Michael Gallagher

A few things that might be of interest:

• An interview with Ian Rawes, who runs the excellent London Sound Survey, an archive of field recordings made in and around London. Read the full interview here. There are some recordings from the London Sound Survey embeded in the interview. My favourite was this recording of echoing oil refinery sirens from Essex:

Coryton oil refinery sirens Essex by London Sound Survey

• One for the ornithologists and twitchers: in the interview, Ian mentions Xeno Canto, an international archive of bird sound recordings. There are currently 7339 species represented in the archive. According to the site, that’s an impressive 69% of all known species.

• 4 hours of drone: my repetitive/experimental band Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo are taking part in a gig entitled ’4 hours of drone’ at the CCA in Glasgow on Saturday 4th June. We’ll be inviting the audience to join us in using lots of small cassette recorders to make a drone. More details here.

I’ve been accruing more recordings of incidental drones so it’s about time I posted some clips. Here are a few of my favourite buzzes and hums from the last 6 months or so.

First up is the hum from a substation near to my office on Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh. There are actually two drones going on here – there is a coffee booth nearby that has a petrol generator, so you can hear that chugging away too.

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I recorded a lawnmower through my window back in summer. It kept stopping and starting, which I found annoying. But when I listened back, this makes it even more interesting, because when the main mower stops you can hear lots of quieter drones around the neighbourhood – possibly from other lawnmowers or power tools.

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The next two recordings were made near the premises of a firm of joiners, shopfitters and builders in an old industrial area of Dundee. In the first one, the machine making the droning and sqeaking sounds was an odd contraption – it had a large metal hopper, elevated about 6 feet, with wide duct pipes leading into it. My guess is that this machine was sucking dust and swarf away from the workbenches inside, like a massive vacuum cleaner. Every now and again you could hear things rattling inside the pipes, a bit like when a piece of lego goes up the hoover.

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Around the side of the building was a metal shuttered door, through which could be heard more droning and various sounds of metalworking:

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The next recording is from near a hotel, Ten Hill Place, in the centre of Edinburgh. There is a basement with air vents from which various drones emanate. They change in pitch periodically, as though the machines are stepping up and down in speed or something.

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Next up is another vent recording made at the rear of the university main library. There is a loading bay with a massive air vent at the side. I suspect from its size that it’s related to the heating system for the entire building. It’s pretty loud when you get up close.

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Finally, a kind of semi-drone recording I made on Infirmary Street in the centre of Edinburgh. I was just walking home one day after work when I heard all these sounds coming from a grill close to street level. At first I actually thought it was some kind of band, fans of Einsturzende Neubauten or Faust perhaps, practising in a subterranean rehearsal room. I was quite into it. Listening closer, what I thought were primitive drums turned out to be hammering, punctuated by power tool drones.

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One of the things that both annoys and amuses me about Edinburgh – and most cities come to think of it – is how you can never get a  moment to yourself. Infirmary Street isn’t a main road so I was hoping I’d be able to record relatively undisturbed. But just as I was hauling all my gear out of my rucksac to get set up, a group of about 30 European men came walking by trundling suitcases behind them. It was a slightly surreal moment, standing there in the street with a big furry mic and fat headphones, with these proto-industrial sounds coming from who-knows-where underground, and a whole delegation of Dutchmen traipsing past.

Here’s a clip of a composition I’ve produced from some field recordings. Just before Christmas last year, I was recording an air vent drone in the High School Yards, to the rear of the Institute of Geography in Edinburgh. After a few minutes I noticed a regular dripping sound coming from snow melting into a nearby drain, so I decided to relocate the mic to bring both sounds into the mix.

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I think this could be a piece of experimental music; the full 6 minute version may well get released as a Buffalo buffalo track some time in the future. But it’s also a document of a hybrid micro-geography, a record of an insitu, impromptu, more-than-human performance. We could hear this as an unintended duet between the weather and the built environment, with systems for air and water management intertwining.

Many thanks to Jonathan for the photo of the air vent.

Tech details: the recordings were made with a Rode NT4 in full Rycote windshield, and a Tascam DR100 recording at 24 bit, 44.1 kHz. Recordings were edited and EQ’d in Logic.

I was just clearing out some old computer files and found an incidental drone recording I made a while ago. The sound source is an air conditioning system inside a cupboard where some printers were kept in my previous office. Listening back I like how it sounds so I’ve made a quick edit:

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It’s mono, recorded with a Marantz PMD660 and an Audio Technica PRO42 boundary mic – not my weapon of choice, but it’s what I had available at the time. The file has no processing, I just chopped out five minutes and then compressed to mp3.

Here are some recordings of drones from the vents in the side of one of the buildings in the central area of the University of Edinburgh. All were made using a Sound Devices 702 and a Rode NT4 in a Rycote windshield. These were the first recordings I’ve made using the 702. I had the low cut filter engaged but there’s still a bit of sub bass rumble going on so I might try raising the cutoff frequency next time. The files are normalised but otherwise unedited.

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I’ve coined the term ‘incidental drones’ to describe a type of sound with which I have become fascinated over the last few years.

The definition is pretty loose. An incidental drone is just any more or less continuous droney noise, usually with a discernible pitched element, that emanates from some electrical or mechanical source which hasn’t been designed primarily to produce sound. It’s sound which is a by-product of some other function, and hence is incidental.

Incidental drones include the sounds made by:

• Refrigerators and freezers
• Fan ovens
• Cooker hoods
• Extractor fans and air conditioning systems (sound artist Eric La Casa has an album called air.ratio which is based entirely on recordings of air vents in Paris)
• Computer fans (my own one is whirring away right now as I type)
• Heating systems
• Substations
• Power tools (lawnmowers, drills, circular saws)
• Lighting (e.g. hum from flourescent lights and dimmer switches)
• Power lines in the mist (as described by Bill Drummond in his book 17)
• Telephone exchange boxes
• Generators
• Wind turbines

In urban areas, once you start listening, you find that these sounds are everywhere. But I’ve also come across lots of incidental drones in rural areas, from grain silos, wind turbines, boat engines, fish farms and so on.

Two of the most remote places I’ve ever been in the UK had incidental drones. One was an electrical installation of some kind by the station in Corrour in the middle of Rannoch Moor in the highlands. If you’ve ever seen the film Trainspotting, this is the station they get off at to go for a walk (leading to the memorable ‘it’s sh*te to be Scottish’ speech). There are no roads anywhere near there, just a landrover track and a single rail line disappearing off across the moor.

The other was a generator in a building next to Barrisdale bothy in Knoydart, which chugged away all day. The latter is one of the most remote places in the UK. Again, no road goes near it (apparently the locals have refused offers to have one built). You can only access Barrisdale by private boat directly, by a ferry then a big walk over the Mam Barrisdale pass, or by a day’s walk over rough terrain from Kinloch Hourn, itself in the middle of nowhere at the end of a 22-mile cul-de-sac.

So I think it’s fair to say that in present-day post-industrial UK at least, these sounds seem to appear in most places where there is human habitation.

Here’s another composition assembled from recordings of hum from a fizzy drinks machine and the ticking of an old clock, both located in the coffee room at the Institute of Geography. I must be a musician at heart because no matter how experimental I get with my field recordings, I’m always drawn to the ones with stereotypically musical features such as pitch and rhythm.

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The mic I’m using, which can be seen in the picture, is a Rode NT4 stereo condenser. I highly recommend it. If you can live with the fixed XY cardioid pattern, the quality is unbeatable for the price. Personally, I find that having the pattern fixed actually makes my life easier as it’s one less variable to fiddle with. You just point and shoot. I see from Janek Schaefer’s website that he’s also a big fan of this mic. It can be powered by a 9 volt battery if phantom power isn’t available, which means you can use it with devices such as minidisc players and cassette recorders. Some of my best recordings have been made with this and an old Sony minidisc recorder.