Wildsong

06/12/2023

14/09/2023

22/08/2023

30 years ago, on the 20th August 1993 I set out early from Deptford in an old VW camper (borrowed from the midwife who’d delivered our son Rowan a few months earlier), to pick up a thousand CDs from Heathrow, aiming to get up to Rutland Water for the opening of the British Birdwatching Fair; I’d set up our stall the day before. This was the launch of Birdsong in Britain - more or less the first UK nature sounds CD.

It sealed a change in life for me. I’d been bashing away in music for 17 years, the last half spent producing in a small hybrid studio - 16-track tape synced with Cubase running on an Atari1040. And doing live sound for Jools Holland and his Big Band.

It was a kind of all-or-nothing leap into the dark. Over recent years I’d become obsessively interested in birdsong and the natural soundscape, particularly in the Scottish Highlands. I couldn’t find any published recordings of the kind I wanted to listen to covering Britain (Walter Tilgner was a big influence); so decided to do it myself.

The CD was composed of recordings made through two springs and summers, mainly in the south of England, the Cairngorms and Central Highlands in Scotland. All from an ms set-up of Sennheiser mkh30 and mkh50 to an HHB DAT recorder.

I decided early on to decode in the field and record as left-right stereo; I thought this probably better for archiving, and more practical. In the first year I varied the level of the side mic a little in response to the situation and the spread of water/wind sound; and mostly it’s all hand-held mic. But from the second year I almost always have the side mic at about the same gain as the mid, in what I thought of as full-width stereo; and the mics are on a tripod, often on long cables.

This was the early years of digital editing and booking a studio to do the editing for the album was expensive. Loading in the recordings was in real-time and I had to plan out all the sequences, cuts and fades carefully in advance to use time efficiently. I wanted a fair bit of variety in there, but with a sense of continuity. No space for experimenting.

CDr was still over the horizon; glass master replication was the only feasible way of professional CD manufacture. And 1000 units was the basic run. So that was it. It went on to sell almost 10,000 copies. Plus a few downloads since. Respectable. But more importantly it was well appreciated by the audience for which it was intended, and I had some lovely feedback and reviews. Despite the original graphically-naive and rather twee cover.

“I received 'Birdsong in Britain' a few days ago - I want to tell you I am absolutely delighted with it; I've made a study of bird song all my life, and I would like to say, I feel your recording is a work of art, apart from being quite excellent in the way you have recorded it. If I may say so, I feel you have truly captured the spirit of the whole subject in a remarkable way."
Miss Sylvia Coucher-Needham

“… quality is such that these recordings are as much rich sound tapestries of the locations as superb examples of a variety of British bird song."
Andrew Branson. British Wildlife

"I have heard many recordings of birds singing ensemble, but never one which had such a strong ecological sense.”
Richard Mabey. BBC Wildlife

To celebrate I’m planning to release a 30th anniversary edition, with extra tracks from the Loch Ossian sessions, next month. In the meantime the 2012 remastered edition (48k 24bit) will be available for free download on Bandcamp.
https://wildsong.bandcamp.com/album/birdsong-in-britain

With best wishes and many thanks to all who have bought a copy, Geoff Sample.

17/04/2023

Mark Cocker tells it as it is in today's Guardian.

More than 40m birds have disappeared from UK’s skies since 1970: a trend that imperils the network that gives us life, says naturalist Mark Cocker

13/03/2023

14/12/2022

And another of the fieldfares, showing how hungry they are and how unskilled they are at feeding like this.

14/12/2022

13.12.2022
Fieldfares driven by the intense frost to test their acrobatic abilities in reaching the last of the apples here on the Northumberland coast.

27/10/2022

Heads-up for birdy people on Netflix. Episode 8 of Guillermo del Toro’s new series 'A Cabinet of Curiosities' is a ghost story about two research ornithologists working on dunlin (The Murmuring - available 28th Oct). Gets a 5star Guardian review. I wonder who provided all the cracking dunlin sounds?

07/10/2022

Białowieża I - Stara twilight

To celebrate the re-release of this album as his-res Flac download (and to atone for taking so long about it!), we’re offering it at half price for the first week. Glorious birdsong soundscapes from the ancient forest of the North European Plain.

https://wildsong.bandcamp.com/album/bia-owie-a-i-stara-twilight

19/08/2022

Some thoughts on the meaning of territory in birdsong.
https://www.wingedgeographies.co.uk/post/space-for-a-song

Geoff Sample Geoff Sample is a field recordist, natural history author (Harper Collins) and sound artist (BBC radio), with a special interest in birdsong and the cultural history of hearing music in nature. Fig. 1 The British warblers by Grönvold Henrik, 1907 Source: https://archive.org/details/Bri...

26/07/2022

A very special couple are celebrating their Silver Anniversary this year. Skye and Frisa are the UK's oldest known white-tailed eagle pair and have been together for 25 years! To mark the special occasion, they've recently fledged their 25th chick together 🦅

Congratulations to the happy couple!

Read the story here: https://www.rspb.org.uk/about-the-rspb/about-us/media-centre/press-releases/skye-and-frisa-25th-anniversary3/

📷 Jim Manthorpe, BBC Winterwatch

13/06/2022

Many members will fondly remember the names Charles and Heather Myers. They were long standing and very active members of the WSRS. This 60 minute programme on NTS Radio (www.nts.live) at 11am tomorrow features a selection of their recordings from the British Library Sound Archive. A celebration of their lives in sound.

27/04/2022

It is so good to be back on a recording trip to continental Europe after staying local for several years. Here's the first of two film clips from our rest day on our journey down through France. This is a field-cricket singing in La Brenne, central France, on the 22nd April. I've been fascinated by these creatures for 20 years; but they need more warmth than we get in northern Britain, so I only get to spend time with them on away trips. I'm really chuffed to have a nice bit of footage as a memento.
https://youtu.be/BflKEr9cewI

Filmed on 22nd April in La Brenne, France.

08/04/2022

I suspected this.

Exclusive: bird impressionist was brought in for Beatrice Harrison’s historic performance, says broadcaster

15/03/2022

Looking forward to this talk next week - and getting my hands on a copy of the book.
https://newnatures.org/greenhouse/events/booktalk/online-book-talk-guida-listening-to-british-nature/

Online book talk: Guida, Listening to British Nature January 11, 2022February 14, 2022 Michael Guida, Research Associate at University of Sussex, will present his book Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2022) in the Greenhouse environmen...

26/02/2022

Bringing you a rather special passage of birdsong ...

Song ThrushRecorded in Wooler, Northumberland 5:30am 26/4/2009. This 2 minute film explores the referencing in a stream of song from an individual song thrus...

09/02/2022

Interesting ... the sonification of electrical resistances in plants ... music?

Music of the plants - How it worksIn this video I reply to all those who asked me how the music of the plants work and more specifically whether the sound in...

19/01/2022

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fossils-reveal-when-animals-started-making-noise/

For billions of years Earth was quiet. Then life got loud