Category: Sound Art

Avon Sunset – for BBC Countryfile

Soundscape Composition

This is the sound piece that I composed and produced for BBC One’s Countryfile Television programme when I was featured on the show on Easter Sunday 2026. I captured the raw field recordings during filming sessions with the crew and presenter Matt Baker in The Avon Valley on the edge of The New Forest. See my previous post for more detailed notes about the shoot. But for now, just press play and…

Imagine yourself at dusk in woodland with a forest stream rippling through the trees. Then wandering out into a wide, open water meadow, just as the sun sets, deep and golden in a clear springtime sky with lapwings calling through the gathering dusk.

This soundscape composition contains a number of different field recordings together with gentle ambient sounds that the landscape suggested to me.

You’ll hear woodland birdsong and the sound of a stream recorded from just above the surface and also from below with a hydrophone. The deep bass sounds within the stream are created by slowing the underwater recordings down several octaves.

The landscape suggested a soft Rhodes piano which I used to sonically describe the delicate woodland atmosphere.

Gradually we move out of the trees towards open water meadows into the sunset. As we go, you’ll notice a change in the ambience which is heralded by the rhythmic sounds of a wire fence and the closing of a metal gate.

A smooth Moog synth melody enters, reminiscent of the distant sounds of lapwings calling across the water meadow.

Finally, a soft, nylon string guitar drifts in amongst the soundscape with a restrained tune that subtly duets with the calls of the lapwings as the piece fades away into the sunset.

If you like this composition, then do have a good old root around this site. You’ll find lots of pieces of my music and soundscapes in a similar style, with most produced to offer you some peace and relaxation from our increasingly busy world.

Always best on headphones – your personal sonic escape! Thanks for stopping by.

Incidentally, if you’d like to see the broadcast then you can find it on BBC iPlayer by following this link:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002ttfl

It starts at around 36 minutes into the programme!

After Midnight – Dark Ambient Atmospheric Music Mix

Ambient Music Mix

St. Barbe, an art gallery and museum in Lymington, on the edge of the forest, asked me to compose and produce a soundtrack to accompany an art exhibition that they were running. It was called Unsettling Landscapes – The Art of the Eerie. Amongst the artworks, there were many paintings of strange eerie trees and dark woodlands. My task was to use these paintings as inspiration for the creation of an hour-long atmospheric, dark music mix. So here it is for you to enjoy. If you’ve ever felt that The New Forest was a bit scary in the deep woodlands, then you’ll get the vibe of this piece straight away. Although it’s unsettling, I think the music is somehow quite immersive and involving at the same time.

It’s best listened to on headphones late in the evening or beyond!

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

A Kayak Collage

Sound Art Composition

A sound collage made from a variety of noises onboard my little one-man river kayak as I paddled downstream: captured with a small portable recorder safely wrapped in a protective plastic bag, and then combined back at my sound workshop using an audio sampler to form this sound art composition.

The hollow plastic kayak seemed to create, what I felt, was an interesting resonant sound similar to the soundbox of a big musical instrument such as a double bass.

Coastal Etude

Sound Art Composition

Coastal Etude is a study of the seaside in summer. It comprises a wide variety of sound objects captured along the forest coastline. These have been manipulated using Musique Concrete techniques and organised to form the finished piece.

These include: Weather forecasts, the shipping forecast, seagulls, waves on the shore and bubbling over rocks, children having fun on the beach and engaged in crabbing, natural helicopters and rhythmically manipulated helicopter, percolating step-synth, wind in the rigging of small boats, manipulated glitch-rigging, kayak paddling and tonal wind.

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.

Windy Rigging

Sound Art Composition

This composition is made from a recording of the sound of rigging wires on several small dinghies rattling against their metal masts in the wind. I’ve modified the pitches and turned the sounds into a musical piece using just those original sounds. The photograph shows Keyhaven, a beautiful sailing village within the New Forest National Park on the shores of The Solent. The landscape in the distance is the Isle of Wight. It’s very close from near here.

The County Show 1

Sound Art Composition

An electronic concerto for six country pursuit commentators, stationary engine and analog step-sequencer. The source field recordings used in this work were captured at The New Forest and Hampshire County Show in July 2015, Brockenhurst, Hampshire, England.

Six manipulated commentaries revolving around country pursuits comprising log cutting, showjumping, hunting, dog handling, cattle and sheep competitions form the basis of the composition.  The rhythmic percussion underpinning the piece is generated from field recordings of small, stationary agricultural engines (including the RA Lister and the Wolseley) produced in the early 20th Century.

This differs from The County Show 2, as this version doesn’t have any of the musical elements. It’s built from just the field-recorded sounds this time.

Dawn Rechorused

Sound Art Composition

A sound art composition, Dawn Rechorused takes a recording of the dawn chorus running initially at normal speed. Then, as the piece progresses, the birdsong gets slower. First to 1/2 then 1/4 then 1/8 of the original speed using imperceptible crossfades. I think it’s amazing how the birdsong changes. When it gets really slow it sounds almost tropical.

It serves to show the fascinating melodic variations of garden birds. The more the original is slowed down, the more varied and unusual the bird’s melodies become. Things that can’t be distinguished at normal speed become clear. Although it’s old-fashioned, slowing down analogue reel to reel tape in this way presents a much more organic and natural quality than trying to slow down modern digital recordings.