Sounds of Lillington

Music Making in Lillington

Wild Earth, in collaboration with the Warwikshire Wildlife Trust, worked with chiuldren and young people in the rural areas of Lillington and Stretton, as a part of the Dunsmore Living Landscape programme. The young people took part in nature awareness and nature connection workshops, and in parallel, created scoundscapes of their neighbourhoods. 

Music Making Process - Some behind the scenes notes:

• Church Graveyard Recording session - Using Zoom recorders to collect sounds. We connected one recorder to a bat detector to record bat sounds but unfortunately we didn’t capture any. One clip was recorded on one of the youth leaders phones. A really nice idea was recorded, we stood in a circle and snapped twigs to recreate the sound of a crackling fire. A very convincing, satisfying and calming exercise.

• Coppicing and Sound Collection - We spent the day in a woodland. The morning was spent coppicing, sounds of sawing were recorded using zoom recorder. In the afternoon we used the shotgun mic to collect ambient bird sounds and collected sounds such logs dropping on logs to create pitched tones

• Ryton Pools - Sound Collection Day - Sound collection Day. We used a Zoom H6 with a shotgun mic on a boom pole to record sounds such as leaf shaking and wood dropping. We used a hydrophone on the end of a boom pole to submerge the hydrophone in a pool and then recorded the underwater soundscape. Participants loved the sounds that were made when throwing stones into the water. We also captured the sound of a dog swimming past. 

  One boy said the underwater sounds were really relaxing, it really calmed him whilst he was listening to the sounds in the headphones.

• Using sounds collected from various outings on the projects to create a piece of music in Logic Pro. All sounds were sampled using logics EXS24 sampler and all members of the group took turns in creating layers for the song. The sound of a piece of wood dropping on to another log created a well pitched instrument for creating melodies.

  The young people thoroughly enjoyed the music making sessions. It gave them an opporunity to explore the activities of their local wildlife and the impact of human activities on them. https://soundcloud.com/wildearthuk/sounds-of-stretton As a part of the umbrella programme, Nature Beats Sonic Signatures, the young people are creating a geodesic dome with naturally sourced materials. This will be launched as an installation in January 2020 at Brandon Marsh Nature Reserve, Coventry.