Anthropophony, Biophony & Geophony.

Stroud Soundmap is an ongoing project and material will be added to the map from time to time. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive map of Stroud, with audio from every street corner, just a collection of local sounds, voices and histories.

R Murray Schafer’s idea of the soundscape, was elaborated by Bernie Krause, who sees this comprising Anthropophony, Biophony and Geophany. The first of these describes sounds originated by humans; conversation, music, cars, trains, sirens, power tools etc.  Biophony, says Krause, is the ‘collective sound produced by all living organisms that reside in a particular biome’, represented on the map by sounds of animals and birds, and Geophony, the non-biological natural sounds of a place, such as rain, rivers and thunder. The totality of these make up the Stroud soundscape.

Specific recording for the project started in 2019, but various older recordings are also included. The net is cast wide and out into some of the valleys and catches a few sounds from the wider Stroud area. So the listener can take a trip out of town, to the estuary for the Severn Bore or to the New Lawn to hear the Rovers’ crowd.

The map owes a debt to two other pieces of work for their inspiration, both larger and more ambitious; the British Library UK Soundmap and the London Sound Survey.