Sound and vision blog

Everybody has a favourite coastal sound. That special sound that brings a smile to the face or a warm glow to the soul. For some it is the ever present sound of the sea while for others it's the song and calls of our coastal wildlife. Whatever it may be, sound helps us form some of the strongest memories we have of our times at the coast.

A group of people who are no strangers to this are the presenters of the acclaimed BBC series Coast. We spoke to some of the presenters about what the sounds of the coast mean to them.

Nicholas Crane

Favourite Coastal Sounds_Nick Crane

The Changing Sounds of the Coast_Nick Crane

Tessa Dunlop

The Magic of Iona_Tessa Dunlop

Mark Horton

Favourite Coastal Sounds_Mark Horton

Lost Sounds of the Coast_Mark Horton

Alice Roberts

Favourite Coastal Sounds_Alice Roberts

Thinking about Sound_Alice Roberts

The UK's Favourite Coastal Sound

A few weeks ago the Sounds of our Shores team asked the public to vote for their favourite UK coastal sound. The results are in and we're delighted to announce that the sound of gentle waves breaking on a sandy beach won with flying colours.

Adam Long, a photographer based in Sheffield who recorded the winning sound, says:

“I’ve been visiting this corner of North Wales several times a year since I was a small boy, and so it feels like a home from home. The recording was made at a spot which is a favourite for an evening walk, and was made in spring before the summer crowds. The sea was almost mirror calm, and I was pleased to capture the gentle sound of the breaking waves and the fulmars on the cliff behind.”

Sounds of our Shores runs until 21st September so you still have a couple of weeks to get out there and record your favourite coastal sound! Full details on how to take part can be found here.

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Many thanks to Coast co-creator Steve Evanson for providing these interviews

Last week we featured part 1 of a Q&A with writer, artist and composer Rob St John about his collaborative art / science project Surface Tension, an audiovisual work that explores pollution issues facing the River Lea. In the final part of this conversation, Rob talks about transforming field recordings  and scientific data into a musical composition.

Once the fieldwork had been completed, you returned to the studio and began to work on the final composition. In the accompanying book you say that you “processed the recordings and photographs using methods designed to echo the pollution of the Lea to create the music and images in this book”. What methods did you use?

One of the wider ongoing themes (and questions) in my work is how to incorporate environmental issues and ecological processes into creative production. I’m especially interested in how narratives about landscape and environment might be (re)made through the influence of creative work, particularly in a time that environmentalists are slowly coming to term the Anthropocene, which broadly describes a world in which humans have influenced every patch of the ‘natural’ world, however subtly. And a central part to this is the issue of uncertainty, hybridity and flux in the environment: terms like ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ lose their certainty.

I’m not saying I have an answer to any of this, but I think that by explicitly incorporating uncertainty and chance ecological processes into your creative work, you can respond to the various blurrings and hybridisations of natural/cultural, wild/managed, native/invasive descriptions and categorisations in the environment, and in doing so foster new, and hopefully fertile conversations and ideas amongst people who come across the work.

In Surface Tension, I was interested in the polluting and degrading properties of the river’s water. A key ecological narrative from organisations like Thames21 describes how the river is amongst the most polluted in the country, with regular fish kills due to high pollution and low dissolved oxygen levels. And this is pretty obvious to the naked eye when walking the river in the summer: there are blankets of luminous green weed, and hydra-head swirls of oil all over the surface of the middle and lower river, and litter washed up in every backwater. Yet, despite all of this, shoals of fish and flocks of water birds and insects still survive in the river (again, it’s that remarkable thing of species and ecosystems still somehow finding a way to keep ticking over, even in the most human altered landscapes).  Sadly, it’s only when there is a large fish kill (as happens most summers) that the diversity of the river is actually revealed (and of course, reduced again).

So, this has been quite a lot of throat clearing as a means of getting round to telling you about how I used water baths of Lea water to ‘process’ analogue tape and films in the project. Field recordings and new compositions for the project were overlain onto 1/8 inch tape, and then the tapes were spliced into short loops, usually about 10 seconds long. The tape loops were then soaked in the baths of river water – duckweed, oil slicks, water snails and doubtless numerous dissolved chemicals – for a month, shimmering like elvers amongst the murk. The tapes were then taken out, cleaned, dried and replayed. Inspired by the American artist William Basinkski’s Disintegration Loops, I recorded this replaying process, as over time the tapes began to disintegrate and fall apart whilst still spinning.  

Degraded Piano Loop 

The water bath had etched various tributaries and knickpoints into the magnetic layer of the tapes, meaning each recording disintegrated in a pattern partially determined by the action of the river: another form of water and chemical erosion.  Elements of the recordings were slowly lost, creating subtle new melodies, rests and rhythms. The film negatives were processed in the same way and rescanned. Here, another process of reshaping the images occurred, as they each developed new marks, light flares and imperfections from the river and its inhabitants.

How did you incorporate scientific data into the work?

As with the tape loops, I wanted to let elements of the river and ecology guide the production of the final sound and vision in the project. So alongside this more tactile, physical processing, I used the Ableton Live and Max MSP software to sonify pollution data sets taken by Thames21 and University College London at seven points along the river. Sonification is the process of translating data into sound, much as you might create a visualisation like a graph or map. There’s plenty of interest in sonification at the moment, partly as a creative way of communicating or remaking scientific research, and partly as a means of asking ‘are there certain patterns and trends in a data set that might be easier to spot through hearing, rather than seeing?’

So, for the sonifications, I mapped various pollution parameters (nitrate, phosphate, bacteria and so on) onto sound production parameters (LFO, hi and lo pass filters and so on) in a Max program called Granulator, which mixes hundreds of tiny micro-second samples of sound together. This seemed an appropriate method by which to make the invisible, dissolved pollutants in the river somehow audible. In doing this work, I very quickly realised that any sonification will inevitably expose a tension between the data set used, and the aesthetic and practical choices made in what sound to sonify and how. Is a simple sine wave the most ‘objective’ sound to allow the dataset to ‘produce’? I decided to use harmonium and piano samples (the harmonium, in part because of the reeds – reed planting is one method that Thames21 use to ‘buffer’ pollutants from entering the river), which were gradually remade into something more ambient and granular by the sonification.  

Pollution Data Sonification

And of course, there were aesthetic and practical choices here, too.  A shift in the parameters and the granulator would have turned out crackling noise: interesting, sure, but much less ‘listenable’.  Was there any noticeable trend in the sound in response to the data?  Not really: but these were large, complex and variable datasets.  We often hear sonifications of more predictable and smooth environmental data, such as tide oscillations.  Aside from producing interesting snippets of sound for the project, the sonifications here were of little analytical use, and I wonder if this is a major thing for people to think about if sonification is to become more expansive and useful as a technique: how to deal with complexity?

A final ‘sonic geography’ technique was to map the reverbs of a number of historical architectural spaces such as the Three Mills complex along the river. By creating an ‘impulse’ (a burst balloon, a starting pistol) in a space, and recording the way the sound decays, a convolution reverb which replicates the acoustic ‘fingerprint’ of that space can be generated.  Again, this seemed a neat and appropriate production tool when attempting to play about with ideas of how the Lea Valley landscape has changed (and will do in the future), by blurring various spaces in which water has flown, been mixed, polluted and abstracted in the past: echo chambers for the various traces of the river.

What’s the result of this work?

All these production techniques were used in tandem with a set of new compositions on guitar, cello, piano and analogue synth, recorded partly with Pete Harvey in Scotland. The final piece of music is half an hour of field recordings, music, sonifications and tape loops, all blurring and overlapping, and was released alongside a book of writing and photographs in April, now archived at the British Library.  A sound map of many of the recordings, and the locations where they were taken was also made, and some of the photographs have since been exhibited at Stour Space in London and The Lighthouse in Glasgow.

Surface Tension Excerpt

What do you hope people will take away with them when they experience Surface Tension?

I hope they enjoy it!  Despite all this theoretical wittering and pondering that’s gone into the work, I wanted to make something that’s really easy and enjoyable to pick up and listen to and read.  And then if something sparks your attention, there’s a whole bunch of contextual information that you can spin off into (like this interview, I guess).  And maybe to be encouraged to visit the Lea Valley, and to see it in a slightly different light, one that’s neither entirely natural nor urban, planned nor self-willed, but instead a brilliant, unique and odd entanglement of all these things and more.

Rob St John (courtesy Emma Cardwell)

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Surface Tension can be consulted in the British Library Reading Rooms (catalogue reference number 1SS0010348)

Rob St John is a writer, musician and artist who recently collaborated with the waterways charity Thames21 on Surface Tension, an audiovisual project highlighting the pollution issues currently facing the River Lea. Here Rob discusses the project and how he set about exploring this vast body of water.

Last summer you were approached by Ben Fenton from Thames21's Love the Lea project to produce a piece of work that explores pollution issues currently facing the River Lea. The River Lea is a pretty substantial stretch of water, running from Hertfordshire to east London and carving a route through a range of different habitats. With a brief like this, where on earth did you start?

With an OS map and some walking boots! Thames21 generally work on waterways within the M25, so the geographical spread was narrowed down a little, although that said I did walk further upstream, way past the motorway, mostly to get a better idea of how the valley changes as the river flows (or doesn’t as I increasingly found) south. Lea Valley has plenty of decent footpaths, so walking the river wasn’t really a problem; instead the challenge was to track different channels of the Lea, particularly as it splits off and out around Enfield. In the end, I walked from up past Cheshunt down to where the Lea meets the Thames at Trinity Wharf, and back again, over the course of a few weekends in the late summer of last year.

You made a range of field recordings during that summer. Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to record or did you approach it with a completely open mind?

It was largely exploratory: after the first recording walk I pared down my recording kit quite substantially, relying largely on a simple field recorder and OKM binaural microphones. There’s something really enjoyable about being able to be so mobile when recording; to stop and quickly set up and capture an emergent or interesting sound. Binaural recording feels very attuned to your body – obviously in the way the microphones sit in your ears – but also in the ways it picks up your footsteps, the sound of you swallowing or your stomach rumbling…(an issue on some of the longer walks).  

There’s a wider conceptual thing here about how you approach field recording, I think. For me, binaural recording’s inherently mobile and bodily characteristics – coupled with the incredible, spatial recordings that it produces – make it an appealing approach to me. I’d much rather be led by my feet and ears in trying to catch traces of the soundscape, rather than setting up masses of kit in an effort to record a specific sound or set of sounds in the highest possible clarity and fidelity. Again, I suppose, this depends on what you want to do with the recordings. In this project (and in general) I didn’t record for reference sound libraries or similar, but rather as a means of providing a palette of natural (and non-natural) sound to produce, alter and generally tinker with in the final piece of sound and music.

Can you tell us about the types of recordings you made?

The binaural recordings were great for picking up the familiar sounds of the Lea Valley: boat communities, cyclists, parakeets, overground trains, aeroplanes, coots and moorhens, footballers on Hackney Marsh, dredgers in the estuary, riverside bars and cafes spilling people out onto the towpath. But in a way that’s more than representational of these individual sounds; binaural recordings are great for picking up wider resonances, overlaps and blurrings of different sounds, often anonymous and shorn of their source, prompting an uncertainty of what in fact you’re hearing.  

Enfield Coot family

I loved the way that parakeet calls would flit around car alarms; the way the rumble of traffic seemed to compensate for the lack of sound from a still river; and how coot calls would reverberate around echoing dry docks along with the clatter of machinery and hammers: an often unintended (and fascinating) blurring of the natural and non-natural, man-made and self-willed through sound.  And often there would be long, subtle drones and burrs in the recordings that I didn’t hear at the time: possibly the effect of my body acting as an antenna through to the rumbles of the ground (it’s perhaps never more evident quite how loud London is until you record there).

Parakeets over Hackney Marsh

In addition to the binaural recordings, I used two other types of microphones: hydrophones and contact mics.  Hydrophones are dropped beneath the surface of a body of water (a process that’s a bit like ‘fishing for sound’ I guess), and pick up the buzzes, scrapes and rumbles of the underwater soundscape: boat engines, insect activity, aquatic birds diving, and occasionally a sound that you cannot identify. Contact mics are stuck to various surfaces (drain pipes, walkway handrails, brick walls, sewer pipes and so on) with electrical tape, and pick up vibrations transmitted by the city (water, traffic, people, boats) conducted through various objects and surfaces.

Hydrophone in Trinity Buoy Wharf

The three techniques allowed me to collect a wide palette of sound from the Lea Valley, each transmitted and filtered in different ways: from the air, through solid objects and surfaces and from beneath the water’s surface. I wanted to let the environment lead me rather than being prescriptive in setting out to capture a specific set of sound: building an inherent sense of uncertainty, chance and serendipity into the approach. I mean, the Lea Valley soundscape (if you can be so general, scale is very important here) is constantly changing and fluid, and heard in an inherently individual and subjective way, so I thought: why try and necessarily pin it down to specific constituent parts?

The different recording techniques you used during your fieldwork allowed you to explore the Lea from both above and below the river’s surface. Underwater recordings are endlessly fascinating because they help you to eavesdrop on a world that is usually inaudible to the human ear. Could you tell us about some of the more unusual or unexpected sounds you encountered beneath the surface of the River Lea?

Listening to pondweed photosynthesise is always a hoot, particularly in the way that putting hydrophones into a seemingly ordinary, perhaps polluted, stretch of water can bring it alive: giving voice to invisible life below the water’s surface. When pondweed photosynthesises (the process of exchanging dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide with the water), it releases streams of tiny air bubbles. When these hit the submerged hydrophones, they produce a variety of short percussive crackles and buzzes, a little like minimal electronica. Added to this, there are the sounds of various underwater insects flitting through the pondweeds, and striating their back legs in order to communicate and signal. Finally, there’s a sonic backdrop of the river itself: of boats passing with rattling hulls and whirring propellers; of mysterious and unseen swooshes that could well be passing fish.  

I ran a public engagement workshop at last year’s Thames21 Love the Lea festival last summer, where we had a number of headphones set up to listen in to the hydrophones. It was a real pleasure to get to talk about this underwater sound with dozens of people – young and old – most of whom brought different interpretations as to what they might be listening to. There’s a real creative, imaginative effect to listening to these obscured sounds in seemingly still and lifeless places.

How many recordings did you collect during that summer?  

Dozens of hours of recordings, which were then edited down to around fifty or so recordings for use in the composition and soundmap.

What other documentation did you collect?

I took photographs all along the walk, in tandem with the sound recordings. These were all taken on film, partly with a nice old 120 Zeiss Nettar camera, and partly on 35mm using pinhole cameras that I made from Lesney matchboxes. The Lesney toy factory was at Hackney Wick until relatively recently (I’m not entirely sure what it has been redeveloped as), so making new images using a cardboard ‘shell’ of Lea Valley history seemed appropriate. And whilst pinhole cameras are notoriously difficult to take decent shots on (I was using a piece of electrical tape as a shutter, and doing some mental arithmetic to calculate exposures…), some of the images that resulted were amongst my favourites. In a way I thought of the walks as ‘experimental’ or ‘creative’ geography fieldwork: tracking routes and sites in a way that echoes a field trip, but gathering information on the landscape through various creative techniques.

In the second part of this conversation, Rob explains how he transformed field recordings collected along the River Lea and scientific data into a musical composition and accompanying book.

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Surface Tension can be consulted here in the British Library Reading Rooms (catalogue reference number 1SS0010348)

Whether it’s the sound of waves rolling on to golden sands, seagulls crying from the clifftops or children playing on the beach, we're on a mission to discover the UK’s favourite coastal sound! Drawing from some of the finest recordings submitted by members of the public to the Sounds of our Shores project, we've come up with a list of 10 sounds that in some way represent an aspect of the UK coastline. From nature to industry, transport to entertainment, these evocative sounds immediately transport you to the coast, having the power to bring back treasured memories or instantly calm the senses. 

So what have we chosen? Here's a breakdown of the 10 sounds that have been selected for this public vote:

1. Children playing on Brean Sands

 2. Dredging oysters at Brightlingsea 

3. Gentle waves at Trwyn Llanbedrog 

4. Ghost train ride - Palace Pier, Brighton 

 5. Kittiwakes at the nest

 6. Mumbles raft race

 7. River Mersey ferries in the fog

8. Seagulls and waves at Black Bay, near Monreith 

9. Seals calling and snorting on Raithlin Island 

 10. Singing Sands, Eigg, Scottish Hebrides

To take part in the vote to find the UK's favourite coastal sound, simply complete the Sounds of our Shores online poll here. We'll be announcing the winner in early September so make sure you register your vote before midnight on Thursday 27th August.

Sounds of our Shores runs until the 21st September so there's still plenty of time to record and upload your favourite coastal sounds. Full details of how to take part can be found here.

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Sounds of our Shores is a three month collaborative project between the British Library, the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland and audioBoom Ltd, running from 21st June to 21st September 2015.

A couple of weeks ago, Paul Nichols wrote about the sounds of Norfolk's Blakeney Point, where he works as a ranger for the National Trust. We now hear from fellow ranger Kate Martin, who is based in the formby area, as she describes her favourite auditory memories.

I think hearing and smell are the two most evocative senses we have as human beings. One single sound can transport you back to a very specific place and time and can even make you recall the exact feelings you had at that moment. The coastal landscape of the UK is full of these sounds for me, and hearing any one of them is guaranteed to make me smile wistfully if I happen to be away from the coast.

One such sound is the piping call of the Oystercatcher. On hearing that high pitched “peep-peep” I am about 4 years old, standing on the steps outside of the cottage that we went to for our summer holidays on the Solway Firth in Galloway. I can feel the sun beating down, I can smell the coconut- scent of the gorse bushes that grew behind the beach and I can hear the cry of the oystercatchers as they move around the bay, searching for mussels and limpets on the rocks or tasty worms and other morsels buried under the sand.

Another more recent auditory memory comes from the wonderful Sefton Coast, where I am lucky enough to work as a National Trust Area Ranger. This sound has unfortunately been lost in many areas where it used to exist, but it still hangs on in a few precious locations in the UK. The sound is the unmistakeable call of the Natterjack Toad, which always reminds me of a well-worn ratchet being wound round and round. The toad can only be heard on warm nights between April and the end of June, and due to its nocturnal serenading it has earned the local name of the ‘Birkdale nightingale’. This sound reminds me of sitting on my front step in Formby with my husband and my border collie Lottie (and most importantly a chilled glass of white wine) at around 11pm on a balmy May evening, listening to the distant call of the male toads trying to attract a mate in the breeding pools. The most amazing thing is that these breeding pools are approximately 1km from where we were sitting, pretty impressive for a creature 7cm long!

A view of the sand dunes and beach at Formby, Liverpool (National Trust Images / Jemma Street)

I could go on for a long time listing coastal sounds and the places they remind me of, such as the babble and squabble of guillemots and South Stack on Anglesey, or the ethereal cry of grey seals and the Lizard peninsula. However the final sound I will leave you with, which is probably the most common in my day-to-day job, is the sound of an Area Ranger unintentionally crunching sand between her teeth after a day’s work on the wind-blasted sand dunes  - nice!

Sounds of our Shores is a three month collaborative project between the British Library, the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland and audioBoom Ltd, running from 21st June to 21st September 2015. Full details on the project and how to take part can be found here.

David Hendy is a media historian and professor of Media and Communication at the University of Sussex. Formerly a radio producer for the BBC, he has a deep interest in the relationship between humans and sound, in particular how these relationships can help us understand human experiences throughout history.  In 2013, he wrote and presented the 30-part Radio 4 series ‘Noise: a Human History’.

Our relationship with the coast has certainly changed over the years, and as a historian I think that studying sound can be a really useful way of reflecting that. Places like Brighton and other south coast towns were pretty small in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period: Brighton itself was a fishing village in decline, a working environment. However, by the end of the 18th century there was a growing fashion for sea-bathing, which resulted in more and more people visiting the area, but also in new kinds of sound. On the beach here in Brighton, for example, you’d probably hear the sounds of bathing machines being dragged up and down the shingle, sometimes pulled by horses. 

This leisure industry really took off in the 19th century once you had the railways facilitating day-trippers, but also when you started to have the notion of a ‘weekend off’ from work. Londoners would come down in their thousands upon thousands, and they were in search of fun. So all these towns like Brighton and Margate had to compete with each other to attract them through entertainment. This meant piers, funfairs and penny arcades, open-air theatres, bandstands. 

Nowadays, those have been added to by things like volleyball courts, bars and nightclubs, which continue to attract so many people in the high season that one of Brighton’s alternative monikers is ‘London-by-Sea’.  But really these attractions are all just the latest modern versions of something that’s been going on for over 150 years. The sounds might have changed, but people have been coming to these places to have fun – and sometimes quite raucous fun – for generations.

Personally, it’s that whole mix of sounds that I like about the coast. If you come down to Brighton and you lie on the beach and shut your eyes, you’ll hear an incredibly rich tapestry of sounds: the waves act as a baseline, on top of which you have other natural sounds like the wind and gulls, but also that element of people enjoying themselves in the cafes or the arcade. When you visit the coast you might have a rough idea of what you’re going to hear, but it’s the way in which those ingredients vary from place to place and from time to time, season to season, which makes the coast endlessly fascinating.

 I think a big part of people’s attraction to the coast stems from the fact that most of us don’t live near the sea these days. So when we do go to the beach, what we’re really trying to experience is a different landscape – and soundscape - to the one that we have in our daily lives. When we listen we are surrounded by sound - it’s a 360 degree experience - and we feel part of the environment in a way I don’t think we do when we simply look at something. In every day life we perhaps tend to take the sounds around us for granted, and I think one of the main virtues of this sound map project is the fact that it will help draw people’s attention to the kind of sensory experiences which we might usually overlook.  It will help remind us how precious these sounds are as part of our heritage, and how much we value them.

[Adapted from interview: https://audioboom.com/boos/3375362-professor-david-hendy-on-sound-history-and-brighton]

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Sounds of our Shores is a three month collaborative project between the British Library, the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland and audioBoom Ltd, running from the 21st June to 21st September. Full details on how to take part can be found here.

For many of us, coastal sounds are experienced sporadically during the year, either through the occasional day trip to the seaside or more prolonged bouts during periods of annual leave. For some though, the sounds of our amazing coastline form part of everyday life. Here, Paul Nichols, Seasonal Assistant Ranger for the National Trust, describes the changing sounds of Norfolk's Blakeney Point.

The year begins with howling winds battering the coast: churning up waves and sending them crashing onto the shingle spit. Once the wind drops however, the air is filled instead by the sounds of Blakeney’s resident birds: the gentle gurgling of Brent Geese merging with the soft 'wheeeo' whistles of Wigeon in the harbour. I will always remember my early days of working at Blakeney Point, and the moment when I first heard the calls of Shelducks wintering on the spit– a loud quacking sound like a ratchet being wound at high speed. I had never come across the noise until I joined the ranger team, but now I will always associate this sound with happy times working on the Norfolk coast. While walking along the beach I also often come across a flock of small brown birds, which explode into a white-winged blizzard as I approach. These are the elusive Snow Buntings, whose soft calls echo around the winter strandline along with that of their cousins – the Lapland Bunting. 

View south from nature reserve at Blakeney point, Norfolk (National Trust Images / Rod Edwards)

As Winter turns to Spring, breeding becomes the focus for birds on the Point. Skylarks serenade me through the dunes and remind me that summer is on the way, while Meadow Pipits make their ‘parachute’ display flights overhead, always accompanied by their high-pitched piping call. Stocky black-and-white Oystercatchers gather in large flocks to engage in fierce duels for dominance, rending the air with their ear-piercing ‘kleep…kleep… ’ battle-cries.

During high summer the harsh cries of our breeding terns and gulls can be heard, as they do their best to gather fish for their hungry chicks. The ‘ooooh’ sound of the Mediterranean Gulls always reminds me of village gossips getting hold of some juicy news, and provides an amusing backdrop to a summer stroll along the shoreline. While walking on the shingle it’s worth keeping an eye on where you put your feet, especially if you hear the ‘pu-whip pu-whip’ call of Ringed Plovers: they tend to lay their eggs in a shallow scrape on the ground, where they are camouflaged against the shingle and very easy to step on!

Visitors to the Point in late autumn or early winter could be forgiven for thinking they can hear the cries of a human baby – in fact it will be the cries of a silky Grey Seal pup demanding to be fed. Adult seals add to the cacophony with their melancholy wailing and snorting: females protect their pups by howling at other seals who get too close, while male bulls display their dominance to rivals by slamming their 400KG bulk into the ground.

A seal on a beach at Blakeney Point (National Trust Images / Joe Cornish)

Of course there is still plenty of birdlife around: Linnets twitter as they gather into large and vocal winter flocks, while from among the seablite plants growing on the salt-flats there comes the distinctive voice of a Reed Bunting calling for its mate.

These are only a few of the sounds that can be heard here on the Norfolk coast: you just need to open your ears and let them all flood in.

Sounds of our Shores is a three month collaborative project between the British Library, the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland and audioBoom Ltd, running from 21st June to 21st September 2015. Full details on the project and how to take part can be found here. In the meantime, here are a few recordings of the Norfolk coastline that have been submitted by members of the public:

As we enter the third week of the Sounds of our Shores coastal sound map project, we thought we'd showcase some of the recordings that have been submitted so far. From waves to lighthouse foghorns, these recordings will help us build a comprehensive picture of what the British coastline sounded like during the summer of 2015. Here we take a look at some of the natural history and leisure sounds that members of the public have been busy recording.

Waves

From small waves breaking on sand to the tumble of pebbles being moved back and forth by the tide on a shingle beach, these recordings are perhaps the most evocative of all the coastal sounds: 

Wildlife

The British coastline is home to an incredible variety of wildlife, from seabirds and songbirds to mammals and invertebrates. Here are some of the wildlife sounds that have been recorded so far:

Amusements

From amusement arcades to seaside funfairs, these sounds immediately conjure up memories of holidays at some of our favourite seaside towns:

If you're heading to the coast during the next three months, why not record your own favourite sounds, either with your smartphone or a digital recorder, and share these on the Sounds of our Shores channel? The project runs until the 21st September so there's plenty of time to get down to your nearest seaside town or favourite coastal spot! Full details on how to take part can be found here.

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Sounds of our Shores is a three month collaborative project between the British Library, the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland and audioBoom Ltd.