Field Recording: Horse, Carriage & Bus - Kensington Church Street

One of the odd parts of working in one of the richest and most well to do areas of London is that you occasionally see things on the street that you rarely see anywhere else in the city. Royal motorcades to and from Kensington palace, billionaires leaving their mansions on the UK's most expensive street and police armed with machine guns to name but a few. 

There's also a lot of horses. I'm not really sure why, but there seems to be more horses in Kensington than any where else in central London. In fact just the other day I saw a carriage being pulled by two horses weaving it's way through rush hour traffic on Kensington Church Street complete with two well dressed coachmen. It looked transplanted from a century gone by where that kind of transport was common place. If it had been in a film or TV show I would have called it a rather lazy British stereotype. I pulled out my phone but instead of taking a photo I made a recording of the horses as they passed a bus that had just pulled up.

Field Recording: A Glitch On The DLR

DLR map

Public transport in London is a fact of life. Unless you are one of the chosen few who can walk to work or drive, you will end up on public transport at least once a week. being confined to a small space for a long period of time on a regular basis will, unsurprisingly, become rather monotonous. I've spoken before on this blog about how I try to lighten up the 2 hours of each day I spend on the tube by listening to podcasts.

That said, every so often, something a bit strange happens that catches you off guard. Whether it's people in fancy dress, passengers exhibiting bizarre behavior or just something disgusting, public transport in London does throw you the occasional surprise. A few months ago I was on my way into work on the DLR (Docklands Light Railway), when I noticed that the automated PA announcements that tell you which station is next on the line had a weird delay effect. The result was a series of announcements that were pretty hard to decipher and for some strange reason, slightly unnerving. Because of these strange sounding announcements, passengers, some of whom see each other every day and never so much as acknowledge each others existence, we're smiling at each other and laughing slightly confusedly at what was going on. As I was standing next to one of the PA speakers, I pulled out my iPhone and began to record the announcements. 

Field Recording: The Royal Mile

This recording was made outside of St Giles Cathedral on a recent trip to Edinburgh. My wife had ducked into one of the shops nearby and I was stood outside taking photos. As I took one of the cathedral, a busker further down the street began playing the bagpipes, something that occurs regularly in the more touristy areas of Scotland.

Perhaps it's the natural reverb from the large stone buildings and cobbled streets that gives this recording an eerie and atmospheric feel and makes the pipes seem somewhat distant and removed from the street noise but there was a certain quality in the atmosphere at that moment that inspired me to pull out my iPhone and record a voice memo.