cool, keep moving. Something to do with urban life. A little back garden in North East London is such an ordinary place from a soundscape perspective. There is nothing here to peek the interest in conventional terms. You'd probably never hear a place like this through any normal broadcast audio channel. And so the idea of a quiet soundscape, a quiet brutalist soundscape, made of layers of indeterminate aural glows, echoes of indeterminate activity, reverberances of empty spaces under a wide an empty sky, must make its indeterminate way to the edgeland of the audio world. And that is here. On Lento. A quiet brutalist soundscape from one rainy night in March.  

Back we go again to Miller's Dale in the Derbyshire hills. To this quiet spot, beside a shallow river wrilling. There's a country lane, and a steep grassy bank down to the river where an old tree grows. The tree, so gnarled, and with an unusually stout trunk, must have grown here for decades. Maybe even a century, or more.  At about five feet from the ground it split into two almost equally thick boughs from which winding branches reached out over the river. Covered in moss. Dense with summer leaves. Something had drawn us to this place. We climbed down because we wanted to hear how the river sounded from underneath the tree. It wasn't easy. We had to hold on to the trunk to stop us rolling down into the water. From underneath we found the leaves worked like a walled garden, cradling and reflecting the aural qualities of the swiftly moving water. It felt like a perfect place to sit and listen, so We felt around the moss and hung the Lento mics beneath one of the thick boughs and left it to record through the night. This section is from the dead of night. The river is flowing steadily. Steadily over the time worn rocks. Above the tree the open sky must have been thick with cloud. Almost all the wildlife is asleep, or making noise that is hidden by the sound of the water. Aeroplanes over fly from time to time, ploughing their nocturnal ways above the clouds from one civilisation to another. The English landscape, however rural looking, is very often aurally speaking not wilderness but edgeland. This is a real sound landscape that represents the world as it is. Whilst listening back to prepare this episode we heard tawny owls calling to each other, from far across the fields.  

Whilst walking up towards the observatory in the Kielder forest, we passed large areas of cleared woodland. "Fallen in the great storm of 2021" a passing forester explained in the afternoon sunshine. In some sections, the trees had been cut and stacked. Rows of tree trunks that smelled deliciously rich with the resin-y smell of Christmas trees. We found the smell instantly relaxing, as if it reduced blood pressure just by inhaling it.  We stopped on a steep rough path by a rushing burn, to take in the pristine quiet ambience. Banks of wind were brushing across the high tree tops. Grand firs, whose countless fine needles instantly convert wind energy into rich brown sound. The rushing water permeated the surrounding space with what we feel is the cleanest white noise mist we've come across this year. Capturing this sound scene was something we just had to do.  Finding a suitable tree for the Lento box by the path wasn't too difficult. Bathed in the white noise mist and the brown sound of the tall fir trees, we left the microphones alone to capture this passage of time. Slightly to the left of scene is the rushing burn. Fresh water speeding shallowly over steep flinty stones. High above and undulating from right to left of scene, wind brushes the upper tree tops, filling the air with waves of softly hushing sound. Various songbirds are singing, wrens and blackbirds but willow warblers seem to be very common in the Kielder Forest. Their song while quite fleeting is a lovely droopy descent down a simple scale of notes. It's very similar to the chaffinch song, only purer, and without the musical somersault that the chaffinsh seems to finish on.

In our quest to capture the pure sound of trees in true spatial quiet, we have without realising it, been following a long and winding path that has ultimately led us here. The Kielder Forest. It's a remote place for England. A place where the sound of trees can properly be felt and heard. A place where millions upon millions of trees grow together, across an area of 250 square miles (400 square kilometres).  Planning this recording trip involved OS Explorer map OL42. We also checked flight paths and road maps to try to guess what extent human made noise might filter into the forest. From the sparse few roads and giant area of uninhabited nothingness, the location looked on-paper like a very quiet place indeed. Ideal we hoped for capturing the real sound of trees, in high definition audio. When we say the 'real sound of trees', we mean the spatial sound of trees in an ever undulating wind. Wind that shifts in strength between soft to medium. Ideally with most variations around the 10 to 20 knot range and that peaks every now and then with slowly rising and slowly falling currents in the 25 to 30 knot range. For the spatial aspect, the trees need to be over a very wide area, and very tall. To be spruce and fir, because these make the sound-feel that we are most interested in. Evocative deep brown hushing.   Somewhat optimistic for these very particular conditions, we travelled up country and ventured deep into the forest. We found a location near the dam of Kielder Water, and in driving rain left the Lento box tied to a tree. Then returned to the village some way outside the forest to stay the night. It always feels strange to leave the box behind, alone in such a vast place. Now we are home and listening back, what it captured is magical to us. Here is the period of time from 3am to just before 4am when the majority of spring birds begin to sing in first light. The wind strengths aren't strong, but there is an undulating wind that can be clearly heard in the tall spruce and fir trees as the banks of wind move across this region of the forest. Echoes of owls can be heard too, distant geese and a strange barking which we can't quite identify. Delicate layers of bird song gradually begin to build as the time approaches 4am.  * As always with Lento listen with headphones or Airpods to properly hear the full range of aural qualities we strive to capture and share. 

Time to take in a view. A panorama that changes with the wind and the tide. It's about six o'clock in the morning, and the Lento box has been recording through the night, tied to a windswept tree facing directly out towards Looe Island and the English channel.   The scene has an aural horizon formed of disapated ocean breakers, crashing against rocks far below. Blended layers of panoramic undulating natural white, grey and brown noise. Close by, newly sprouted leaves flutter around the microphone box in fast currents of blustery air. As the gusts subside, a softer, calmer view of the headland is revealed.  There's a fresh bracing feel to this place. Spring birds sing and call. Land birds such as chaffinches, wrens, robins, chiffchaffs and wood pigeons. Some sea birds too, herring gulls and possibly some oyster catchers. It's an exposed location. Unsheltered from the elements blowing in from the vast and empty sea. Unsheltered, and so thoroughly enlivening.

West Looe at night. A Cornish town on the edge of the Atlantic ocean. An edge where human things end and emptiness begins. We've shared a few captured sound scenes from here over the last month. This is the one if you're searching for the sound-feel of long, true night quiet. What is true night quiet? Capturing rich and detailed audible quiet, in contrast to dead meaningless silence, is what we're always trying to do with Lento. By rich and detailed we mean those aural essences, those often very delicate sound signatures, that give a place its own sound feel, and that aren't actually created by anyone. The sound feel of a place is formed and shaped by what's in it, its geography and its weather.   On this part of the Cornish coast we found very little human made noise during the night. No aircraft overflying. Next to nothing on the roads. Just long stretches of time where the softness of the place's sound-feel can be experienced with clarity. This episode is a section of time from around 3am in early April. A blustery weather front was blowing in from the sea, billowing along the narrow lanes of West Looe, cuffing in the roof gaps, whistling somewhere in a distant chimney pot. Fresh. Very spatial. A true and uncluttered piece of time.  Here are our top tips about how to re-experience this captured quiet. Find a relatively peaceful spot and listen through headphones or airpods. If you have Apple Airpod Pros set the volume just over half way at about 60%. This closely matches the sound levels that would have been landing on your eardrums by actually being at the location. Volume levels do vary between headphones so we can't give reference levels for other types of ear phones. Having now tested decent noise cancellation we can say when it works it can be like turning the lights off to watch a film. Clean listening, largely free of extraneous noise. Nothing beats a quiet room with a comfortable couch though, if you have one, and a pair of velvet headphones.