Nature Writing

The Sound of Place

When reading or writing about place, how much attention do you pay to sound? I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently as the first draft of my book is just about complete.

The sounds of place are unique to each precise spot on this earth, every turn of a corner carries its own tune. But, how do you write this? Honestly, I’ve struggled with it. In October 2020 I attended an eco poetry workshop, ‘The Animacy of Fossils & Other Nonhumans’ which was run by Maya Chowdhry. The aim was to generate lyrical language that represented sound. One of the exercises was to explore the Nature Sound Map (link below) and find a recording that interested us. After listening for about a minute we were asked to rewind and listen again. Then we had to write what we heard, making up the sense of sound from letters and symbols, such as…

Inf, iginuff, inf, igninuff inf, igniuff.

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Pwweee, wreep er rerdy.

I enjoy listening to the sounds of place recorded by Radio Lento, (link below). If you want to try this exercise you could use this as an alternative resource.

Maya’s workshop was challenging and fun, and I thought I’d take what I learned and try to creatively represent traffic noise, birdsong, and weather sounds. On each visit to the places I was studying, I concentrated on the aural landscape—the soundscape—and came up with a variety of ‘words’ that, to me, embodied what I heard.

I submitted what I thought to be evocative prose pieces to my supervisors and was made aware that, for them, my experiment didn’t work. The reader experience is everything isn’t it? They suggested that I find different creative ways of describing sound. I’ve been working on this since, and I’m making some progress I believe.

I relate this to you because I’ve recently read On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester, and there are many instances in this book when she describes birdsong using non-words. Referencing the nightingale she says:

‘The whistled notes that built to a crescendo in the classic ‘shree, shreee, shreeee, jug, jug, jug’ were sung hard, drawn out slowly and carefully enunciated. It was a song of yearning.’ (p55)

And of the lapwings, she writes:

‘The soaring ‘pewit, wit, wit- eeze wit’ (…) was quite the loveliest, most joyful sound I could want to hear.’ (p137)

In my old Birdwatcher’s Pocket Guide by Peter Hayman, the sounds of these two birds are described thus: nightingale = pieu-pieu-pieu, or chock-chock-chock, and lapwing = peeerst, or pee-wit.

Feedback so far, from my PhD supervisors and my writing buddy, Daniel Ingram Brown, leads me to believe I’m on the right track with my PhD, but I’ve ditched trying to recreate sounds with text and keyboard symbols. I don’t feel downhearted about this and I’m glad I gave it a go. I went further than birdsong and attempted to write the sounds of the non-living world, but they were too problematic.

The reader must be able to read a text and gain a sense of immersion-in-place for Place Writing to be really successful.

What descriptions of sounds work for you? I’m keen to know what you think about this topic as it is so relevant to Place Writing. What other examples have you found that are either useful or impossible to get your head around? Have you tried this sort of thing yourself?

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Links and Credits

Links to sound archives Nature Sound Map and Radio Lento

Find Maya Chowdhry on Instagram and this is her website

Find Nicola Chester on Twitter

Follow Daniel Ingram Brown on Twitter

Chester, N. (2021) On Gallows Down.

Hayman, P. (1979) Birdwatcher’s Pocket Guide.

Photographs in order of presentation: By Keith Potts, Zhi Xuan Hew, and Keith Potts again, via Unsplash.

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