99 High in the hills amongst snow laden trees – Christmas special

Full Episode description

We always try to make a recording in the landscape after it’s just snowed. It’s so quiet. And the quiet is palpable. The effect is unique and wonderful, and is down to the way freshly fallen snow absorbs sound. By absorbing it so well though, there is virtually nothing for the microphones to pick up, and so none of these recordings have ever properly worked.

Over Christmas 2014, whilst staying with family up in the hills of Derbyshire, it snowed, and snowed, for days and days. And so we recorded, and recorded, for days and days too. Each time, on playback through headphones, the spatial sense of landscape quiet, the effect we strive to capture in all our recordings, was entirely missing. 

A few days later, just before ten o’clock at night, the snow began to fall again. The landscape was frozen, after days of freeze thaw. And this time, instead of absorbing sound, the icy snow was reflecting it. As the snow fell, every tiny fragment and particle of it made a sound, in varying degrees from the finest of fine dust, to sounds almost like leaves dropping, to distinctly heavier scattering ice falls. There was a lazy wind in the trees too, moving through as soft murmuring white noise. Occasionally, it was strong enough to push off the lighter accumulations of snow and ice, causing it to fall between the branches, and down onto the frozen ground below. For the first time, the snowy landscape sounded spatial, and the microphones were able to capture the feeling of being out amongst snow laden trees, within a wide open, and frozen landscape. The old clocks can be heard chiming ten inside the house, and towards the end of this unusually short episode for us, far away geese, and foxes too.

Merry Christmas everyone! From Radio Lento we wish you and your family a happy and sound new year.