There was a really extraordinary thing by wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson on BBC Radio 4 the other day. It was about the work of Alan Lamb and the Wired Lab project.
Lamb was long fascinated by the sound of the wind moving across long stretches of old telegraph cables, and he was convinced that if he listened for long enough he would hear the most beautiful music ever unwritten. So he bought a half-mile length of old wires in rural Australia, attached electrical pickups to either end, and began to make a series of remarkable recordings. And he has been doing this for something like thirty years. You can hear some of his music here.
‘Music’ is really the only word for it. The pitch can be changed by something as subtle as the sun shining on the wire. There are whispering bell-like tones in gentle weather, odd pings and pulses as birds and raindrops glance from the wires, sometimes sounds of painful, nauseated intensity as the winds grow stronger. Crashing sounds like a faraway avalanche or the ghost of a runaway engine.
Reminiscent of a character from a J.G. Ballard story, Lamb has his own curious theories about the psychic effects of his music, and the frequently meditative or disturbing effects it has on people. He believes his compositions are a form of controlled chaos which mimic the firing of our own neurons; perhaps the sound of the wires ‘singing’ literally resonates with some deep and inaudible pattern within our own minds.
If you live in the UK you can listen to Chris Watson’s program in full on the iPlayer.
