It goes from slightly nerve scratchy through to comic. And it has a rhythm. Not a regular one. It's like it's descending. It's starting at a pitch and then descending. It goes through these higher registers and lower registers and the high registers sometimes are sort of—not as extreme as this—but the finger[nail]-on-the-blackboard type thing. Then the lower registers feel really visceral and from the lower belly—where I might hear them in my body. Kind of like the difference between a violin and a double bass. It seems to pass through all of that. When it's at it's more finger[nails]-down-the-blackboard state it's almost like what you might have as a soundtrack in a horror film. And when it goes down to the lower registers and goes sort of farty, it's more what you might have in a comic scene. So it has these different emotional registers—scary and comic.
Helen

Like nails scratching a board or something. I know I'm not meant to talk about the source. I could feel that it was a shitty hinge or something but it sounded like a brass instrument at the same time, doing some free improvised jazz thing. It was really interesting.
Thorsten

And at times, or maybe at one time, I could discern two tones at the same time, but [mostly] it was just one. It seems to hold this same tone but then it could rapidly change and have a flourish to it. For moments it was a dull sound, but then most of the time it had a full metallic ring to it.
Matte

Materials? Sounds like a squeaking hinge or a balloon—air going through a balloon. Or it could have been—I heard a wind instrument, a sort of trumpet or something like that. But that wind going through sounded more like a balloon or a door hinge. I hear that at night, sometimes when I can't sleep. Metal against metal.
Lizzy

… where it moves into almost becoming, comfortable, but then it moves out of it again. I know you said don’t necessarily think about the source of it but it’s instinct to try and identify where it’s coming from, what’s made the sound. At times I pictured a door, a squeaky door. People tuning up instruments. So I wondered whether it was a wind instrument or even a string instrument. It possibly could have been either. But there were times where I almost had a physical reaction to it. The discordant times, where the hairs on your back almost start to— “yeah I don’t know that I really like this”…up high between the shoulder blades, for the screechy, unpleasant. It’s got such a range.
C.

It had quite a diversity of pitch going on from very high pitched sounds, squeaky sounds, high thin tones, to more grating lower tones—slightly harsher, low tones. A lot of multilayering. Also thinking musically, there's clashing tones, things which were close to each other. And also at moments, reminiscent of a brass instrument—kind of brassy tones coming in.
Jo

But as it went on, it was “oh no, it sounds like a trombone or a whale”. What are those sounds like? I really like the texture of the creak when it happens slowly. You get the textural bumps in the sound and then the descending of the pitch material as well. Then [it’s] really nice when they come layered on top of each other [in a] fuller, more harmonic way.
Alexandra

What it actually did was—the quality of the high pitched harshness would devolve into a warmer…So it started cold and would go into something warmer as it went deeper. So it had these two qualities that were almost, they weren't really fighting against each other, they were [co]-existing. This coldness and this warmth—it was almost like two different beings in conversion. It started off quite cold and invasive, I guess, but it felt warmer after a little while.
Matt

…almost like you hear the actual sort of grains of the sound. So the frequency is like seven or eight Hertz or something. You hear the actual—what's the word—the activations that eventually become vibrations when they're fast enough. So very low frequency to quite high squeaky sounds—the tonal range is very great. Spatially the sound feels like it's in a large-ish acoustic, a biggish room. I it sounds a bit like a door squeaking to me but then there are moments when it resembles instrumental play. It's not too far off a double bass being played at times, although it doesn't have the right sort of resonance for that. No it's obviously a thing in the world, not an instrument. It's a door or a gate or something, but I guess it couldn't be a gate because gates tend to be in the outdoors and this is obviously indoors. But you're not interested in what it is more what it's doing. Struck me as not having a huge dynamic range. It didn't go from super quiet to super loud or vice versa. [It] maintained a similar sort of dynamics over the whole thing. And rhythmically it seem to have a lot to do with the movement of something and its rhythmicity was quite contingent. Like it wasn’t that determined. It’s quite indeterminate—what's going to happen, how the events align in time. Beautiful.
Jim

[Makes trumpeting noise]. Maybe a bunch of whales. And obviously some kind of horn instrument. But in terms of the qualities or the emotional response—the slow drawn out kind of sound and then coming in to [descending tone with round lips] and then dropping back to [dj dj drooooooo], is similar to that kind of movement of a door. When you’re home late or something and you’ve got flatmates and you’re just trying really hard to not make sound. It reminds me a bit of that. But then in the process you end up making more sound.
A.S.

Is it two horns? It sounds a bit like an elephant. A circus elephant. The rich, deep—the richness of the sound the depth of the sound, it's really strong and it sounds like it's coming from a long trunk. It's really quite thick and strong so you imagine it coming from something like a big elephant.
Michael

At one point I had a cinematic vision of a door opening onto veranda or something like that. It wasn't like the blackboard. It wasn't irritating, it was atmospheric. I guess it's all about that naming thing. That is what it is in the beginning and then after that point you expand out. I have a film background [and] there's the image of the door opening and then a story that is unknown and unappeared. It's like an in-breath—something's going to happen. I guess I move into that idea of the trumpet sound because I'm interested in how things move out of one thing into another—a theatricalising of it or a transposition of it to suggest something else. Using one thing to suggest something else. The quality of the sound, I don't know if I'm very good at that. I couldn't give it a note. I actually don't have that kind of language really. I like to move around conceptually. It had a big sort shape to it. It had a kind of arc shape. I did a work once about a door opening and closing and there was a cat flap with a metal door that was up and as you open and shut the door it was drawing a line on the wall and making a noise, so it was reminding me of that. So that sound quality is like, it had that kind of shape, like a door.
A.

So that was really interesting. And it happened within that quarter and the forefront of it. It all happened there for some reason, which is an unusual experience. I don't know if that describes or is reflexive. Obviously the analytical person in me wanted to try and think about how it might've been made. I had some ruminations on that. But then I let my imagination go and it sounded like an imagined animal. Originally I was thinking, "oh, it's the door squeaking" or something really logical and rational, but then I quite enjoyed getting lost in its sound. I found it quite a lovely way of letting myself just enjoy it for its own sake. [Images?] …Straight necked giraffes, [a] Dr. Seuss-y sort of style imagined animal. They're blue. That sort of playfulness. And ribbons and balloons. Quite joyous. Peaceful but playful sounds.
Susannah

It's not discordant. It's something that's working through a process. Coming from my own interest in sound theory, there is this tendency to ascribe a kind of a judgment to sounds. You know, this is a pleasant or unpleasant sound. That could be, I guess, defined as a kind of unpleasant sound, but it's not really. That's just a judgment. But it's a sound in a process—a process of going from one point to another point, or transcending or correcting itself, or working through its trajectory. I guess squealing, arching or… I can't think of the adjective. Something that reflects an arc kind of shape. I’m sort of resisting some of the really obvious ones like squeak. That's the one that goes with that but I like a sort of human [term]…like scream. Scream, but not necessarily in a bad way, not totally unpleasant. Because it was shifting through different registers or sounds. It wasn't that same monotone of the drain sound. So the variation gave it something more musical in a non-traditional musical sense.
Kim

The kind of sound, the squeaky nature of it, is reminding me of a door or window being opened. And in terms of the intention behind it, because its done quite slowly, if it is the image of a door, someone is quite deliberately opening it to create that sound rather than trying to avoid the sound. You don't know the intention. It could be either wilful, something mean, but it could also be, and I would go with that, a sense of playfulness—a "knowing" creating of that sound.
Martin

This is also the first recording where I'm feeling speed. There's a kind of very careful intent in it I feel. In the beginning I heard—I was trying to figure out what brass instrument it was until something, with either the hinges or just some timbre in there, made me think of a door. And then I thought it was really funny. That's what made me feel “oh that's hilarious”.
Alanna

The door itself could be metal. So a mixture. You'd have the wood as well as the metal sound. Or it could be metal on a roof, in the wind, blowing up and down. You can see I come off a farm. I had the feeling it was going back and forth. Just swinging in the wind.
Mary

… and you were just recording [them] do things I would have believed it. But then there's something quite distinct about it. It’s a door or it's something with a hinge, but it's got this whole pathetic trombone vibe. And it's, you know, that moment of “Uhh, I've paid money to listen to this”. It sounds like someone's blowing into their instrument, without any kind of nuance like [rrrruuuuurrrrr] and they're just drawing on this note and it's almost tuneless and it's stretching on. But you know there was something quite distinct where it stopped…there was a moment where it became very clear what it was. Or in my head it became less abstract and just locked onto, no, it's somebody just opening and closing something. I guess there's something satisfying because it then snapped back into the original. The recording has a kind of arc to it and it was very easy to click back into that abstraction. But it was almost satisfying to be able to puzzle that out. And be like “Oh cool, OK, now I can let it go”.
D

That's it for that one.
MP

But when you listen to it's like [makes noise ehuaaaaaa glissandi up then down], the characters in there are funny. I did a Masters of puppetry so I connect character with objects quite often—sound as objects. Those little conversations that were in there were very funny. The personalities of all the different strands of it are very funny. I think there's a humanness about some of those sounds, like that [makes noise ehuaaaaaa glissandi up then down - again], like the whinge, the whine, the groan. Those kinds of qualities, which are very human, but obviously not of human born. The object becoming human makes it comic. It points out qualities of us as humans that are quite funny.
Penelope

Well it's tonal. It's musical. It's drawn out. That's what I mean by stretchy—the balloon thing.
Susie

But it also sounds so much like a brass instrument in the way that the pitch sort of wavers a bit and the tone changes quite smoothly. There's quite a range from a soft to harsher type of tone. The brass and the tones there. And again that, sort of the joy in what I assume is a door sounding like, some kind of avant-garde saxophone solo is very fun. I enjoyed that.
Reuben

I was trying, at the end, to determine if it was an instrument or something. But most of time I was like, yeah it's a door.
Meghan

…I don't know how to describe it without saying the material. It sounded wooden. I don't know how else to describe it without saying what it makes me think of. Maybe wooden shells or some kind of rounded wooden object, or the shell of a nut or something like that.
Gabriella

This makes it feel quite rounded, but with a straight edge, like a sort of straight edge, and then this puffy rounded sort of thing. And that rhythmic quality in it made me want to move to it. In London I do this open floor dance class and I joined them the other night on Zoom. [The teacher] plays sometimes quite abstract soundtracks to move to. And that one, the rhythmic—it felt a bit percussiony—like I wanted to, my body wanted to actually start moving. It animated my body that way, I guess, because it had a rhythmic kind of structure to it. And maybe the sounds as well. The sharp bits were quite percussive. And it was quite a soothing sound to listen to. I mean, it was energised. It was motivating and energising, but it was also quite a happy sound for me. You know in a raindrops-on-a-tin-roof kind of sense.
Helen

It felt contained, like something was being stirred. It was in a confined space, a container or something. That was a weird noise, not unpleasant. A curious sound.
Susie

And it had quite a staccato punctuation going on. But also an underlying muffled kind of walkie-talkie, even a voice murmuring as well, below the surface. It went up and down, and it was a little more full on sometimes and then it eased off, then a little more full on.
Matte

[But] it seemed to have a very distinct underwater feeling. It's like the usual concept of bubbling or water—not bubbling but sort of moving over something—becomes dry and more crackly.
MP

A quite watery event, but it could be cooking. So watery and [something] a little bit plastic-y about the sound. I don't know what plastic-y means other than that. I guess the sort of resonance that plastic objects have is a particular sort of quality. It doesn't sound wooden or metallic, but some sort of vessel is involved in it. And there's also a feeling of little explosions. So whether that's some sort of a heat energy making certain events reach a threshold, then exploding beyond that. I get that feeling that there's some substance which has been activated by heat, energy, chemical energy or something—a little bit the way pop popcorn suddenly reaches a threshold and then explodes. But it's not popcorn. I'm not that interested in what it is, but there's that feeling of energy applied to something to take it into a new threshold.
Jim

…because that's sort of implicit. But I remember when I first played with one, and that reminded me—and was probably even better example of it—it actually felt like a little universe with little exploding stars. That's how I hear that. Or fireworks going off, but millions of them, millions of skyrockets bursting. So there's obviously some liquid quality to it, but I feel like it's almost a little more universal than that.
Matt

There's a very high pitched tone in the background, which you sometimes get with contact mics as well. But there's a definite aqueous nature to the sound and this reverberant quality, which suggests a vessel. This rhythmical, almost, crackling sound, which might've been some kind of effervescent…something bursting or agitating against something.
Jo

Then I could hear things like the idea of the little animals. It might be snapping or crackling or little things that might be happening within a sort of a natural space. So I felt like I was in a bath, and my head was almost the hydrophone, if that makes sense, if I wanted it to be imaginative about it. Even that sense of when you just put yourself underwater or close to the water and you hear that sort of air—you know, that sense of not hearing—and how being underwater, immersing yourself, it's quite soothing. So that's my take on that sound. Actually I was lucky enough to hear sea grass in Port Phillip Bay a few weeks ago. We went on a volunteer thing and a sound recordist came along and had these beautiful hydrophones so that you could hear the seagrass releasing gases. Apparently sea grasses like blue carbon and so it takes in the carbon dioxide and produces oxygen. So it's like a forest underneath. Anyway, it was really lovely to hear it. Put that on your list. I'm sure you'll like it.
Susannah

…because I could hear this kind of high-pitched tone in there which I get when I turn up mine a bit too loud. But when it first started, I was like, “oh, this is [a] bubbly watery sound”. And the thing that got me to contact mic was [that] you can hear the impact on the mic, which is, I guess like a drum sound, a kind of membrane sound. It's a bit higher in pitch, the impact of the object hitting the mic, but then around it, there are these more bubbly tonal sounds, like creatures eating. Or something watery for sure. But again it has that very satisfying, rhythmic, textural combo.
Alexandra

So it feels like the audio recording is almost clipping. It sounds like maybe you're tapping a keyboard underwater or something. I don't know how to describe that but as submerged. It's really clicky.
Thorsten

So I thought there's water. I thought I could hear water and I don't know if I could actually hear it or if that was the evocation of something in terms of an image—stones, water. But then after a while I thought this actually sounds like a fire, like in a fireplace, that kind of, I don't even know how you say that word, what does fire do, this…[Crackle], yeah the crackling of a fire. And then a moment where, I don't know, some sort of breath, possibly? Definitely a change to what that was and then back to the more crackling sound. Then I was a bit confused as to what I was listening to. I thought this is really strange, I go from water and somehow I thought pebbles or stones and then reinterpret that as crackling. It was interesting that in the beginning I was thinking that I could really identify the water but then once that image of crackling fire came in, I was questioning if I could still hear water.
Martin

So I like the lower—I don't have a very good vocabulary of music—but the lower kind of register, the lowest part of that sound felt more comforting. But then there was something kind of nagging, insistent about it as well that was a bit too demanding—demanded a lot from me. But then there was another sound that sounded like a sleeping bag or something, or was it just like mic sound or something? But then it's like, am I in a tent also? Inside of something. But then I thought it was like something frying in the fry pan too.
Kim

…but I often hate things rattling. Like on my bike, in the car. What's that rattling sound? How do I make it stop? And some of the spikes in sound—it was very dynamic, not super comfortable. I also don't like loud crockery, that kind of sound. Crockery on crockery. I’ve noticed, maybe more with age, really not enjoying sudden loud noises. They make me physically jump. I can't even control my reaction to it. But the set last night [at the NOW now festival] that had a toothpick and balloons—I just got dread at the start of it, but it was actually really great. I guess the context makes the difference.
Reuben

…but you can hear their clothes rustling. It feels my hearing is impaired. And I'm trying to think why that is. I feel like I was in someone's pocket—like a pen in a pocket. That would be what it sounds like to be a pen in a pocket.
Elle

Sounded like if a mic was placed inside of a windbreaker, like a pocket and you're walking around and there's just two surfaces [rubs her hands together] rubbing against each other. Like fabric-y. It makes me think of a foley set up. Maybe not because a foley artist makes it pretty realistic, but it felt over-emphasized. And also it drew upon a memory that I had [in reference to my work], when some two to three year olds came over to play with a big bucket of water and little finger cymbals and balls, wooden balls, underwater, and they could hear it coming out of a speaker.
Alanna

You get a similar kind of feeling to it I guess [scrapes table rhythmically]. Just something about that slowly scraping, getting the last leftovers, is the kind of feeling I get from it, if that make sense. And something about that kind of bubbly, watery kind of [tt tt tt], kind of poppy—with the [scrapes table] scraping away.
A.S.

The sensation of the the sound? It felt like a spinning, a deep… there's something cyclical on one level. And then there's something on the surface. The stupid word luminous, not crackling, but yeah. If it were a shape, it would have…If you had two objects in a bucket of water and moved them around at different paces, but the one in the bottom of the water was submerged, that's going around around, and the one at the top was contacting with an object on the surface. I don't know. I could just listen to that all day, all day.
Penelope

And that little popping—hardly popping—rattling sort of [tt, ttt, ttt, ttt] fast sound. I couldn't imagine…Then there was a whooshing, a bit more white-noisy sound. Things floating and bumping each other in a trough or a bath.
Lizzy

…like a spoon with ice cubes. Then a baby's bath, in an old metal bath or something. Then I had an electric eel. I imagined what an electric eel would sound like under water if it was being recorded.
A.

Again it felt like something underwater, even though I know from asking you about it that can't necessarily be what it is. There's a point where—it's not you holding or somebody holding a balloon and rubbing it? But there's some sort of extra texture that comes in about 2/3s of the way through and that almost acts as a release, well for me because I can't work this out, but at least I have something else to break this up. I found it compositional for whatever reason.
D.

It sounds a little bit like a waterfall creaking or something. Is it recorded underwater? It sounded a little bit like a somewhat muted drum machine as well, but obviously giving off a bit of an off rhythm. But it sounded a bit mechanised like that.
Michael

That's a horror game where there's these monsters chasing you and this really really loud, blaring noise tends to play when one spots you. Looking at that video you can see how they made some of the sounds. [For] thudding footsteps they just sort of bang a bucket on the ground or something like that. [I think] moreso of how it's made. I think about that instead of what it is. I didn't really know what that was. I don't really think I identified anything but I was going that could maybe be ice on a glass or something.
E.K.

I mean, there's the white noise and the splatter of it. And the volume rose and fell. Then there was the thin line of a note that ran through it at times. There's this kind of stuff [hand motion] but there's also the splatter of it. But even that thin line had a sort of a blur. There was like a thin line with a halo around it.
C.

There's a feedback-y feel to the sound. And then that's kind of fascinating. You go “well, what is that quality that makes me think it's feedback?”. But I guess it's the replication and decay of certain sonic events. That they replicate, but then go off into into the aether in some way. It just feels way more electronic than the other sounds. But there is this weird acoustic about it which isn't some sort of spatial or Euclidean acoustic. It's more a circuitry acoustic or that's what I thought. And there's a tonal quality to it as well. There is a pitch element there, that certain buzzing, which I can identify specifically as tonal. You could zoom in on the pitch in a way that I couldn't in the previous one. The other one was more generally noisy, whereas this one gives me a feeling that there's a specific tonal element to the sound.
Jim

There were some parts [where] it's just something that I would just listen to while I was doing work or something. If it just held on that kind of fuzz, that sort of warm, fuzzy part, then I could sit with that for awhile. [Images?] Like a microphone with a dead cat on it, that sort of fuzzy [wind shield]. It was like I was listening to the sound of that fuzz, you know, the dead cat on the microphone. That's the image I got. That sort of gray, white-noisy fuzz.
Kim

It has its own rhythm and patterns. Lots of patterns in machine sounds. I think that [they are] a little less varied perhaps, or in a narrower range so that maybe it doesn't have—I don't know, I'm hesitant to talk about any musical words because I'm so ignorant about that—but it doesn't have so much melody. I would say it's just this small range of rhythms that I really enjoy actually. That was quite quiet and pleasant to me. It was quiet and rhythmical and subtle.
Lizzy

Susie

It seemed like sort of short delays in there. I'd say like fluttering and skittering.
Reuben

Chopped a bit, which made it a bit tense. But at the same time it was a very gentle sound. It was like some sort of wind, air movement sound. It evoked something like helicopter propellers. Interesting the way it was kind of so gentle, but there was an underlying tension for me with the way it was chopped and it was building and receding and building. [Images?] I’m okay with taking it as it is [as just sound], but my mind still jumps to images. Like it still jumped to a helicopter propeller and that added a bit of a tension as well. That sense that if you're anywhere near a helicopter propellor, there are massive winds going and it's dangerous. I wasn't sure that it was literally that, but it doesn't bother me not to know. It's quite lovely, experiencing sound that's different enough to an everyday identifiable sound to be intriguing. It makes it curious.
Helen

But then I was thinking it probably isn't a butterfly trapped in a cage though. It was just imagination. That's interesting how a sound can take you there. The colour, the colour palette is quite dark and it made me think of certain concerts that I would attend where you would see other fellow sound artists. It's a very specific crowd, so it made me think of a venue.
Alanna

Either that or it's a camera outside an office block that's filming some pigeons that are nesting and that's what the mic on that camera is picking up. And then the third thing I thought is that sounded like the soundtrack to [the film] Barbarella. Barbarella getting along in her little space machine and about to crash and that's the sound effects. It's a very 60s, sci-fi early effort to make it sound space age. It was just evocative of Barbarella. Or could it be in space? Obviously that sort of genre when the music or the soundtrack would sound like that. And then I thought, what do I think I'm hearing? I thought it might have sounded like wings, but not normal wings, digitally recreated wings…I’ve been doing a bit of reading about Machine Learning lately. Some of the pictures that they can produce and how they learn and how uncanny they are. I thought, this sounds like if a machine had heard a lot of wings flapping— this is what it would have done.
Elle

It sounds like a sound track to a visual art piece of some kind. Just flickering, shadowy, black-grey light. Nothing too crazy. Not any hot colours or anything. Kind of dark. It's a little bit eerie. But it doesn't put the hairs up on my back or anything.
Michael

Like the [cone] and the copper wire, inside the machinery. Or maybe you were touching something. So it had a "we're in the machine now" feeling. But at the very beginning it was almost like wings and then you'd done something, expanded out the wings, the wing movement of a moth or something.
A.

…or maybe it's just that I haven't been practicing hard, but I do feel like I fall back on images [as] an easy way to describe what it is. Or connotations—it sounded like a sci-fi film sound or like some kind of electromagnetic thing. And then I was trying to think more about the sounds themselves which were either rising or falling. Now, I can't remember, but there were tonally either going down or up in a certain way and seemed like they were coming from the outside and moving in—going down a step, so they shake themselves into the front. And there was a gray quality to the sound. I started to think, “oh, this sounds grey to me”, which I don't know if that's just like my weird coloured association with static. I could almost describe some [sounds] better with a movement than with words, you know? Because it was kind of more kinetic.
Alexandra

So it's the kind of soundscape that I'm very very comfortable with and familiar with to have in the space. But also I have no real understanding of how it would be created. So the amplification, there's a bit of a cymbal sound that comes in but I think a lot of it is electronically created. What I think I like about this kind of sound—it's fairly mysterious to me so I don't know exactly what it is…But how it fills the space, and potentially what it does to a body moving in a space…It creates a space that is full of possibility because it's difficult to pinpoint. It just thickens the air. Thinking, imagining being in an empty space, physically, that kind of sound already fills it in a particular way that is very inducive to movement, but you also don't need to work at filling the space anymore because it's already there.
Martin

Very digital and fast paced. Sounds like something is loading or progressing or something like that. It’s building towards something even though it's constantly the same sounds being repeated. I think it could get annoying after a while. It doesn't sound natural so it might make you feel uncomfortable after a while.
Garbiella

I don't know if I have many thoughts about that one but I like when there's that very crisp, glassy, digital—not digital—synthesised sound, but there are little bits to the side or underneath. I like that. I think because, from making music as well, I do like the idea of very crisp, glassy, blippy, synthesised sound played in a room, but then you hear the little bits of hum and interference. It makes it a bit more alive or something.
MP

Scanning for life forms, scanning frequencies. It has a rhythm to it as well. Even though it seems like it's random I also could detect a regularity to it. And I thought it was only clean, these very clean kind of synthetic sounds but I noticed, scanning the frequency range, there was also something a little distorted there towards the end. It might have been there the whole time but I didn't detect it earlier. [Images?] I naturally try and put an image to it I think, maybe more subconsciously, but in this space more acutely or consciously. I dare say I’d probably do that if I wasn't in this kind of situation, just a little bit under the surface.
Matte

There's something trying to speak or trying to communicate with us that is, for want of a better word, alien or something very foreign to humanity perhaps. There's a really nice low frequency pulse. You've got the high pitched, fast moving stuff, but there's a low frequency pulse that sounded like a heartbeat, a heartbeat in distress, perhaps.
Matt

But it also reminded me of all the BBC Radiophonic Workshop stuff. It sounded like early musique concrète kind of sound effects. The quality of the recording sounded aged even though it was alien, if you know what I mean. It’s like a 1950s sci-fi approach to creating an alien sound. I guess it just sounds—I’ve got to find an adjective—it’s lasery, its mechanic[al], it’s not human sounding, it’s not at all organic. Like it comes from a machine, it’s mechanical somehow.
Thorsten

I wondered, whether it might be those big sort of sound rods that you can put into the air. I couldn't possibly describe what it was making the sound. It sounded like there was just some humming and there were some wonderful rolling sort of electronic [makes trilling noise—lilillililil ]. It was great, but it's beyond my capacity to know what that might be. Electrodes and that sort of sound. A hum as well. And maybe some vibrational magnetic sounds.
Susannah

…rather than something you find in the environment I suppose. [Images?] I don't really know what to think. I suppose flashing lights in rhythm with the sound. Just a strip of just these old lights lighting up red typically.
E.K.

Because it kind of sounded like it was relaying, I don't know. I always say I'm tone deaf when it comes to music. I just thought PacMan, I thought arcade games. I go to the bowling alley with my partner and his friend and we go bowling and then they play the games and that's what I thought of.
Meghan

…or something like that. It had some high oscillations and also some low sounds, almost low beating sounds to it, which made me think of isochronic tones or something like that. Quite a range going from high fast moving tones to low ones.
Jo

…it reminds me of maybe a 60s sci-fi soundtrack. I can't help but relate it back to something. It's so hard not to. But I guess it [the listening skill] would probably develop maybe if you spent a few hours. As you said, you start with the source and as you're talking about it, it kind of expands into other things.
A.S.

I guess to that end it makes sense that the recording is shorter but the length doesn't really matter. The thing I plucked out was the lower, the fan or humming underneath it, which is very, very soft and clearly not meant to be the focus. The very rhythmic and repetitive beeps, beep bloops…but the thing I kept locking onto was whatever was happening underneath it, the kind of low-level noise, in the cables. I guess because it's such a sustained noise and it doesn't vary.
D.

…the Sound of Cancer, where we've been interviewing all sorts of people about cancer, working with scientists. And one part of the project has been interviewing people about MRI machines and how that freaks them out. But that piece of music—it's like a piece of music for me—it's like, I could move to that [makes rhythmic noise—deuh, deuh, deuh, deuh], that [makes trilling noise] over the top of it. Terrific. I don't know if that was [an MRI], but it was really great.
Penelope

Na, doesn't resonate. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing at all. It could be a bleepy thing but, its nothing. So it could be technology. I did think, perhaps drops onto glass [taps table] It's not quite—it's a bit too fast for a drop.
Mary