The room is part of the recording.
A listening notebook from Leeds. Field recordings, a modest home stereo, and the sounds that usually go unnoticed.
A few minutes of careful listening
I am Ravi Ellery, and I collect sounds that do not ask to be collected. Rain reaching a windowsill. The low click of a kettle switching off. Footsteps crossing the bridge after the bicycles have gone. I live in Leeds and carry a small recorder when I remember to charge it, which is less often than the notebook would suggest.
At home I listen through a pair of speakers on shelves that are never quite at the same height. Moving a chair can change what I notice more than changing a setting. I write down those changes in ordinary language: softer, closer, less like a cupboard. The vocabulary is personal and useful to me, even when it would make an engineer laugh.
The session index contains three written accounts of recent listening, including the things that went wrong. This is a notebook rather than an audio player; the durations describe recordings in my private collection. Read about Ravi for the story of a hobby that began with a noisy radiator and grew into an excuse to sit still.