Sound and vision blog

Over the past couple of months Graphic Media Design students from the London College of Communication have been producing coursework inspired by sounds from the British Library collection. The students were given their pick of recordings from the http://sounds.bl.uk site, and asked to produce graphical works in whatever form inspired them, for a project we called (logically enough) 'Sound & Vision'. Some of the students' work is being featured on this blog over two weeks.

Our third student is Marika Samek. Her piece entitled Awaken was inspired by wildlife sound recordings of her native Poland.

When listening to the sound materials at the British Library Sound Archive I was strongly drawn to the nature and life sounds. Listening to those sounds, I found myself revisiting some of the places I have been to and remember from my childhood. The sound I selected for this project was recorded in 2001 by Ian Todd. I chose this specific sound as it represents the sound of woodland; the dominant sound is the call (song) of the thrush nightingale, we can also recognise the sound of other birds, wind and all sorts of tree movement in a beautiful forest, near my hometown. I have visited this area many times in my past.

Thrush nightingale at woodland edge next to the lake (2001)

 The idea for Awaken come not only from the sound but also from pictures of this beautiful place, and the emotions and memories they bring back from childhood. Awaken examines subjects of light, movement, shadow, rhythm, structure. The aim of this installation is to transform the organic, clear form of wood and translucent film applied on acrylic into a shimmering world of light, shadow, and brilliant colour. It is a metaphor for how Sound - something assumedly invisible - an integrate with other senses and create beautiful Vision in the form of a vibrant picture.

I like the idea of Awaken being a unique art piece, as each viewer will experience it differently depending upon the time of day, ratio of natural to artificial light, precise angle of viewing, and even the number of people in the gallery. It is even possible for two people to stand next to one another and each have a completely different experience of the dynamic presence of light.

I titled my work Awaken, as that is the feeling I get every time I observe it. It is a dynamic piece, representing energy and movement yet it also bring happiness and peace from contemplation, making us feel alive and awake.

You can see more of my work at www.marikasamek.eu.

Marika Samek

Last year we provided a range of wildlife and environmental sounds for a project investigating the soundscapes of the Early Mesolithic. Archaelogist Dr Ben Elliott recently sent us this report on the achievements of the project and what the team are planning on doing next.

My name is Dr. Ben Elliott and I am an archaeologist from the University of York. Over the past year I’ve been working alongside the sound artist Jon Hughes to explore some of the amazing animal and environmental sound recordings held within the British Library's sound archive; with the aim of producing something a little bit different.

I’m a member of a research team investigating human activity during the Early Holocene in the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire. During this time, groups of hunter-gatherers lived around a series of lakes and wetland environments within the Vale. Situated around one of these lakes – Lake Flixton - the sites of Star Carr and Flixton Island have provided vital evidence for the ways in which people in Britain adapted to the rapid periods of climate change which gripped Europe at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,500 years ago.

The present day Vale of Pickering looks, and sounds, very different to the landscape that these hunter-gatherer groups would have been familiar with. The lakes have become infilled with thick peat deposits, and in the more recent past these boggy wetlands have been drained to create vast tracts of agricultural land. For the past 60 years, archaeologists have been excavating sites buried and preserved within this peat, uncovering animal bones, worked wood, stone tools, and plant remains which have survived since the end of the last Ice Age. The site of Star Carr in particular is famed within the archaeological world for its incredible levels of preservation, and the rare and unusual artefacts that have been found there.

Sonic Horizons at the Festival of Ideas, York (courtesy of Ian Martindale)

Jon and I have been working with the archaeological evidence to address a simple but rather overlooked question. What would life at a site like Star Carr have sounded like in the Early Mesolithic? The rich array of finds and environmental data recovered from the site certainly provides plenty of opportunities to explore this question. By experimentally replicating prehistoric tasks that are documented within the archaeological record of the site, we began to build up an archive of the sounds of everyday activities such as flint knapping, antlerworking, paddling watercraft, firesetting, bark rolling and heating water with hot stones. We also used field recordings from the British Library to build up a database of sounds which would have featured in the contemporary environment – the calls of the birds and animals whose bones have been excavated from around Lake Flixton and the wetlands and forests that are known to have existed around this time based on ancient preserved pollen and seeds.

These recordings were then used by Jon to create a 34 minute long sound fabric, which explores the lost soundscape of the Early Mesolithic Vale of Pickering. This is structured around 16 smaller “scenes”; short narratives directly based on the archaeology recovered from sites around Lake Flixton and featuring two recurring Mesolithic characters – Jack and Amber.  This piece was mixed ambisonically, allowing sounds to be positioned in 360^o around the listener, and set at variable distances to help create an eerily immersive experience.

Putting the soundscape back in the landscape: open day at Flixton Island

This sound fabric was performed as a series of outdoor installation events using a large set of outdoor speakers, arranged in a 30m diameter circle to deliver a full ambisonic experience to members of the public. These events helped to transform one section of a York public gardens into a Mesolithic wilderness, provided a stimulating and strangely soothing sonic backdrop for teaching young children about their Mesolithic past, and was even used to give local residents a sense of what their present-day surroundings at the site of Flixton Island might have sounded like during the Early Mesolithic.

Our work has broken new ground in exploring the everyday character of sound in early prehistory, and has allowed hundreds of people to experience a new take on what life might have been like during the British Early Mesolithic. We’re now looking for new ways to explore sound in prehistory, and are building up a network of potential collaborators to ask similar questions in a range of new archaeological landscapes. All of this has been made possible by the British Library's peerless collection of environmental and animal sound recordings and the help of Cheryl Tipp. Together, we are working to find a new home for old sound recordings; in Britain’s ancient past.

To find out more about the project, visit the Star Carr Tumblr site. You can listen to the Mesolithic soundscape here.

(images kindly provided by Ben Elliott)

On 13 May 1940 The Times published a letter from  the famed wildlife sound recordist and broadcaster, Ludwig Koch. Koch had settled in Britain four years earlier, “unknown and penniless”, and had quickly established himself as a leading figure in the world of natural history sound recording. He was responsible for the country’s first birdsong recordings, publishing these in the form of sound books such as the popular ‘Songs of Wild Birds’. This book and two-disc set attracted enormous media attention, effectively making him an overnight star in the UK. For the first time, people could listen to the songs and calls of Britain’s most common birds in the comfort of their own homes. Such was the success that a second volume quickly followed the following year.

Nightingale song, disc 1, side A, Songs of Wild Birds (1936)

Chaffinch song, disc 2, side B, Songs of Wild Birds (1936)

Skylark song, disc 3, side A, More Songs of Wild Birds (1937)

Koch playing birdsong records during the launch of his autobiography 'Memoirs of a Birdman' (Erica Marks, 1955)

Koch’s letter to The Times centred around a wild Blackbird that could mimic the song of a Green Woodpecker. Interesting enough you might say but it’s Koch’s opening paragraph that really deserves attention. Look again at the year of publication. 1940. By now Britain was in the grips of a war that was to see the world torn apart. Thousands of British troops were already fighting on the battlefields of France and the evacuation of allied forces from the beaches of Dunkirk was only two weeks away. In the midst of this bloody conflict, Koch encouraged readers to find solace in the beauty of birdsong:

War or no war, bird life is going on and even the armed power of the three dictators cannot prevent it. I would like to advise everybody in a position to do so, to relax his nerves, in listening to the songs, now so beautiful, of the British birds. If one watches carefully, one can be sure of surprises.

Koch himself was no stranger to the oppression of dictatorship. Forced to flee his native Germany in 1936, when pressures from the growing Nazi regime became too dangerous to bear, Koch had no choice but to abandon his precious recordings, painstakingly collected during the first years of the 20^th century.

All these recordings on wax cylinder and wax discs, including my collection of nearly fifty birds recorded between 1927 and 1932, were deliberately destroyed by the Nazis, together with the bulk of my unique collection of gramophone records (Extract from Memoirs of a Birdman, 1955)

Koch’s 1940 salutation to the power of birdsong sits in stark contrast to other letters that filled the column. The darkness of war was rapidly descending, with debates over munition supplies and urgent pleas for funds from the Red Cross appearing alongside Koch’s appeal. One hopes that his indefatigable belief in the ability of birdsong to calm and de-stress listeners, reached beyond the page and helped at least some readers  find comfort, during such harrowing times, in the sonorous beauty of the natural world.

The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985 is available in the British Library’s Reading Rooms. Visit the Early Wildlife Recordings collection on British Library Sounds to hear more wildlife recordings from Ludwig Koch.

We’re thrilled to announce the start this month of a new project: Europeana Sounds. This project will bring together online, for public access, over a million sound and associated digitised items from leading audio archives and libraries across Europe.

We shall double the number of sound tracks that can be discovered through Europeana, improve descriptions for two million sounds, music scores and associated items to make them easier to find, and we’ll create new thematic ‘channels’ on Europeana that bring related objects together in a coordinated way. The sounds will encompass not just musics of different genres – classical, pop and rock, traditional and folk - but also languages and dialects, oral memories, nature and environmental sounds.

Europeana Sounds will be accessed through Europeana, the portal to Europe’s digitised heritage. Through a multi-lingual interface supporting 31 languages, Europeana already connects a mind-boggling 30 million books, paintings, photographs, sounds, films, museum and archival objects from collections held by 2,200 source institutions. Sound recordings are one of the most popular media types, although representing just 2% of Europeana’s content. And while many of Europe’s leading cultural heritage institutions have large, high-quality audio collections that have great public appeal and are valued for research and for creative use, access to them is fragmented and constrained. Europeana Sounds will make audio content from memory institutions easily accessible - a much-needed gateway to Europe’s incomparably rich sound and music collections.

Coordinated by the British Library, this three-year project is led by a network of 24 European organisations: innovative digital technology organisations and leading library and archive collections of sounds and related materials. We will also collaborate with three digital distribution platforms, Historypin, Spotify and SoundCloud and their existing global online communities, to extend the public reach of Europeana’s sound recordings.

The project will additionally test innovative ways to enrich metadata by crowdsourcing and by using automated machine-driven categorisation and cross-media linking. It will align different kinds of objects from different collections:

Blackbird (Turdus merula) singing (painting by Stephanus Hendrik Willem van Trigt. Source: Teylers Museum, Netherlands, via Europeana)

Blackbird singing

Blackbird (Turdus merula) singing (recorded by Eric & May Noble, Wales, March 1991. Source: The British Library)

We’ll also experiment with ‘score following’, so you will be able to scroll music scores from collections contributed by one institution while listening to recorded performances of the same compositions from another source, as illustrated below with extracts from Johan Sebastian Bach's Wohltemperierte Clavier.

Score of Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 870 from JS Bach’s manuscript of Wohltemperierte Clavier ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, book 2. (Source: The British Library. Add.MS 35021).

 Wohltemperierte-Clavier-BWV870

Audio recording of Prelude and fugue in C major, BWV 870
(Source: recorded example from Europeana via Helsinki City Library).

More details about the Europeana Sounds project:
Website: http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-sounds
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eu_sounds

Europeana Sounds is funded by the European Union under its ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programm.

The songs and calls of 100 species have been specially selected for the British Library’s upcoming exhibition Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight. Taken from the Library’s extensive collection of natural sounds, these recordings have been incorporated into a rather fab bit of phylogenetic software – welcome everyone to OneZoom.

This tree of life explorer helps users discover and visualise the evolutionary relationships between species in an easy to access way. Working much like a map, the explorer lets you zoom into particular areas of curiosity and in so doing so reveals interesting and sometimes surprising branches in our planet’s evolutionary history. Did you know that elephants and hyraxes are basically first cousins? You will once you’ve had a look at OneZoom.

As you zoom ever deeper into the tree, families, genera and eventually species are gradually revealed. Each species is represented by a leaf on the tree; each leaf is then colour-coded to reflect the current conservation status of that animal. Now, for the first time, some of these leaves also carry with them the typical vocalisation of the species they represent. Here are just some of the birds, mammals and amphibians that made the final cut:

Western Lowland Gorilla

Gorilla gorilla gorilla, recorded by Nerissa Chao in Mikongo Conservation Area, Lope National Park, Gabon, 2002

Manx Shearwater

Puffinus puffinus, recorded by Alan Burbidge, Skokholm, Wales, 1998

Humpback Whale

Megaptera novaeangliae, recorded by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Caribbean Sea, 2000

Common Toad

Bufo bufo, recorded by Eric & May Nobles, Radnor, Wales, 1989

Crested Bellbird

Oreoica gutturalis, recorded by Vicki Powys, Northern Territory, Australia, 1993

OneZoom is the brainchild of Dr James Rosindell, a biodiversity theorist based at Imperial College London who, together with Dr Luke Harmon from the University of Idaho, came up with the initial concept.

The idea of representing relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, in the form of a tree gained popularity within the scientific community during the 19th century. The great naturalist, Charles Darwin, used this concept to express the diversification of species from a common ancester in his seminal work 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel produced several trees of life that reflected refinements in his research into the phylogenetic history of life.

Darwin's tree of life published in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)

Tree of life featured in Ernst Haeckel's The Evolution of Man (1879)

The evolutionary illustrations of Darwin and particularly Haeckel are beautiful visualisations of data that reflect the scientific knowledge of the time. The level of information available however is defined by the medium on which they are presented. The future lies with phylogenetic trees, such as OneZoom, that exist beyond the page, allowing an unprecedented level of exploration and understanding of how life on Earth evolved.

Beautiful Science runs from 20 February to 26 May, 2014, is sponsored by Winton Capital Management, and is free to the public.

David Vélez is a Colombian field recordist, sound artist, writer and curator. He is co-founder of the field recording netlabel Impulsive Habitat and chief editor for The Field Reporter. Earlier in the year he spoke about his work at the In the Field symposium.

What first sparked your interest in field recording?

I guess it was sparked by my interest in movie scenes with little dialogue and plenty of incidental sounds. I can't pick / remember one movie or one director in particular but I guess the movies of Andrei Tarkowsky, Luis Buñuel, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders had something to do with me recording sounds.  My interest developed further while studying documentary production and film editing and more recently when I was exploring new sources of sounds for my compositions and bought a portable recorder.

How has your practice evolved over the years? Are you still inspired by the same subject matter or has experience led to new interests and areas of investigation for you?

Field recordings always present an interesting and challenging scenario. When I started recording sounds my approach was fully formal; now after many years the subject behind the recordings and the questions I ask about the practice itself have acquired more relevance to my work. I still think this is a very aesthetic process though, where I look for sounds that have some kind of value for me.

I have worked with recordings in many different ways, from recording in rural and natural areas (focusing on capturing animal sounds and environmental acoustics) to setting up indoor situations and installations and recording them. The sounds produced in the creation of my sculptural works have also become a subject of my sound captures - an example is my release 'Unseen terror' which is based on the acoustic documentation of the creative process behind my installation 'Adrift and catastrophe'.

Unseen Terror excerpt (0'48")

With regard to sculpture and field recordings I am now presenting 'La orilla' (seashore) in Sonósferas, a Sound Art exhibition in Bogotá. 'La orilla' is a performative sculpture where I use a recording from the loud and droning seashore of Palomino, Guajira and play it back in a subwoofer whose powerful vibration activates a series of objects, creating a scene of frantic tremor and destructive resonance. The creative possibilities with field recordings are endless.

Also I would like to add that right now I think it is interesting and pertinent to evaluate and question the action of recording itself, in particular the given pursuit of fidelity and accuracy. It is intriguing to explore other ways to record sounds where the correspondence to 'reality' isn't necessarily the focus; this questioning can present interesting results both formally and conceptually, as I pointed out on The Field Reporter in the review of the Patrick Farmer and Stephen Cornford release 'A measure of ground'. This is a great example of media exploration.

Much of your published work comprises field recordings that have been manipulated in some way. In contrast, your 2012 3Leaves release El pájaro que escucha (The Bird that Listens) focuses on the natural sounds of the Colombian rainforest. Why did you decide to present these recordings in their original form?

When I traveled to Palomino (where this work was recorded) I brought with me the book 'The inhuman' by Jean-Francois Lyotard. The book centers on the question of whether there is going to be a thought that will regard the imminent future death of the sun. This book had a big impact for me, and the Palomino environment turned out to be a great mirror to reflect the thoughts and emotions prompted by reading it. Although I was just looking to record birds, the incidental droning sea waves and other external elements gave the recordings some sort of sinister nature which later became the emotional axis of the release. This material made me question my role as composer, encouraging me to avoid heavy post-production processing and instead present a more documental work where my role was more about pointing out things and being a proper medium, rather than manipulating sonic matter which was what I was doing for years.

El Pajaro que Escucha excerpt (3'00")

You co-curate the widely acclaimed netlabel Impulsive Habitat which publishes a wide range of field recording-based works. How do you envisage the label developing over the next few years and are there any particular projects you would like to explore?

Overall I try to set easy basic goals: keeping the label running in the way it has been running over the past two years would already be satisfying enough. We release a new work almost every two weeks and the scouting and publishing process demands plenty of time and effort from the team. We constantly focus on publishing unheard sounds, unheard artists and unheard approaches and fortunately this has led us to encounter new ways in which to do the things we do.

You play an active role in promoting field recording in Colombia through workshops, lectures and listening events. Why is this so important to you and do you see an emerging community gradually taking shape?

The sound art and composition fields in Colombia are at a very interesting moment right now: you have young surging artists and established artists working and presenting their work together in the many spaces and platforms that are either created for or turning their attention to creative sound manifestations. I think this mixture of generations, in addition to a mixture of creative processes that range from the more academic to the more empiric and from the more visual end of sound art to the more musical approach of composition, is what is helping make the local sound art 'scene' interesting for the audience.

I have to mention certain people that are working very hard in promoting sound art and composition such as curator, composer and sound artist Ricardo Arias in Bogotá who organises events and curates exhibitions that draw plenty of interest and attention. Also I'd like to mention composer Miguel Isaza in Medellín who builds digital platforms and communities that publish sound releases and create / link content of interest.

This year on Impulsive Habitat we have been putting emphasis on publishing works by artists from places where the recording-based compositions haven't received enough global attention and Colombia just happens to be one of those places.

Last month I directed a series of phonography workshops in rural areas of Quindío. It was a great experience to see people of different ages and backgrounds getting involved in the listening and compositional process and being capable of producing interesting documental material by themselves. Sound art and composition are not easy practices to encourage in a place with such a visual and mainstream musical culture such as Colombia;  sound presents a very powerful experience though, so once a person has dug sufficiently beyond the surface of things, they will find meaningful forms there.

In a different aspect Colombia has an enormous biodiversity but the economical policies, in particular the uncontrolled developing of the mining industry, are threatening these bio-diverse environments giving some political and poetical sense to the action of recording these environments.

Finally, with so many ways of documenting our surroundings we ask the question Why field recording? 

I have worked with photography, video documentation and phonography over the years but phonography is clearly the medium I have explored the most…why?

Probably because I care and worry about time. For me time is a beautiful and overwhelming mystery: we can't see it, we can't grab it and still time shapes the way that every single moment appears to us. 

Sound is the medium that better imprints the mysterious presence (or absence) of time, in part because sound is also invisible, intangible and equally mysterious. Sound potentiates our imagination, activates our memory and reaches into our emotions in unique and powerful ways.

Sound connects us with our surroundings through some sort of streaming process that allows us to perceive simultaneity, change and motion in a more 'realistic' way than we could ever perceive it through the visual experience. Likewise the notion of space is for me more realistically perceived through reverberation and resonance than through visual perspective. 

Sound travels at 1.236 km per hour, light travels at 1.080.000 km per hour and electricity travels slower than light. There is always a delay, a gap, a void, a distance between the event and the beholder; a gap that, no matter how small and subtle it can be, it is always there. The future is already occurring somewhere else but we just can't sense it yet and by the time we get to sense it it will already be in the past. The present time is nothing but this gap, because the present time is completely subjective.

Recording and playing back or processing the recordings allows me to give some poetic output to the questions I make as an artist, composer and mostly as a person concerned about his own existence. Recording and giving to these recordings an artistic purpose gives to my life some existential relief knowing that in the future the world that I perceive and that I am part of won't exist anymore.

Audio works from David Vélez including El pájaro que escucha (British Library call number 1SS0005179), Unseen Terror (British Library call number DD00000326) and Forma y percepción (British Library call number DD00000293) are archived at the British Library. For full details please visit the Sound and Moving Image Catalogue.

In February of this year Europeana launched an exciting new project that seeks to promote and facilitate greater re-use of cultural heritage resources. Through a series of pilot applications, open innovation challenges and spin off projects, Europeana Creative will demonstrate that Europeana, an online portal which provides access to over 26 million digitised objects, can provide the creative industries with both inspiration and actual content.

The British Library is one of the project's 26 European partners and will be providing access to 3000 digital sound recordings with particular emphasis on wildlife and environmental sounds. One of the largest contributions will come from the historic collection of British wildlife sound recordist, Lawrence Shove. With an interest in both the sounds of individual species and the wider natural soundscapes of Britain, Shove soon developed a comprehensive collection of wildlife and environmental sound recordings. By the 1960s he had become one of Britain’s best known wildlife sound recordists and worked on a number of published records including Woodland Birds (Discourses, 1966) Dawn Chorus and Nightingale (Discourses, 1969).

At the moment over 450 recordings from the Lawrence Shove collection can be found in the British Wildlife Recordings section of British Library Sounds. Highlights include:

Sea coast atmosphere, Skokholm Island 1965

Blackbird song, Devon 1961

Skylark song, Devon 1966

Yellowhammer song, Devon 1966

Making these sounds and their associated metadata available through Europeana Creative will increase the visibility and awareness of this rich collection and encourage creative re-use in innovative and imaginative ways. It's been an interesting journey so far and we'll keep you posted on all the latest developments as the project progresses.

In 2010 the British Library released 'Secret Songs of Birds', a CD featuring the slowed down songs of 24 birds from around the world. The elaborate warblings of species such as the Skylark, Grasshopper Warbler, Grey Fantail and White-winged Fairywren were placed under the acoustic microscope and manipulated to reveal a level of detail not normally detected by the human ear.

Skylark song normal speed (0'55")

Skylark song at 35% of normal speed (3'01")

The process of slowing down bird sounds is by no means a new one. In the late 1950s Musical Director of CBS Radio in the USA, Jim Fassett, began experimenting with the speed and pitch of sound recordings and would showcase his results on his Sunday afternoon radio programme ‘Strange to your Ears’. Fassett is perhaps best known for his work ‘Symphony of the Birds’ which was created entirely from manipulated North American bird recordings. Together with CBS technician Mortimer Goldberg, the two men carefully re-recorded fragments of field recordings at varying speeds and then superimposed these altered sounds onto a single tape. The final composition has a strange, ethereal quality that embraces the ideals of Musique Concrète and manages to bridge the gap between the natural and the artistic world. In 1960 Columbia Records released an LP version of ‘Symphony of the Birds’ along with another of Fassett’s creations ‘A Revelation in Birdsong Patterns’. This comprised a selection of individual songbird recordings that had been slowed down in order to reveal the intricate patterns and subtle variations that are usually concealed from the human listener.

Dr Peter Szöke, a Hungarian scientist and musicologist, also experimented with the speed of bird vocalisations. ‘The Unknown Music of Birds’ was released in 1987 and featured recordings of birds from around the world. Szöke strongly believed in the concept of avian music and used the voice of opera singer János Tóth to support his theory. Tóth beautifully imitated the slowed down songs of birds such as the Hermit Thrush and Woodlark, which helped Szöke emphasize the similarities between human music and birdsong.

The concept of slowing down birdsong was taken a step further in 2007 when British artist Marcus Coates produced an installation entitled ‘Dawn Chorus’. Recordings of individual species such as the Yellowhammer and Song Thrush were slowed down to such an extent that human singers could successfully mimic the individual notes. These examples of human mimicry were then filmed and speeded up to match the natural speed of each bird’s normal songs. The end result was a series of films that not only transformed the human voice but also revealed unconscious movements that were comparable to the physical behaviour of specific birds.

The goal of our 'Secret Songs of Birds' project was to strike a balance between revealing the detail within a song and creating a "new" song that was interesting, pleasant to listen to, yet still retained the essence of the original composition. Through experimentation, different speeds were selected depending on the nature of the song.

Grey Fantail song normal speed (0'47")

Grey Fantail song at 40% of normal speed (1'28") 

Goldcrest song normal speed (0'33") 

Goldcrest song at 35% of normal speed (1'30")

In some cases, recordings were slowed to 50% of the original speed which proved an adequate reduction to allow the listener to distinguish the hidden notes and rhythm of the song. At other times, further reductions in speed were necessary to fully uncover the song structure. In all cases, the alteration of the natural speed allowed us to reveal the subtle intricacies of these songs and present them to a new audience in their full splendour.

Secret Songs of Birds is available through the British Library Shop priced £10.00

(Skylark - Alan Burbidge / Grey Fantail - David Lumsdaine / Goldcrest - Richard Savage)