Hugh Huddy
Radio Lento
Not specifically for children, but each episode features a lovely landscape sound postcards in 3D immersive sound. Best with earphones. Listen while reading, resting or being mindful.
Go to episode one
There are 268 episodes
Episode One: Episode 1 – Suffolk wood at 6am
This is an Episodic show. You can listen to it in any order, but episode one is always a great place to start.
About
Created by: Hugh Huddy
Started: March 29th, 2020
Status: Active, 268 episodes
Kind: Episodic
Language: English
Link to this Podcast
<a href="https://soundcarrot.com/shows/shows/radio-lento/page/27/" title="SoundCarrot.com - Children's podcasts"><img src="https://soundcarrot.com/img/sc-sm.png" alt="Listen On SoundCarrot" style="width: 200px; height: auto" /></a>Creators website
Hugh Huddy
Content, Artwork and advertising within this podcast is not owned or affiliated with Sound Carrot.
Hugh Huddy
Content, Artwork and advertising within this podcast is not owned or affiliated with Sound Carrot.
Episodes
Soundscenes of spring from the Derbyshire hills
46:02 | Episode: 60 | March 27th, 2021
Nestled between high gritstone walls, just off a single track lane about 1000 feet up in the Derbyshire hills, there’s an old farmhouse with a chicken coop. Hidden under tall trees it has a panoramic view over the valley. On an early April day in 2018 when the barometer was high, when a blue sky stretched over and the air had that invigorating sniff of rain-washed agricultural land, we left the microphones in an elderly apple tree to record the sheep, the birds and the valley for a few hours. The tree was one of a pair that have stood there opposite the farmhouse for perhaps half a century or more. They stand like an admiring couple, taking in the view. From this beautiful spot they must have witnessed fifty springs, and thousands of new born lambs. These soundscenes feature hens and a cockerel, cows, sheep and lambs. Assorted garden and moorland birds assemble – chaffinches, jackdaws, rooks and robins, blackbirds, black caps and a pheasant. This is also the sound of the sky as we knew it pre-lockdown. Threaded with aircraft, including some long humming lazy propellers. We hope we can get back soon after restrictions are lifted to re-record this soundscape.
A fallen tree on Galley Hill
31:15 | Episode: 59 | March 20th, 2021
It was, from a bridleway in rural Essex, the long slanted beam that first attracted us over for a better look. A fallen tree, perpendicular to the rest, lying half in and half out of a patch of woodland. We’d been trudging over claggy footpaths for an hour and it was coming on to rain. We needed to stop moving, and properly take in the landscape. The beam formed a natural bench, and something to climb on. After our ears had adjusted, we realised much of the human noise in the landscape was gone. The M25 to the south, and a road called the Crooked Mile which separates the edge of the Lee Valley Park and open country, had both sunk below the horizon. This spot was an oasis for listening. A place to enjoy the early spring sound of the local wildlife, and the rising and falling of the wind in the trees. Leaving the microphones behind on the tree trunk to record for a while, we went back to the bridleway, just to see where it went.
Suffolk Wood (part 7) 2am – counting the chirps of a dark bush cricket (sleep safe)
01:01:11 | Episode: 58 | March 13th, 2021
When the bell of St Mary’s strikes 2am, and the world has dissolved into shadows and echoes of far away things, there’s a solace to be found in counting the chirps of a dark bush cricket. When all that is near is a loose twig falling, a small mammal, biding its time between a fleeting moment of stealth, and the semblance of a nocturnal breeze seems to be somewhere around, high up in the trees, there is a reason to let go of the urge to track time. Let the night planes take it. Let them draw it away in their soft rumbling arcs, away and over the dark curve of the Earth. And don’t worry. They’ll be sure to leave it where you can find it. It’ll be there when you arrive. There on the cusp of dawn. Here, in this rural Suffolk wood, in this safe and empty place, on this calm August night when thoughts can be let go to float down into the leaves, its the trees who’ll stand over.
Seaside brutalism – at the Port of Felixstowe
30:28 | Episode: 57 | March 6th, 2021
On the beach, sat within wetting distance of the water’s edge, there’s a point where the noise from the container port begins to meld in with the shingle soft washing to and fro of the waves. Here, about a quarter of a mile away, towering gantry cranes can be seen whining backwards and forwards, deftly hoisting lorry-sized containers like little matchboxes from an impossibly vast supership. Venus, mega-sized, operated by China Shipping Container Lines, and with a warehouse-sized engine and chimney that throbs and pulsates the sea air for miles around. On this, a weekday last summer, the port and all of its rumblings form nothing more than a backdrop to what beaches are really for. Playing. Oblivious children constantly on the move run soaked and delighted to their families before rushing back to get ankle-deep in the waves again. Parents warn there’s a stranded jellyfish, while claxons and two-tone sirens announce the peril of yet another swooping crane, on the horizon. There’s a jagged beauty to all of this, a form of shoreline brutalism.
56 The whispering trees of Bayford Wood
46:29 | Episode: 56 | February 27th, 2021
It was our first visit to Bayford Wood. A country walk, on a bright July day which was not quite as warm as it should be. A walk under an undecided sky, from time-to-time enhanced with inexplicable flurries of raindrops that fell like scattering beads. As we followed the track deeper into the woods, surrounded by tall trees, long growing and cathedral high, a small propeller plane buzzed over. It made us look. Then, with the quiet returned, our ears became tuned to the presence of countless myriad things high above us. Whispering things, hissing things, softly shushing things, filtering down their fine gossamer sounds in slow undulating waves. Lung easing. Chest expanding. Mind cleansing. All from up in the vaulted ceiling of green, forty feet above, millions upon millions of leaves, set in tiny individual motions by the breeze. We found a grassy bank set back from the track, pushed through a hedge of ivy, and left the microphones alone to record while we went off to brew tea on a camping stove.
Light rain beside the lane near Sandy
51:06 | Episode: 55 | February 20th, 2021
It’s all woods and rolling fields in rural Bedfordshire. Good for long walks under wide skies. A chance to get away from it all. On a wet February day, after splashing along muddy lanes and mud sliding footpaths, after passing a pair of Anderson shelters either side of an empty and waterlogged field, we saw a tumbledown wall cloaked in moss. Behind the wall, tucked down in a shallow dell, so quiet it hardly reached us, the melodious sound of a running winterbourne. Watery places always seem to cast a magic spell. So we climbed through the spiky trees peppered with lichen and left the microphones to record. It felt like a long forgotten spot, set back from people and the Iron Age track. When they were sure we had gone, tiny birds returned to flit about, distant cows lowed as the rain gently sifted down through the bare branches. A silvery sounding place, cool, and clean of clutter. In a few months the leaves will come, the fields will dry, and the landscape will sound of spring.
Sound-scenes of Norman’s Pond as dusk turns to night – sleep safe
44:50 | Episode: 54 | February 13th, 2021
Dusk. The gates of the Lee Valley Park are shut. The people are gone. The miles of footpaths are empty, save for crossing ducks. Beside Norman’s Pond, hidden in the scrub, the dark bush crickets have begun. Gulls cry out. On tepid summer water, swans are swimming, slow under the gathering shadows, drippling the mirror-still surface for food. Their calls bounce and echo across the empty lake. Melding with the sound of passing trains. With the tidal flow of the A10, London’s artery into rural Hertfordshire.
After the dawn chorus in the Forest of Dean
36:52 | Episode: 53 | February 6th, 2021
There is a time when thin light broadens into day, when the sun is properly up and warm and every diurnal creature is settling into its daily rhythm. A time when the delicate trickles of the night stream can no longer be heard as the ambient sound within the forest has grown into a mellifluous hum, made up of birdsong, gentle wind, and of buzzing bees. It’s the time before most people are awake, where all natural things are up and weaving themselves back into their world, threading their strands of aural colour through each and every tree, each and every tangled vine. An early corner of the day most often unheard. This episode, discovered in our archive due to ongoing lockdown restrictions, is the forest in late May 2019, just before 6am. Other parts of this same all-night recording can be heard in episodes 17, 30 and 38 (visit our blog for links to them all). We made this recording by leaving a pair of rain-proofed microphones hooked up to a field recorder on a long-life battery, hidden up against the trunk of an ancient oak tree, in a remote clearing inaccessible to people.
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Created by: Hugh Huddy
Started:
March 29th, 2020
Status: Active, 268 episodes
Kind: Episodic
Language: English
This is just so relaxing to listen to.