Ignoring the smells of Borough Market to hear the sounds

Today we’re off for a wander around London’s famous Borough Market, a place much better known for its smells and tastes than for its sounds, for self-evident reasons. But trying my best to ignore the beautiful smells coming from every single stall and concentrate instead on the sounds, I discovered a unique sonic environment. There’s the sound of food being cooked, prepared and sold, the sounds of people from all over the world eating foods from all over the world. On top of that, there’s a London Tube line running right overhead, so all of these sounds are punctuated by what sounds like a mechanical rumbling of thunder as trains pass overhead – an immediately striking sonic feature to a new visitor, but of course one to which the regulars are completely inured.

For the remix, I wanted to draw out this low, threatening rumble, and also bring out the high-end sounds of cooking food (hissing pans etc.) so I’ve taken two versions of the sound and EQed all of the bottom end from one, and all of the top end from the other, then split them across the stereo field. It’s amazing how much stripping the bottom end data from a sound makes it almost unlistenable – you can almost feel your skin crawling if you focus on the high-end sounds, as if you can hear raw audio data instead of sonic information.

City version:

Memory version:

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