If you manage to find a dip in the landscape where road sounds do not reach, don’t celebrate too early, keep in mind aircraft noise travels much further. My experiences attempting to record nature in the UK have certainly been mixed. Some 10 years ago I was trying to record dawn choruses around Edinburgh where I lived, and my nemeses were farm animals. Once I moved south to England, I realised how spoiled I was to have long lulls in between flights overhead.

Living close to Heathrow, Gatwick, City and a few smaller airports means I can count from 4 to 8 aircraft in the sky at any given time of day. That translates to a virtually constant aircraft noise background.

In 2020 all of this slowed down for a short while. I couldn’t go on expeditions for 9 months, so I decided to give local soundscapes another go. While air traffic was indeed reduced, it was still present. After months of attempts I finally found a location that sounded better than anything around it – a wooded valley nestled between two hills in the English countryside, with a creek at the bottom. I managed to make a handful of beautiful recordings there, from lush dawn choruses to calm creek babbling and even thunderstorms.

This did not last for too long though. Going back the following spring, I noticed that the aircraft noise had gone back to pre-pandemic levels. I have since explored many parts of southern England, but the best I can do here is give up clean nature and focus on countryside atmospheres. These will include birdsong and wildlife calls, but not exclusively. Farm animals are part of this soundscape too, along with occasional distant farm traffic. It’s a compromise I’ve made reluctantly, but I enjoy these recordings and the process of capturing them. Listeners also seem to find them interesting and worth the effort.

In 2016, about 6 years into my sound recording journey, I decided to join a sound art workshop in South Africa. My aim was to get an introduction to the continent while capturing some good recordings and exploring new land (and soundscapes) in the process. What I did not know back then is that the experience would ignite a fascination with Africa for me. I’ve gone back to the continent on my own expeditions many times since, and I now feel a deep connection with its wildlife, nature, landscapes, cultures, people.

You may think that going to a remote part of, say, Senegal or Kenya would be enough to get away from man-made sound. That was my plan, but the reality in the field was very different. While it was much better than the UK, I still had to work hard to find pockets of natural quiet. It turns out people are noisy, and there’s not much you can do about it. Places like national parks, that have solar power and are very conservation-minded still need vehicles to patrol. Tourism, ideally the sustainable kind, is one of the few ways to fund conservation but comes with its own man-made noise.