Category: Birdsong

Painted with Sound: Listen to the Forest sound installation at New Forest Heritage Centre in Lyndhurst

I’m delighted to be able to tell you that a gallery show featuring my sounds is about to begin in the heart of The New Forest at Lyndhurst, and you’re all invited…

Painted with Sound: Listen to the New Forest runs from 10th September to 2nd October at the New Forest Heritage Centre in Lyndhurst. Original soundscapes and ambient music combine with large cinematic projections for a mesmerising, immersive experience.

This time I’ve set my sound works to beautiful cinematic projections of forest scenes. The result has produced a genuinely immersive environment where visitors are actively encouraged to chill out on comfortable seating for as long as they like. Entry is free, (although the centre, which is a charitable trust do welcome donations) and the installation is open from 10am to 5pm seven days a week. I think you’ll find that it’s the New Forest as you’ve never heard it before. 
 
The wide-ranging forest soundscapes that are featured include natural environmental sounds, bubbling streams, the bustle of the villages, traditional forest activities, birdsong, peaceful ambient music and a whole lot more besides. It’s a complete compendium of the New Forest in sound. 
 
As many of you know, my working method revolves around recording all sorts of sonic fragments from within the forest, which I manipulate, layer and assemble into unique soundscape compositions and ambient musical pieces. I try to consider every noise from the forest as potential material for these compositions in the same way that every colour is potential material for a visual artist. Quite simply… it’s painting with sound… 
 

“In the New Forest, sound is often overlooked and goes unnoticed, but I believe that everyone’s forest experience can be improved and deepened by giving more attention to it. Now, thanks to the New Forest Heritage Centre, I’m able to show how varied, interesting and often beautiful the soundscape really is, bring it to centre stage and give everyone the unique chance to have fun enveloping themselves in forest soundscapes for the very first time.” 

The New Forest Tape Collage

Sound Art Composition

For this Sound Art composition, I’ve reverted to long-lost analogue tape recorder techniques, and realised the work entirely on my old Ferrograph 7 reel to reel tape machine; a lovingly restored British recorder from way back in 1968 that was originally owned by the military (see photo above).

This piece is a magnetic tape sound collage… which is just like a visual art collage, but made with sound. You’ll hear lots of different sounds from all over The New Forest, juxtaposed and combined with each other in unexpected ways and brought together to form a snapshot of the landscape and its people in just four and a half minutes. See how many of them your can recognise. Here’s a bit more information on the concept and history of the tape collage in case you’re interested…

While artists have been layering images and incorporating autonomous elements into their work since the advent of paper, collage truly emerged as a medium in its own right in the early years of the 20th century with the Cubist experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The duo coined the term “collage” (from the French verb “coller,” meaning “to glue” or “to stick”) to describe works composed from pasted pieces of colored paper, newsprint, and fabric, considered at the time to be an audacious intermingling of high and low culture. It revolutionized modern art. 

The collage concept was later applied to sound; in 1948 two French composers, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and their associates at Radiodiffusion et Télévision Française in Paris began to produce tape collages (analogous to collages in the visual arts), which they called musique concrète. All the materials they processed on tape were recorded sounds—sound effects, musical fragments, vocalizings, and other sounds and noises produced by man, his environment, and his artifacts. Such sounds were considered “concrete,” hence the term musique concrète.

Springtime Selection

Springtime Selection is the first of an occasional, carefully-curated, themed collection from my New Forest Sounds archive. This instalment takes you deep into the forest in Springtime, one of the most sonically interesting of all the seasons.

In Spring, with the bedroom window half-open, I wake up to the beautiful balm of the early dawn chorus of birdsong… and now, you can too!

If you have some quiet time, settle down with a pair of headphones for 20 minutes and enjoy immersing yourself in this soundscape…

Brockenhurst Dawn Chorus

Springtime in The New Forest woodlands is something quite magical, because the general birdsong chorus is often punctuated by soloists like the cuckoo, and percussionists like the woodpecker. Come with me and have a listen…

Springtime

Lastly, I’ve got a piece of my Springtime Sound Art for you. What would it sound like if our New Forest woodpeckers all got together and created a musical arrangement? Well, listen below to find out! This composition uses the manipulated sound of a woodpecker in the woods and features slowed down sounds, delay and a variety of note pitches. I’ve called it “The Woodpecker Variations”.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed my little Springtime Collection. Look out for more curated selections from the archive in the future.

The Woodpecker Variations

Rider

Soundscape Recording

This beautiful and iconic forest sound comes from a lone horse and rider accompanied by her dog, passing slowly by early on one deliciously clear and still morning at Aldridge Hill near Brockenhurst, deep in The New Forest.

Crows in the Coppice

Soundscape Recording

Crows starting to nest in Springtime, in the trees of The Coppice at the edge of Whitefield Moor in The New Forest.

A Woodland Morning

Soundscape Recording

Enjoy an early morning in New Forest woodland, immersed in the beautiful sounds of Spring birdsong. Twenty-three minutes of natural soundscape brought to your favourite armchair.

Slow Bees

Sound Art Composition

Take the sound of bees on flowering honeysuckle, and slow them down to a quarter of their normal speed, and suddenly we can enter a whole new and unusual soundworld. The bees sound just like little Spitfire propeller aircraft coming in to land on the flowers, and the birdsong takes on a strange tropical quality. Listen to my piece called “Busy Bees” to compare how the bees normally sound.

Busy Bees

Soundscape Composition

Soundscape piece. The sound of summer bees on yellow honeysuckle flowers in a New Forest village garden. For an interesting different perspective on this soundscape, take a listen to my “Slow Bees” piece, where you can enter into an unusual soundworld!

The Song of the Blackbird

Soundscape Recording

The song of the blackbird is beautiful, and provides us with some of best melodies of all the garden birds. The individual that I recorded here is a real virtuoso with a gift for improvisation too, producing a mellow flute-like song at a nice, leisurely pace from the apex of a New Forest village roof in late Spring. The song comprises soft, clear and liquid notes that, to me, sound very pleasant to listen to, especially as the phrases never seem to repeat exactly the same twice.

Dawn from a Window in May

Soundscape Recording.

Wednesday morning, 6.30am in the middle of May, and it’s dawned still and clear on the outskirts of this New Forest village. The early sun is rising up through the oak and beech trees, casting long, dappled shadows on the dew-covered lawn. Outside this open window, birds are singing enthusiastically greeting the advancing dawn.

Now and again a car hisses by on a nearby, quiet forest road, sounding like an ocean wave running up the shoreline and then fading away. Up above, sharing the blue sky with the sun, airliners hurry along at 30,000 feet or so, leaving fluffy, white vapour trails and adding their distant, rumbling voices to the soundscape. Listen for a while…