- Sounds like a book
David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken (2022) seeks to establish sound as a new vital sign for the environment. It takes on more than it bargained for.
- Sounds of the Bog and the Apocalypse
A bog’s curious, ordinary, delicately explosive sounds belong in our narratives of climate crisis just as much as landscapes of epic disaster.
- Cassant et sec: Londres dans la vague de chaleur
La pelouse spacieuse d’un parc est-londonien, atteignant 37 degrés Celsius, se transforme en vide aride.
- A southern English forest in pictures and sounds
For all the stories and statistics, woods can become distant from everyday life. Micheldever Wood is a mixed broadleaf-conifer woodland in Hampshire that contains many of the signature characteristics of a British forest.
- Why do we need data sonification?
Data sonification is data display using any sound that isn’t speech, offering new and inclusive ways to interact with d
- London’s heat wave in sounds and pictures
At 40 degrees Celsius, London transforms.
- Brittle and dry: London in the heat wave
At 37 degrees, the airy lawns of an East London park have dried into arid emptiness amidst a potentially lethal heat wave.
- UK rainfall variability: It never rains but it pours
In an era of disastrous storms and constant fear over coastal defences and flooding, you might expect rainfall to show reliable, multi-decade, climate-influenced patterns. Or at least to swing wildly, as seasonal temperatures do. The actual picture is incredibly complex: precipitation is in fact trending in certain directions and swinging wildly at the same time. …
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- A field guide to open secrets
Getting to know a place takes time, even with methods like a randomised sound survey. It also takes the courage to throw away your map.
- A robin’s song to hurt your ears
A tiny robin’s song in the dawn chorus approaches frequencies at the limits of human hearing.
- Singing ‘chiffchaff’ by numbers
There’s much more to a chiffchaff than meets the ear.
- Silence and chaos and birds in between
A dawn chorus contains so much joyful chaos: that’s what makes it a chorus. For pure density of sound, most green spaces at dawn in springtime could give Piccadilly Circus a run for its money.
- Tall tree, loud robin
What makes new recordings worthwhile is that they can tell us about our environment by showing how birds interact with it. With that in mind, today’s birdsongification features the humble robin.
- Rain turns the world into a drum
Not even laser imaging can tell you as much about your material surroundings as rain can.
- Remembering a crisis in sound
Street recordings from the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown tell a tale of quietness, crisis, and the presence of absence.
- Forests go up, forests go down, but mostly down
New woodland is an essential climate mitigation tool. So where is it?
- Traffic isn’t noise
The way we hear traffic sounds reveals what we think of as worth hearing.
- London floods: On microphones and water
As rain spills into destruction during the summer 2021 London floods, the violence and disruption is getting louder.
- The unique and mysterious life of a London city park
It doesn’t look like a wild ecosystem, but point your ears at this London park and you might be surprised.
- The curious sound of the void
There’s a river here, but not the kind of watery soundscape that you might have expected.