Since long before sound recording and radio brought a curated soundtrack to our lives, we have been surrounded by the immersive soundscape of nature.
The sounds of the modern world have intruded on and obscured those of the natural world—but attempts to capture this unique sonic environment have challenged broadcasters and fascinated listeners.
The ‘Nightingale Lady’: Beatrice Harrison’s duet
Beatrice Harrison was a celebrated cellist who gave the first performance of Delius’s Cello Sonata and was chosen for the first recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto conducted by the composer himself.
Practicing in her garden one evening, she heard a nightingale respond to her playing and echo her melodies. Recognising the appeal of the duet, she approached the BBC to broadcast the event.
BBC Photo Archive
... I telephoned Sir John Reith at the BBC, who seemed very dubious at first. Meanwhile the song of the nightingale was at its height at Foy Riding and I knew that it must be now or never as from now on he would sing later and later at night and in two weeks he would be gone.
Beatrice Harrison
In 1923 the BBC had introduced a new, more sensitive microphone, the Marconi-Sykes Magnetophone. The extremely heavy iron device was held in a ‘meat safe’ stand, named after the meat storage cupboard it resembled.
The microphone had already proved itself capable of capturing wildlife when the sounds of insects caught in the cage were picked up. Despite its robust exterior, inside was a fragile aluminium coil supported with a paper backing and attached by cotton wool pads covered in a thin layer of Vaseline.
On 19 May 1924 in Miss Harrison’s garden in Oxted, BBC engineers propped the Magnetophone on a stool to broadcast the encounter. The nightingales held out until the last 15 minutes of the broadcast before joining in, but listeners were captivated, sending more than 50,000 fan letters to Harrison, some addressed simply to ‘The Nightingale Lady’.
The performance was so popular that it was repeated the following month. Broadcasting the nightingales then became an annual event for the next 12 years.
Beatrice Harrison's cello performance
The broadcast was a phenomenon, but not all was as it seemed. Many decades later, analysis of the recordings suggest that the bird sounds were in fact faked by a human impersonator. Moving the heavy equipment to site may have scared off the nightingales themselves but the broadcast made an immense impact on the public.
... [the nightingale] has swept the country... with a wave of something closely akin to emotionalism, and a glamour of romance has flashed across the prosaic round of many a life.
John Reith, BBC Director General
How did the Second World War impact nature recording?
On 19 May 1942 the BBC returned to the garden to broadcast the actual nightingales in a solo performance, without the cello accompaniment or human imposter. The broadcast was cut short when engineers discovered that they were joined by the sound of bombers overhead on the way to raids in Mannheim.
The sound would risk a security breach that could alert targets to the incoming aircraft, so the live signal was stopped, although a recording continued. The recording was restarted when the planes returned—only this time, 11 fewer planes came back.
Nightingales with bombers heard overhead
BBC recording of nightingales with bomber planes heard in the background.
Ludwig Koch and the first bird sound recording
In 1936, Ludwig Koch—a Jewish sound recordist with the Gramophone company—left his native Germany. He was warned by colleagues about the danger of returning.
Koch had been an enthusiastic recorder of sound since age eight, capturing the earliest recording of a bird in 1889 and releasing Gefiederte Meistersänger (Feathered Mastersingers)—a sound-book of 25 bird species—in 1935. Much of Koch’s historic collection of recordings which captured nature and ‘sound autographs’ of famous individuals, including Otto von Bismark, were left behind and lost during the Second World War.
BBC Photo Archive
Settling in England, Koch produced Songs of Wild Birds, a double gramophone record and illustrated book that documented English birds. Taking his bulky equipment into the field, he avoided the trouble of scaring of the birds by planning his recordings for days. Koch watched the birds in their habitats then placed the microphone to record in the early hours before daybreak.
Before the era of multi-channel recording, Koch’s equipment cut the sounds directly onto disc.
The recordings are remarkable for focusing on the sound of each bird with minimal background noise. This was achieved with a team of staff who would help flush out unwanted species to ‘isolate the songster’, removing the birdsong from its natural sonic environment.
Koch amassed an important collection of bird and wildlife recordings.
Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature
When did the BBC launch their Natural History Unit?
BBC producer Desmond Hawkins had an interest in birds, wildlife and nature. On joining the BBC’s West Region in Bristol in 1945, Hawkins launched The Naturalist, a radio show dedicated to science and observation made accessible to the public.
BBC Photo Archive
The show used Ludwig Koch’s recording of a curlew’s song in place of a theme tune and Koch appeared regularly to present his recordings. The popularity of the show made Koch a radio personality and encouraged the BBC to purchase Koch’s archive of recordings. Radio shows such Birds in Britain followed, demonstrating the appeal of natural history broadcasting.
As television began to gain dominance, Hawkins launched Look in 1955. Presented by Peter Scott, the successful natural history series ran until 1969.
In 1957 the BBC formally established their Natural History Unit, keeping its base in Bristol. The unit produces some of the BBC’s most successful programming—but the figurehead of natural history broadcasting had yet to join.
David Attenborough and the rise of natural history broadcasting
David Attenborough started working at the BBC as a producer in 1952. It wasn’t long before he moved in front of the camera as a presenter of Zoo Quest in 1954; thus began his long association with natural history programming.
In his early expeditions around the world, Attenborough carried what he called his ‘clumsy tape recorder’. The L2 tape recorder was designed by EMI for the BBC. It was the first to be battery powered, making it portable enough to take into the field, and could be comfortably carried from a strap over the shoulder.
© Science Museum Group Collection
Magnetic tape recording provided far greater flexibility in the field than Koch’s earlier equipment. Multiple reels could be carried—though, as the machine had no erase function, there was no option to re-record. Later models changed from valves to transistors which reduced the weight and improved battery life. The technology allowed for travel to exotic destinations and captured recordings of glamorous animals that appealed to audiences.
In 1965 David Attenborough became controller of BBC2. He commissioned the landmark documentary series Civilisation and Ascent of Man, both of which exploited the recent arrival of colour television. Each series had an authorial presenter, Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski respectively.
Having covered art and science, the next series—Life on Earth in 1979—focused on natural history and was presented by David Attenborough himself.
BBC Photo Archive
The series, produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, was highly acclaimed and has been influential on documentary film-making. It was followed by The Living Planet (1984) and numerous other series presented or narrated by Attenborough, including Wildlife on One (1977–2005) and Planet Earth (2006).
Attenborough has become a much-loved public figure for his natural history presenting and campaigning, with later series such as Blue Planet II (2017) incorporating conservation messaging.
How does the BBC Natural History Unit capture the sounds of nature?
The BBC Natural History Unit has been consistently pioneering though the use of cutting-edge technology and experts with the exceptional skills and patience to capture breathtaking footage. Planet Earth and later series document the process of film-making within the programme.
A recurring difficulty is to capture wildlife without human interference. It’s essential to bring human technology into the natural environment to record it—but a challenge to render that technology invisible onscreen and undetectable to animals.
David Attenborough convinced the BBC to use the smaller 16mm format Bolex film cameras on his early series Zoo Quest. Although seen as ‘unprofessional’ compared to traditional 35mm, the smaller, lightweight cameras were more agile for recording on location.
© Science Museum Group Collection
The camera mechanisms create sounds that could disrupt the natural scene. A sound blimp covers the camera and muffles the sounds. Film-makers use tricks to disguise their equipment. The ‘poo cam’ blimp seen above was made for a Bolex film camera to resemble mud or dung.
Going a step further, natural history sound recordist Chris Watson placed a microphone inside the ribcage of a zebra carcass to accurately capture the sounds of vultures feeding.
In some cases, sound proves almost impossible to capture in the wild. Sounds may be too faint or too far away from the recordist to register. Where a camera can zoom or use a telephoto lens to cover distance, microphones cannot as easily distinguish distant sounds. A parabolic dish can be used to amplify sounds to a microphone.
Planet Earth II received criticism for its use of ‘fake sound effects’. The addition of sounds in post-production is a standard process in film-making, adding incidental sounds that were not recorded on set. In natural history film-making, individual sounds cannot always be isolated from the ambient sound. It was a struggle Ludwig Koch faced in capturing a single species.
... wildlife film-makers often turn to sound designers, or Foley artists, to recreate something that sounds like it would in the wild—a soundtrack that is true to nature.
BBC Earth
Something as delicate as the flap of a wing or the movement of an animal through air may have to be recreated. In many cases the soundscape can be reassembled from new and existing field recordings. Just as footage may be shot over a number of days and edited to create an engaging narrative, sounds are compiled digitally to increase the ‘realism’ of the programme.
With the reduction in transport and modern human-generated noise during Covid-19 lockdowns, birdsong was more audible; technology can obscure as well as record nature.
It improves your state of being and mental health to be able to hear more birds and I think the shutdown highlighted that, and this study provided some data to support that.
Dr Elizabeth Derryberry, University of Tennessee
The sounds of nature have always had popular appeal. Broadcasters continue to innovate with new technologies and programming to reconnect audiences with the natural world.
Further reading
Online
- Capturing the song of the nightingale, Iain Logie Baird, Science Museum Group Journal
- The cello and the nightingale, Robert Seatter, BBC News
- Ludwig Koch on recording a White-rumped Shama in 1889 (audio), The British Library
- Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature (audio), BBC Radio 4
- Ludwig Koch: Master of nature’s music, John Burton, Wildlife Sound Recording Society
- Nine astonishing ways David Attenborough shaped your world, BBC Teach
- The tricks that nature documentaries use to keep you watching, German Lopez, Vox
Books
TBC
