Stuart Bowditch Podcasts

I love Venice and this is the third time I have visited. A lot of people come for the art, the history or the wine. I come for the sound. In the absence of roads and the motor car, sound travels differently in Venice. Boundaries are broken with domestic sounds being audible outside, and public sounds being heard in private places. Sounds are more localised due smaller public places in alley ways and squares. And I think individual sounds appear clearer due to the lack of traffic din that usually muddies the soundscapes of other cities. In this recording my travelling companion heard the sound of an oboe being played in a room above the alley way of Saca de la Toleta, in the district of Dorsoduro. We positioned ourselves beneath the window for around 10 minutes, to finish off eating out street pizza, and to admire the beautiful juxtaposition of oboe practice from above, and passersby at close quarters below.

For a few Tuesday evenings on a row I had noticed that bingo was being played in the Church Hall near St.Andrew's. So I waited until the following week, took a stroll down the road and sat on the wall outside with my recorder. What a lovely moment on a warm summer evening. The moon was shining brightly on the way back.

As part of the Constable Ambisonic project I want to understand how we perceive the landscape, and what did Constable and his contemporaries bring to our understanding of the natural world, and who else has contributed to the language used and ideals we hold in regard to perception of landscape. Here I talk to electronic musician, Paul Blackburn aka Yggdrasil, about how sounds from the natural world inform his music, the relationship between analogue sounds and electronic hardware, and how humans are a part of nature.

During the eclipse of 1999 I was on some scaffolding in Islington, London, applying mastic to a block of flats. What I noticed at the time was that as well as the change in light, the sound changed too with everything, traffic, birds, people, becoming quieter. So 27 years later I decided that I wanted to try to capture that change in ambience. I found a quiet place on the map not far from where I live and walked on the footpaths to a gap in the hedgerow outside Pebmarsh, Essex. The eclipse happens in the middle of this recording, and listen to hear if you can detect any change, amongst the aircraft. There is a lovely treat at the end of the recording if you're in to birds.

It’s 10pm and I’m in the graveyard of St.Mary’s amongst the stones, I’ve tried to position myself near the image location but also not on any graves, it’s so quiet that even my notepad paper sounds loud as I write on it, the very distant A12 drone off to the north, a distant jet above, everything here is quiet which is letting sounds from further away be heard, the occasional passing car, no birds, no bats, no wind in the trees, no people passing. A long pause of not much, and then the silhouette of a bat above the nave, not a cloud in the sky, something crawling on my leg, the porch light, the weather vane, a flag pole with no flag, the silhouette of the Church, crenellations, a car door slams somewhere in the village, I saw a lot of dog walkers, walkers, joggers as I arrived but now no one, rural places always go to sleep early, 10 is the cut off time here, it’s 9:30 in Sudbury, now I’m almost unable to see what I am writing, Constable’s parents are buried just over there, it appears that time moves more slowly in quiet places but that’s not the case, that moth drawn to the recorder lights is moving in real time, someone with a torch, a flashing red light passing by on the road but I am unable to see what it is attached to, I’m having to be extra quiet with my movements and have definitely worn the correct clothing.