The HomeSounds Show

HomeSounds

The HomeSounds Show invites everyone to become active environmental listeners for the benefit of their creativity, education, health and well-being. HomeSounds creator Martin Scaiff and naturalist and educator Rob Coleman soundwalk together sharing sounds they discover, their experiences, those of participants of the HomeSounds project, and the ideas of sound-recordists, scientists, artists, young people and anyone else interested in how our acoustic habitats shape us, and our world. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-homesounds-show--5490625/support.

  1. Ipswich - Seconds of Sound at Suffolk Libraries

    09/04/2025

    Ipswich - Seconds of Sound at Suffolk Libraries

    Welcome Home Everybody! In 2024 I was privileged and delighted to be appointed ‘Environmentalist in Residence’ for Suffolk Libraries, an independent charity running the public library service for the county of Suffolk in the UK. For this residency I created a project titled ‘Seconds of Sound’ within which lay two main strands of work. The aim of the first was for me to walk between all 45 of Suffolk’s public libraries, recording acoustic habitats and environmental sound on the way and then disseminating these recordings into a collection to be added to the main library catalogue. Reaching between 1 and 3 libraries a week and covering 350 miles in total these walks began in late April and finished in the middle of October. They were surrounded by spring, summer and autumn, visited city, town, and village, farm, field and house, and followed road, track, path, coast, river and railway.  The second strand was to create and deliver public events and activities to engage people in the sounds of the world around them and to encourage Active Environmental Listening. This work involved me leading public soundwalks, giving talks and delivering workshops at libraries across the county, and led to the creation of a unique Nature Silent Disco, the first performance of which took place at the First Light Festival in Lowestoft that year.  This episode of the HomeSounds Show is taken from a conversation I had with Suffolk Libraries children’s librarian Sophie Green in October 2024. This conversation, part of Suffolk Libraries ‘Wild Reads’ initiative, followed an incarnation of the Nature Silent Disco at Ipswich Library that drew on extracts from the Seconds of Sound collection I had created, live environmental sound and elements of bio-sonification.  In our conversation we discuss the aims of the residency, my experiences of walking around Suffolk recording sound, the business of field recording, the HomeSounds project, soundwalking practice, active environmental listening and some of the complexities of human relationships with environmental sound.  At the end of our discussion is an extract of the Nature Silent Disco recorded at Mildenhall Public Library towards the end of my residency. LINKS HomeSounds Seconds of Sound Collection Suffolk Libraries Suffolk Libraries Creative Residencies HomeSounds Show Supporters Club

    58 min
  2. West Runton and Happisburgh - Sounds of Coastal Erosion

    08/01/2025

    West Runton and Happisburgh - Sounds of Coastal Erosion

    Welcome Home Everybody! In this episode I, along with Sue Grime from North Norfolk District Council’s Coastwise project, take our Sidestrand school group on a trip to West Runton beach. West Runton forms part of the Deep History Coast, a 22 mile section of North Norfolk shoreline famously home, amongst other ancient treasures, to the remains of a 600,000 year old Steppe Mammoth, the bones of rhinos, hyeanas and bears, chalk rock pools that reveal rich bounties of fossils as the tide goes out, footprints and tools of our ancient human ancestors and, our contemporary focus for this trip, a line of cliffs that are slowly giving themselves to the sea.  Sue and I were then joined by Rob on a second trip to the village of Happisburgh, another section of this deep history coast that is disappearing, though in this instance much more quickly than that of West Runton. Here we explore the beach, the cliff tops and St Mary’s Church, a religious site that has been watching the advancing sea for over 1000 years, and that sometime in the next 100 will be undermined by the waters wearing motion, and the ground’s submission to it.  Our aims were to listen to the cliffs and the rock pools, the sea and the sand, and the soon to be lost topography of these places, and also to explore more generally the physical, human, and of most interest to us, acoustic nature of coastal erosion. LINKS www.homesounds.org Home | Coastwise (north-norfolk.gov.uk) https://www.timeandtidebell.org https://www.visitnorthnorfolk.com/Deep-History-Coast HomeSounds Show Supporters Club

    30 min

About

The HomeSounds Show invites everyone to become active environmental listeners for the benefit of their creativity, education, health and well-being. HomeSounds creator Martin Scaiff and naturalist and educator Rob Coleman soundwalk together sharing sounds they discover, their experiences, those of participants of the HomeSounds project, and the ideas of sound-recordists, scientists, artists, young people and anyone else interested in how our acoustic habitats shape us, and our world. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-homesounds-show--5490625/support.