Free sonic paintbox app featuring Chris Watson’s sound recordings – available from September

Chris Watson has been working in collaboration with arts collective The Nimbus Group to create a new immersive sound painting app featuring Watson’s precise and stark sound recordings of the natural world.

Nimbus uses experimental approaches to transport users to places and experiences including: the inside of an animal carcass as it is being eaten, a Mozambique Nightjar singing on the banks of the Zambezi, and a family of elephants sleeping in grassland on the Massai Mara.

Nimbus will be available for free download from The Nimbus Group website from 10 September 2014.

You can read more here:
The Wire
FACT

The Society is proud and honoured to welcome the acclaimed wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson as its President. Chris is well-known across the world for his recordings which have featured in many natural history programmes on radio and television including the BBC’s series ‘Frozen Planet’ with David Attenborough which won a BAFTA Award for ‘Best Factual Sound’ (2012).
www.wildlife-sound.org

Minute of Listening is an exciting and innovative project that has the potential to provide all primary-aged children with the opportunity to experience sixty seconds of creative listening each day of the school year. By downloading a simple application to their laptops, desktops or interactive whiteboards, teachers can bring a wealth of sonic resources into their classrooms.
www.minuteoflistening.org
For a full list of contributors:
www.minuteoflistening.org/pages/partners

The Acoustic City, edited by Matthew Gandy and BJ Nilsen.

This book is now for sale in the TouchShop, where you can find more information and track listing on the CD, including a track recorded by Chris Watson…

The Acoustic City consists of a series of cutting-edge essays on sound and the city accompanied by a specially commissioned CD with field recordings, compositions, and music. The book will comprise five thematic sections: sound mappings including cartographic and conceptual approaches to the representation and interpretation of soundscapes; sound cultures including specific associations between place, music and sound; acoustic flânerie and the recording of urban sounds (including bats, birds and urban nature) as well as reflections on the “auditory self” with links to cultural history and literary theory; acoustic ecology including relationships between architecture, sound, and urban design; and the politics of sound extending to human well-being, noise abatement, and the changing characteristics of ambient sound. This innovative essay collection will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines including architecture, cultural studies, geography, musicology and urban sociology.

Chris Watson is probably the world’s most famous field recordist. Without a doubt he has more recordings of animal sounds than we could listen to in a lifetime, However, we’re straying slightly off of animal recordings and into Watson’s collection of natural sounds – and how they ended up as one of the most unique and exciting sampled instruments: Geosonics by Soniccouture. Designing Sound chatted with Soniccouture’s James Thompson about the project.

http://designingsound.org/2014/02/the-making-of-geosonics-by-soniccouture/

Inside the world of a wildlife audio expert

Chris Watson, who has worked on Attenborough’s Frozen Planet and Life in the Undergrowth, shares a remarkable insight into sound recording, some exclusive clips – and his feelings about music in wildlife shows.

Chris Watson has been awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award 2013 for Composers, along with Emily Hall and Bryn Harrison

The full list can be found here

Click here for more information

Sometimes Radio 3 tries to be too clever by half

“…The most extraordinary sound of the week was actually something so common and heard almost every day even by those mired in the inner city. Chris Watson, the sound recordist who to great effect spends days and nights outdoors making wildlife programmes, took his recording equipment into Newcastle’s Central Station. One evening, at dusk, after all the commuters had gone home, he picked up a single melody, the song of a blackbird. As Watson explained, ‘The song rolled down on to the track and filled the southern entrance to the station,’ echoing through the vast Victorian amphitheatre. This is why we keep listening — odd moments of pure sound, instant connection.” [Kate Chisholm]

By Ian Youngs

Chris Watson went from influential 1970s band Cabaret Voltaire to recording sound for David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries. Now the leading audio recordist has captured the sound of Sheffield for a “sound map” of his home city.

Chris Watson hears things that other people do not.

Well, we hear the same things. But Chris Watson listens…

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24034090

You can read an interview in the PRS For Music Magazine, M here

Insight Into Sound and video clip can be found at Southern Star

“Technically it’s so beautiful; it’s beautifully recorded. I think he does what an artist should do, which is take something every day and make you hear it or see it differently. I could listen to this anytime of day or night, I could listen to it heartbroken or grieving… so beautiful, so inspiring. It paints pictures in your head and yet it’s barely music. This record can make you see beauty in the everyday.”

Read the full article here

EP The Signal Man’s Mix

Easter Eggs Live
60 mins
Sunday 31 March

Channel 4

The first of the two main programmes as Mark Evans explores the weird, wonderful world of eggs. The eggs are due to hatch. Jimmy Doherty examines bugs, and Lucy Cooke investigates frogs.

Easter Eggs Live
60 mins
Monday 1 April

The second of the two main programmes exploring the wonderful and often weird world of eggs, from clown fish to emus. Mark Evans updates viewers on the animals that have hatched overnight.

“At 1800h local time I fixed a Sennheiser MKH 8040/30 middle and side rig against a sun bleached log by the edge of a small muddy pool. This was the only surface water I could find on the floor of a steep sided valley formed by the ephemeral river Kuiseb on the western fringe of the Namib desert in Namibia, southwest Africa.”

Listen on the Wildlife Sound Recording Society blog

The Financial Times:

Sound recordist Chris Watson tunes into the Suffolk soundscape that inspired the composer

A walk with the FT: In Britten’s footsteps

One moment we are listening to widgeon ducks whistling from the wetlands to our right. The next we are stopped in our tracks by a wren sounding the alarm at our approach. The sound recordist Chris Watson and I are a couple of miles north of the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh, and already the quietness of our rural surroundings has revealed all sorts of sounds. “Silence is oppressive but quietness isn’t,” says Watson. “Silence doesn’t exist in the natural world.” Next Friday, Watson’sIn Britten’s Footsteps premieres as part of Aldeburgh Music’s year-long Britten Centenary celebrations. The piece is a season-by-season introduction to the habitats familiar to Benjamin Britten, reprising the sounds that surrounded him on his “composing walks”, and serving as an aural route-map today. [Andrew Clark]