Tom.
• 24: White Noise Footsteps
• 23: "Amusements"
• 22: Caged Birds & Free Birds
Caged birds, free birds, trams, traffic, pedestrians and footsteps. Recorded at the Aviary in Nottingham's Arboretum Park using binaural headphone mics and a Zoom H4N recorder.
Listen with headphones for purest binaural reproduction.
• 21: Aleatoric Toys
I found a steering wheel sized disc on the wall of a children's play area at the park the other day. Entirely made from steel except for the perspex front, making visible the metal balls bouncing and falling on the spokes as it's spun.
What at first seems chaotic and random, gradually becomes melodic and repetitive when the right speed is achieved - kind of an aleatoric music toy for kids. Nice.
• 20: Balls
Polystyrene balls. Thousands contained within a bag and massaged with feet. Maybe it's only enjoyable because of how satisfying it was to do it... or that it was much louder than I expected. Either way, I like the sound on its own. Almost as much as I like the sound of Velcro.
• 19: Droplets On Canvas
A familiar English summer sound: Rain putting out the fire. My first BBQ of the summer stopped short by the weather. I managed to capture these raindrops though, which I enjoyed.
First I caught the rain on the umbrella just because I could, but I didn't think it would be quite as interesting as the hot coals. The more I listen to it though, the less it sounds like droplets on canvas but static interference or something. Anyway, Here they are both for you. Droplets on canvas and droplets on hot coals. Enjoy.
• 18: Binary seduction
Her voice became strangely intimate after about the seventh "Oh". What I'd assume android sex lines are like. I never called back, but I think I can remember the number.
• 17: Parkour Phonebox
What does it sound like to be standing in a phonebox whilst two Nottingham Parkour Free-Runners jump over the roof?
This was part of an audiovisual Parkour installation that took place in Nottingham, for Light Night, Friday 18th February 2011. Long exposure photography by Trish Evans. Trails of light courtesy of free-runners Philip 'Flip' Hunter and Mat 'Spark' Taylor from the Nottingham Parkour group, Urban Revolution
• 16: Wow! 6EQUJ5
On August 15th, 1977, while working at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), Dr. Jerry Ehman detected the now infamous 'Wow!' signal using the The Big Ear telescope in Ohio.
The Big Ear was a fixed antenna, using the Earth's rotation to scan the sky. The time it took to observe any given point in space was 72 seconds which was determined by the speed of the earth spinning and the width of the telescope's beam.
Any extraterrestrial signal would last exactly 72 seconds, during which time it would take 36 seconds to reach its peak (the middle of the beam) and gradually decrease thereafter as the beam passed it. Not only does this recording bear those exact characteristics, it's a pulsing sound like radio waves, unlike any other static random interference heard from outer space.
Despite years scanning the exact same area of space where the signal was captured (the constellation Sagittarius, 2.5 degrees south of the fifth-magnitude star Chi-1 Sagittari) the sound has never been heard again, or anything like it since.
• 15: My Other Heartbeat
I guess this is too personal to be categorised as a noise that everyone will be fascinated by, but the beating heart of my first unborn child is pretty damn special to me. The 'noise of my life' is more appropriate.
My mind is utterly blown.
• 14: The Sound of Sand Dunes
First of all, watch this video with headphones of through a speaker system that has bass. Then, for more info check out these two BBC radio programmes here. Part of the second one documents the sound of sand dunes and, among other things, how scientists prepare microphones to record sound on other planets as space probes hit the surface.
• 13: Shuttle Launch (ammended *)
This is a sound so mammoth; so monumentally colossal, that it challenges anyone to capture it with any accuracy. It can't be microscopically scrutinized, monitored in a controlled environment or examined close up. It's just too bloody immense to be contained, either by recordings or the physical world it inhabits.
The bombardment of blaring explosions rippling back down to earth impact the ground with such force as to sonically incinerate everything in its wake. The noise annihilates every other sound in the vicinity, burning and stripping away at the atmosphere as it leaves the world behind.
It's sort of the sonic equivalent to staring at the sun without eye protection.
According to www.ukqna.com, the noise generated by a shuttle launching is enough to vapourise water and create a rain cloud - so much so that, when the shuttle launches, it'll rain in a city nearby some short time after.
Listen to this through speakers or on headphones to hear the bottom end.
Note: This is just a clip and only an MP3 at that. To hear a full, much better, hi-quality 24bit/96Kh resolution version and some info on how it was recorded, go here
* Originally, I'd tracked down a high quality recording, hoping this would better represent its awesome nature, but I found it almost too sterile and doesn't get across the real energy and power of it. So below is a clip of audio I ripped from an online home video. I think this better conveys how it must feel to be there:
• 12: Thirsty Trees
Bioacoustician, Bernie Krause, has recorded the rhythmic vascular systems of thirsty trees.
He discovered that the cells in the xylem and phloem of the tree fill with air to try to maintain the osmotic pressure
that's usually produced by the sucking of water up through the roots.
At a certain point the cells burst. Krause adds "When they pop, they
make a noise: we can't hear it, but insects can. And when insects hear
multiple cells popping, they're drawn to the tree because certain ones
are programmed to expect sap. And when the insects are drawn to the
tree, the birds are drawn to the tree to eat. it's all a microhabitat formed by sound: The sound of popping cells." (Incidentally, when the
xylem cells pop, they die and form the rings of the tree). Recordings
are made at their natural high frequency (about 47 kHz!) with a
hydrophone and then slowed down by about a factor of seven.
Bernie's done some fascinating work in the field of "biophony", which is based around the idea that every animal in an eco-system has its own acoustic territory, or bandwidth of sound that it vocalizes in. If something comes in and takes over a certain bandwidth (like the regular route of a noisy airplane) entire populations can suffer, or be forced to adapt.
Text and sample courtesy of boingboing.net
• 11: 'Sferics'
If humans had radio antennas instead of ears,
we would hear a remarkable symphony of strange noises coming
from our own planet. Scientists call them "tweeks,"
"whistlers" and "sferics." Although we're mostly 
unaware of them, Earth's natural radio emissions are
around us all the time.
"Everyone's terrestrial environment almost literally sings with radio waves at audio frequencies," says Dennis
Gallagher, a space physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center
(MSFC). "Our ears can't detect radio waves directly, but
we can convert them to sound waves with the aid of a very low
frequency (VLF) radio receiver."
Lightning is striking somewhere on Earth nearly all the time (about 100 times per second), so strange-sounding VLF signals are constantly propagating around our planet. "The best time to listen is usually around sunset or dawn," says Gallagher. "That's when electron density gradients that act as natural waveguides form in the local ionosphere."
Here's some samples. The first is a 'Sferic' and the second is a 'Whistler'
These samples and text were taken from here
• 10: Seal Synthesis
This recording could have easily
been lifted from the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet or some Amazonian jungle gig
Pink Floyd never played. It's actually the sound of Weddell seals under
the Antarctic sea ice. I found out about this after watching Werner Herzhog's,
Encounters at The End of The World. A documentary well worth a
watch.
Sounds courtesy of http://www.junglewalk.com
• 09: Carmen of The Spheres
In 1977, Nasa launched the twin Voyager spacecraft. Their primary mission: the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. Though the mission was successfully completed years ago, Voyager 1 continues to send signals back to Earth and is now farther from us than any other human-made object - more than twice as distant as Pluto - and speeding outward at over 38,000 miles per hour.
Appreciating
the vast distances into unknown territory these
craft would venture, scientists placed a very interesting item on
board. They each carry with them a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph
record (pictured) containing sounds and images
selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Should
the disc be discovered by an alien culture, engravings on it indicate
how it is to be played; the revolutions per minute and how the
needle and cartridge (also included) are used to make it work. Kind of
like an Ikea assembly diagram for E.T.
But among the variety of analog encoded pictures, mathematical equations, human greetings and sounds of dogs, babies, crickets, hyenas, volcanoes, aircraft and music (click here for a full list) is a recording called 'The Music of The Spheres'.
Originally thought to have been conceived by the Greek mathematician and astronomer, Pythagoras, Music of The Spheres deals with proportions in movements of planets, stars and moons as a form of music. For example, if you take the number of days it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun (365.25) and turn that number into a frequency of sound (frequencies are determined by the number of times a pressure wave hits the ear drum per second) you can make all 9 planets in our solar system produce their own 'tone'.
However, waiting 365 days for every one pressure wave to
hit your ear drum isn't going to work, but if you divide the
numbers so that you raise the pitch of the notes by whole octaves and keep doing that again and again until the the waves are frequent enough to be humanly audible (human hearing is roughly between 20 and 20000Hz, or waves per second), then you can turn the data of a planet's movements around the sun into a musical pitch. In effect, you speed up the spin of the solar system till it sings.
The following audio file is an interpretation of
these concepts by composer Greg Fox entitled, 'Carmen of The
Spheres'. Going one step further and applying the data to the
duration of notes as well (a method known as consilience) Fox uses sine waves to
produce, I think, a really mesmeric piece of music.
Listen through speakers or headphones to hear properly.
To hear the recording that appears
on the Golden Record (now hurtling through the outer reaches of space) click here.
It's a very poor quality mp3 though so probably not a good
representation of the original.
• 08: Backdrop For The Ears
If log fires made no sound at all, would we enjoy them as much?
Obviously, if they'd never produced sound in the first place we'd have
no way of knowing but hypothetically, if the crackles, rumbles, spits
and fizzes were somehow removed I
think they'd be sorely missed.
For me, there is an inherent parallel between this and vinyl recordings - possibly even an unconscious association between the gentle crackle of vinyl and a wood-fire. Since crackles were never an intention in recordings, technology has improved to the point where silence in a record really does mean silence. In reality though, you'd be hard pushed to find yourself in a situation where there was no background noise, no matter what your surroundings.
Anyway, here's a little scenery; the original ambient backdrop - and after it, the unmistakable sound of a roaring fireplace... or is it just vinyl crackle again at half-speed?
• 07: Never-Ending Descent
Being as it is that such a wide variety 
of optical illusions
exist (like the 'Ascending, Descending' staircase by MC Escher, pictured) it wouldn't be a stretch too far to
suppose there would be a similar variety for confounding the ears as well. But from
what I can find, that simply isn't the case. There are, of course, lots
of interesting effects for playing around with sounds and distorting
them, but they can't really be categorised as illusions.
The Shepard Glissando Tone (named after Roger Shepard, a Cognitive Scientist) does what a good illusion should do; utterly discombobulate the listener and make them feel a little bit strange. This seemingly endless descending tone (that is no lower in pitch by the end of the recording than it was at the start) is actually a chord made up of a number of descending notes. Each individual tone fades in from nothing, peaks in volume when it reaches its midway point, then fades out again toward the end.
Because there is no definitive beginning or end to the tones, the human brain glues all the midway parts together as they fall and perceives the overall sound as constantly descending. Imagine a big circle of trombone players each starting their descending tone about one second apart from each other. If they were able to fade in from nothing and fade out perfectly (no mean feat) they could perform this illusion live.
The sound doesn't have to descend of course, it could be a never-ending ascending tone, but I find it far more disturbing this way. It presents the listener with an interesting mix of confusion and weirdness; the prime ingredients for a good illusion.
• 06: Long Distance Relationship
What makes a sound remarkable?
This sample below is a recording taken by the COROT space telescope in October 2008 of the resonant vibrations of three different stars. By detecting subtle frequencies emanating from them, scientists can now create and map images of their core interiors from thousands of light years away.
Were there a definitive list of remarkable sounds, I think that music made by stars would rate quite highly. They do, however, sound uncannily like some sound effect lifted from an early Star Trek episode. Maybe Gene Roddenberry knew more than he was letting on.
• 05: Luscious Texture
If it weren't for dog hair, a Swiss bloke and Burdock Burrs VELCRO would not exist.
The story goes that George de Mestral, the Swiss mountaineer and inventor, came back from a stroll with his dog covered in burrs. Noticing how these things cling fast to their furry subjects, George took a look under his microscope and saw that the burrs had stiff hooks clinging tightly to the fluffy fibers of his dog's hair. Thus, in 1941, Velcro was born (a combination of the word velour and crochet).
• 04: Cosmic Belch
Subjecting oneself to the seduction of raw synthetic frequencies can be a sumptuously arousing activity to do now and then. Take this dirty, granular, almost pornographic snarl, for example; a sleazy yawn of electrical vomit that, despite its luridness, I find is a joy to have gurgling in my ears. Its consistency is so absorbing, one might be forgiven for wanting to caress its coarse and malleable hide. It's almost reminiscent of some massive creature's final breath as it falls, slain by some gallant foe. If you could smell it, it would surely be a foul and pungent stench that, somehow, you cannot help but enjoy, like a particularly flavoursome fart.
Apparently, scientists have discovered that black holes do indeed 'fart'. They even recorded one to be a B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C. I'd like to think that, out there, some filthy, guttural sub-sonic belch like this one is rippling across space right now.
• 03: Dashing Off
It's pretty damned impressive when you think about it. Just how it is that a bongo, a hi-hat, a cowbell and the sped up sample of a bullet ricochet can be sonically sewn together in such a way that - despite it having absolutely no real similarity to the sound of the action it has been used to depict since cartoons began - there isn't a single person alive who's seen television who can't immediately picture its visual counterpart? It goes to show just how easily manipulated the human brain is.
It's actually a bit disturbing. If a cartoon sound effect can embed itself irrevocably in our collective psyche and become instinctively associated with a completely arbitrary element, what other things could have been fed into our brains through tv and the media since childhood? What other unconscious associations are we making?
We're all manipulated in one way or another. Even if we're aware of any controlling societal influence and actively fight against it, we're still governed by it because it has our full attention. It's a distraction. What would we be doing and thinking about if we could break free of that influence? Probably sat at home watching cartoons.
• 02: Man Scream
Evidently, the motivation for this sample was meant to reflect some form of primal fear, but it just sounds pathetic. Seriously, who would produce such a noise?
• 01: Punch
No sound is more embellished and sensationalised than the fight-scene punch in the face. However hard you hit someone, it'll never produce this sound. 
Unless you're pounding raw steak, shattering chicken carcasses stuffed full of walnuts with baseball bats, or smacking around slabs of meat using pigs' feet (methods used in the film Fight Club) you're gonna have to accept that the reality of it is, a punch in the face sounds about as tough as a girly little hand-clap.
note: some of the black and white illustrations on this site are used courtesy of: http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/
