![]() ![]() Listeners to Radio 4's PM programme have recently been sending in their favourite sounds. I love pub noises – especially the clatter of metal barrels rolling into the cellar. "Lost the music," he says, sounding disappointed. Another friend made a pilgrimage to a pub he used to frequent only to discover that the "particularly musical toilet cistern" he remembered was no longer there. A cousin used to have a vacuum cleaner that she swore sounded like the opening notes of I Am the One and Only by Chesney Hawkes when switched on. One of the drawers makes a musical, whistling, whooshing sound as you open and close it – a noise that today instantly transports me back to my childhood. I now use as my bedside table a small set of drawers that was part of a modular unit in my childhood home – the height of 1970s chic. The rhythmic thud of clothes going around and around in a washing machine. And then there are church bells – a lovely British noise, even to the ears of a hardened atheist such as myself.īut it's in the realm of the domestic, to my mind, where the most evocative sounds are to be found. As is, of course, the bongs of Big Ben, and the theme tune to the Archers and the soothing otherworldly shipping forecast. Steam trains, Routemaster buses, the hoot of a Manchester tram and the old bell cords on buses are all great British sounds. Public transport also makes people misty-eyed. Birdsong is oft cited as a favourite British sound – my personal favourite is the skylark, which sounds to me, thanks to a misspent, stoned afternoon in my youth on a hot Welsh beach, like amazing stripped-down techno music.Ī kettle that whistles while it works. It's a wonderful cacophony of city noise and birds. "Floor THRREE" she would enunciate in a way that was deeply British and oddly unsettling.Īnd there are hundreds of us sound nerds out there – Ian Rawes runs the London Sound Survey, a collection of recordings of everything from the subterranean clanging of the Woolwich foot tunnel to dawn in east London. I have several recordings of the disembodied female voice in the lift at my old office. Isn't it though? I love overlooked sounds. Nilsson told a Swedish newspaper: "At first my colleagues called me a nerd, but it is great to be a nerd." On Nilsson's personal hitlist is the sound of a person dialing a rotary telephone and "at least 40 different English kettles boiling ready for preparing afternoon tea". In September, Swedish museum curator Torsten Nilsson will visit Britain to record sounds we rarely hear today. These oft-unloved, everyday sounds are near-extinct – but luckily, a sweet project to preserve sounds such as these in an audio archive is currently under way, as part of a £170,000 EU initiative. Before we became slaves to smartphones, the soundtrack to our days was different: the whistle of a kettle and the clanging of a typewriter, perhaps, or the unmistakable whine of a dial-up modem. ![]()
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