Field recordists capture quotidian sounds for fun and posterity.
On a recent Saturday, Ian Rawes, a part-time deliveryman, spent several hours walking around London with two microphones strapped to his head. He went into a vegetable market and got so caught up recording the sound of birds in its rafters that he almost got hit by a cabbage-laden forklift hurtling toward him.
He went to a park, only to decide that the stream dribbling through it wasn't worth recording. Then he headed to Stamford Hill, a traditionally Hasidic Jewish community, where he wove around men in towering fur hats, capturing snatches of their conversations in Yiddish.
“A good morning's work, two more tiny fragments of the mosaic that is London,” he said as he took off the microphones.
Mr. Rawes, 51, is better known as the founder of the London Sound Survey, a website that contains a substantive collection of real-world recordings of the city, from the pontifications of street preachers to squeaky escalators, from foxes engaging in mock fighting to, even, the Tower Bridge cranking into action.
He is part of a growing number of what might be called sound hunters who roam city streets and remote countrysides to capture the dramatic ane unusual as well as the plain but underappreciated noises that surround us. Some of them release albums and even play concerts.
The thrill of the chase aside, Mr. Rawes says he is performing a vital historical service. “As time goes by and cultural, technological, economic conditions change, these recordings will become more and more interesting,” he said.
“I mean, could you imagine if you could hear the sounds of 18th-century London today?” he said. “Even if it was just the sound of people spitting in the street, coughing - and a lot of people were sick back then, so it probably would be - it'd be fascinating.”
Mr. Rawes was working at the British Library's sound archive about 10 years ago when he stumbled across tapes of the sounds of every bus route in the county of Yorkshire, complete with dense handwritten notes.
“We'd probably now diagnose the person who made them as on the autism spectrum,” he said, “but it made me think, ‘God, if he can do that, there must be something in London to record.’”
It has proved more difficult than expected to find dramatic sounds in London, Mr. Rawes said. “There are some places you can go, and you'd have to be spectacularly incompetent not to make an interesting recording,” he said. “The Amazon rain forest at night, for example.”
He added, “In cities, it's harder to find great sounds, unless you love the sound of cars.”
Field recording has a long history. In 1889, an 8-year-old German, Ludwig Koch, made the first known recording of birdsongs using a phonograph that his parents gave him. Wildlife recording flourished after World War Two, especially in Britain, where a society was formed in the 1960s, its members regularly rising before first light to capture dawn choruses.
Musicians have long incorporated such recordings into their work, but Mr. Rawes and others like him are fixated on the raw sounds themselves.
Kate Carr, a 38-year-old Australian living in London, has released records featuring the sounds of rural Thailand and Icelandic fishing villager, with an occasional guitar strum as the only musical accompaniment. She once was a D.J. in Sydney, but her music taste kept widening until she found herself listening to field recordings and wanted to try it herself. Her latest record, due for release on Aug. 26 on the Riverstones label, features recordings from Marnay-sur-Seine, a French village next to a nuclear power plant. The Seine floods there each spring, and Ms. Carr sloshed through its waters to record the birds that flock to the river. But the nuclear plant's power lines played havoc with her microphones and she ended up producing a record filled as much with the buzzes of electricity pylons as the chatter of birds.
