Minute of Listening

In autumn I'll be working again with Sound and Music to help roll out a trial of their new Minute of Listening project in Cornwall. A fascinating idea, and the sort of thing I would have loved at school!

A thousand voices

Thanks to everyone who came on our night time wander to listen to the thousands of birds roosting at high tide at Dawlish Warren. Sitting quietly in the dark at the roost sharing the sound of oystercatchers, brent geese, curlew, wigeon and dunlin all jostling for space was really wonderful, perhaps amplified by the remarkably high spring tide and the perfect cool stillness of the air.

I'll be thinking about one more sound walk as part of Aune Head Arts Flittermice and Hoots series in the next few weeks ... and will try and put the field recordings into a podcast to try and hint at the sound experinces we've had.

Dusk at Dawlish Warren, 28 October 16:30 to 19:00

As part of Aune Head Arts Flittermice and Hoots series I'm leading an evening sound walk to identify and listen to the migrant wildfowl for which Dawlish Warren is so well known. If you’re interested in making sound recordings, bring along a mini-disc, digital or other recording device as there will be many opportunities for capturing the evening’s soundscape.

The City Rings

This sound project, linking selected schools in Belgium, Spain, Denmark and UK is coming to an end. The results from Cornwall are documented here.

The poetry of the earth is never dead

Due to poor weather we resheduled our walk in search of crickets and grasshoppers and other small sounds to the week following the advertised date. Fortunately it was second time lucky as six of us enjoyed a warm still evening's wander around Orley Common.

We were rewarded with the quiet sounds of dark bush crickets and the considerably louder reeling of the UK's largest insect, the great green bush cricket. Alongside these we also recorded the echo-location of bats transposed through a bat detector and numerous calls of birds, including some very active jays and the pre roost calls of blackbirds.

Finally, in darkness, we picked our way back to the car park, our path faintly illuminated by the natural limestone paving.

The following week we gathered again, this time at Aune Head Arts studios at Dartington. There, using laptops and the studio's very wizzy Macs we started to edit our collected audio in what will be a series of short podcasts for Aune Head's website. More on this in October.

The City Rings

From September I'll be providing background support for Cornwall based sound artist Cat Lee Marr who's working with Sound and Music on a project called The City Rings.

The City Rings involves young people from a school in Cornwall sharing sounds recorded in their local environment with young people from a school in Barcelona and vice versa. It's based on a project run recently by composerPippa Murphy in Scotland and documented here .

The poetry of the earth is never dead- 6/7 September 2011

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's--he takes the lead
John Keats, from "On the Grasshopper and Cricket"

In September I'll be runnning an event help people to discover the many and varied sounds of grasshoppers and crickets. This is an event in two parts. On the first evening we will visit Orley Common just to the west of Ipplepen to listen to these insect musicians and make sound recordings of their songs. On the second evening we will take our sound recordings to the Aune Head Arts studio and, using audio software, make short sound compositions which will be published on the Aune Head Arts website.

Both evenings start at 7pm and will finish by 9:30pm. Booking is essential. Naturally, both crickets and grasshoppers sing best when the weather is warm and dry, and quite happily sing in the evening (indeed great green and dark bush crickets sing into the night). If the weather on 6 September is poor, we'll reschedule.

For more details, visit http://www.auneheadarts.org.uk