This carol was set by Britten in his early cantata "A Boy was Born". Later, after the emotion involved in writing his War Requiem, he took it out in isolation and reworked the setting for a solo voice, which is what you hear here (performed in the University Church of Oxford University). The words are usually associated with the grail legend; but modern scholarship suggests a link with Anne Boleyn, whose badge was a falcon.

A long edit (35 min) of several recordings I made on different days at our yearly November fun fair. Crowd atmosphere, merry-go-rounds, bumper cars, slot machines, boom-boom all around… A blend of my two DYIed recording systems, CAD GXL1200 mic/Maya 44 USB card/laptop and TSB165A mic/modded Zoom H2 recorder.

Here, a video of a torch waved around is spatially sonified. Occasional lens flares cause loud sound events. The scaled translation of the image is such that the lens flare is aurally modelled as being 300m wide. Apparent sound source extent is synthesised by decorrelating 3600 concurrent granular voices. This means that the 300m wide lens flare should be perceived as a large sounding object. The video can be seen in full (but with only a stereo downmix) on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/9202956

Test image for the spatial sonification of images. The lens flare represents a 300m wide sounding object. Sound produced from the farthest parts of the shape (B) will arrive at the centrally located listener (x) considerably later than sound produced from the closer parts A). When heard, this effect sounds like a kind of reverberation. However, unlike room-modelled reverberation, where both first reflections and diffuse reflections typically arrive from all sorts of directions, this reverberation is somewhat unidirectional. There are no real reflections, all sounds arrive directly from the object.

A medley of several recordings I made early in the morning on the very last day of the 2009 Hot-Air Balloon European Championship which took place in Brissac, near Angers, France. Lying on the ground, the balloons first have to be inflated with large noisy fans before the gas burners can get into action. Feverish activity around the dozens of them that lifted off that morning for their last flights there. Surely best enjoyed on with-height setups (from 9:30 on there's one passing right above), this track will prove "a bit" noisy at times, but if your speakers love pink noise, this is the track they'll need !!! ----(DIY TSB165A "soundfield" mic / DIY preamp / Modded Zoom H2 recorder)