ABSTRACT
In many locations within our towns and cities, sounds meld and blend into amorphous ‘soups’ of noise, which make it hard to extract the sometime subtle songs of some of the more reticent instruments within this complex orchestra. In this chapter, the author likes to ‘drill’ down into the mix of those ‘many sounds together’ in an attempt to isolate some of the component parts of urban sound; in order to do so, he intends initially to revisit recordings from a personal archive, balancing their witness against the filter of memory. Time has become a crucial dimension in the exploration of this excursion, and it is appropriate that it should do so, since sound, as readers have said, moves through time, just as they do ourselves. Rain is silent until it touches surface, and in forestry, as David Haskell expressed so elegantly, 'the rain's sound refutes any attempt to use a single idea to isolate the tree from its community.
