Radio Lento podcast
Hugh Huddy
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Top 10 Radio Lento podcast Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Radio Lento podcast episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Radio Lento podcast for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Radio Lento podcast episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
191 Moorland waterfall (sleep safe natural white noise)
Radio Lento podcast
10/28/23 • 60 min
An hour of pure falling water in a natural wide open landscape. Captured in the early hours of yesterday morning in the hills of Derbyshire. A place off the beaten track. Up in the hills. Rugged. Reached by a steep up climb holding for balance on arm-thick sapling trunks, whilst stepping between winding deer tracks.
An old holly tree stands amongst many other trees, facing the waterfall. We hang the Lento mics off one of its outstretched limbs. Angle them out so they can hear across and beyond the waterfall. A profusion of hard ferns growing up from the rocky pool softens the intensity. Down stream hart's-tongue ferns line the banks, and rustyback ferns cover time-toppled dry stone walls. This unmanaged upland environment is filled with vegetation and clean refreshing sound.
When embarking on a long listen like this, the sound view may at first seem, well, just white noise. Pure white water noise. Not much else. But time does something. The auditory brain gradually tunes in. To tune in, headphones are needed as they are designed specifically to project binaural sound directly onto the left and right eardrums (with no room-gap). The left and right inner ear then carries the soundwaves layered with complex spatial cues (here the waterfall and surrounding environment) into the auditory brain where a mental picture is formed. These soundwaves, having been authentically captured using ear-like microphones at a real location, can trigger a similar aural and perhaps even physical response to the experience of actually being there yourself. It's why we say "surround yourself with somewhere else".
This sound-view is of the waterfall, to the left. Partly hidden behind trees and beds of hard ferns. The stream flows in front of you left to right down the moor, to the valley that opens out to the far right. Ahead and below the holly tree holding the mics is the drop pool where water faintly gloops and gurgles. And sometimes very tiny clicks can be heard from left and from right. Probably the branches of the trees 'resting' down as they do in the cool night hours. This process where the boughs of a tree rest down by around fifteen degrees makes subtle noises, and is when dead wood most often drops down into the leaf litter.
The auditory brain is our constant 360 degree survival sense that's evolved over a million years giving us a powerful non-light dependent way to alternatively 'see' the world around us. Spatial hearing has evolved in tandem with sight and our brains construct our perceived reality from both senses together when out in the natural world. Even though modern ways of thinking are heavily anchored to sight, by investing just a little quality time in natural binaural listening you can tell it taps into something subliminal and evolutionary. A calm threat-free natural environment like this one beside a remote waterfall, just does feel good. There's no need to wait for scientists to tell us why.
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141 Soft land murmuring - Wooler, Northumberland
Radio Lento podcast
11/12/22 • 28 min
An exposed tree, looking down upon the town of Wooler, high in the Northumberland hills. It stands amidst wide open fields, by an empty bench and an overgrown footpath. It stands. And it feels the time passing, through the slow undulations of the wind.
Bright cloudful skies. Rain expected. Then out across the valley the bell strikes. Reverberantly. Five shining tones to tell the sleeping town of Wooler that this is the fifth hour of this new, Northumbrian day. Two tiny birds leap to attention, from their hidden places inside the tree.
The soundview of this wide panoramic landscape changes with the wind. Tawny treetop owls. Sheep. Cawing rooks. Flocks of chattering jackdaws. Wood pigeons, cooing comfortably from their lofty roosts. Then as the wind gathers strength, the soundview shifts to the interior space within the tree. To the hushing currents of moving air pressing through its dense and complex branch structures. To the light countless flutterings of its small, crisp edged leaves. Soft undulating murmurings, of the land that is Northumberland.
158 That edgeland feel along the Thames near Tilbury Docks (sleep safe)
Radio Lento podcast
03/11/23 • 27 min
Bright hazy sunshine. Behind, and up the bank, a winding footpath, littered with discarded sunbleached things. Here, sat still and amongst it all, dense bankside vegetation. Everything dried up, and whisping in a warm late summer breeze. Ripe blackberries growing on renegade edgeland canes. Hints of sunbathing crickets. Slishing shoreside water. Wafts of cludgy strandline clay.
The Thames flows from left to right of this sound scene. Far to the right, almost inaudible, Tilbury Docks. Gantry cranes lifting containers light as lego bricks from giant ships. One after the other. Bleeps thinly carried by the cuffing wind. Straight ahead the overgrown slope of the riverbank opposite. Far to the left a ship, approaching. Mid-channel. Steaming east, just twenty miles more to go to pass Leigh-on-Sea, then out onto the open sea. Its huge engine kneads the air with deep, muscle massaging vibrations. Reminds this forgotten piece of wilderness, that it's an edgeland.
Taking in the vastness of the river. And listening into its detailed shoreline. And letting the time pass. Such a wide river at this point. Such choppy water. Washing and rewashing the lumpy clay bank, in brisk rocking rhythms. Shifting something small, and tinny. Perhaps it's a fragment of paper-thin slate. Or a slither of metal. The water's revealing an empty thing down there too. Hollow. Maybe a semi-submerged plastic container being slowly unburied from the mud. A little way to the right, along the bank is a rusting wreck. A stranded pontoon bridge, left to rot. Nature will find it something to do, one day, when it's ready. All we need to to, is wait.
Sleeping city waves
Radio Lento podcast
04/10/20 • 42 min
Hearing London at night from a small patch of grass bordered by shrubs, flowering plants and a bay tree, a typical garden in Hackney enclosed within old brick-built walls. Just before 3am distant machines began to fill the air with gentle undulating washes of sound. The effect is pleasantly soporific. It's a wide landscape recording and quite delicate, best through headphones or on speakers when everything is quiet.
155 Out on Cooden Beach at night - part 1 (sleep safe)
Radio Lento podcast
02/18/23 • 30 min
A mid-February night and you're out on an empty beach, for the cold sea air, and that feeling of wild emptiness. There's nobody about.
Past the silent hulk of a huge parked digger on caterpillar tracks, you reach a shoulder high timber groyne (a long, narrow structure built out into the water from a beach in order to prevent erosion.)
You pull yourself up and peer over, down into the gloom. The drop onto the beach beyond is too deep. But you don't turn back. Instead, you get yourself up onto the top timber beam, and sit, in a balanced position, and look out to sea.
With this bit of extra height you can really hear the width of the beach. The sea, and all the detail of its rolling waves. Their muffled thuds. their frothing crashes. The parnoramic rushing breakers that travel spatially, all the way from the far right to the far left of scene. Aural evidence of longshore drift.
Ten minutes later. Settled into the moment. Sense of time regulated not from within, but by the external passage of panoramic sound, you are still as a heron. Listening. Level and straight. Tuned deep, into the dynamic foaming of the intertidal zone.
*We captured this sound landscape photograph a few days ago whilst visiting Cooden Beach between Hastings and Eastbourne on the south coast of England. Only one aeroplane and one car are audible throughout this whole section of time, so we might be able to add Cooden Beach to Lento places with genuinely quiet horizons.
Garden birds under a silent sky
Radio Lento podcast
01/23/21 • 51 min
Every year, on or near the 4th of April, we leave the microphones out in the back garden to record the dawn chorus. It's a simple ritual, partly to mark the beginning of a new season, and partly to compare how the dawn chorus sounds now compared to last year. Despite us living in Hackney in the North East of London, where the buildings and roads don't change much, the soundscape from year to year does. It's always different. We've been making these recordings for 12 years and, not surprisingly, last year saw the most dramatic change. London was in its first lockdown. The schools were closed, the roads mostly empty, reduced to a fraction of the normal traffic. And the skies had fallen silent. No more planes chasing the tail of another, minute by minute. As the day dawned and the sky lightened, the gardens behind the terraced houses woke to high circling seagulls and silky soft birdsong. Unimaginable, impossible in any other year. Gone the rumble and whining of jet engines, gone the rattling bumps of cars on speed bumps. Gone the heavy grey noise, the aural fog that coagulates the air. Instead see-sawing great tits, echoing, crisp and pure. The jovial cooing of wood pigeons. The cawing of rooks. Some screeching green parrots on a mission to get somewhere else fast, and little delicate chittering birds commuting from roof to roof. And like an operatic performer, like a musical instrument perched in a tree, the most totemic of garden birds began to sing its song. Melodious. Perfectly clear. Wonderfully inventive. Inflecting notes of cheer and even glee, as it embarks upon its journey into spring. A blackbird.
** Share the essence of spring. Now available as a sound card on our Ko-fi shop. **
Daydream 3 - rain water woods (new material coming soon)
Radio Lento podcast
08/20/22 • 5 min
It's the dead of night. Along an exposed stretch of seawall East of Burnham-on-Crouch, a deluge has started. Rain lashes down from a pitch black sky onto the swirling water of an out-going tide. This is the River Crouch, and the microphones are capturing the essence of this nocturnal estuary landscape, opposite Wallasea Island in Essex.
Bright daytime, on Landermere Creek. Wild water surrounded by green fields and farmland. Gulls, redshank and curlews speed up and down the creek on fast, blustery breezes. In this place there's a strong sense of escape, and of a world where land, sea and weather interlace.
On a rock, closely suspended above a small patch of exposed shell beach at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary, near Bradwell-on-Sea, the microphones capture the pristine detail of the incoming tide. The way these particular waves move. the way they lap, and hurry along the contoured rocky edges, as the tide slowly rises. It's a sound that no matter where you are, or what you're doing, happens twice a day, everyday.
We stumbled upon a fallen tree whilst walking over Galley Hill near Epping Forest. the M25 sounded further away than usual, so we tied the mics under its steeply angled trunk for some shelter, and left them to record the ambience of the place alone. Some rain falls in large heavy drops, from ominous grey clouds seen from miles away approaching. But this rain didn't. It fell from an open sky, light as it was light grey. Flocks of jackdaws flew overhead, surveying the wide open fields between the outcrops of trees.
We always set out to capture the closest 3D aural experience we can, so with a pair of headphones, you can close your eyes and feel yourself present somewhere else, somewhere perhaps more natural, and peaceful, but without our human presence disturbing the nature that lives there. As dawn breaks over a wood in Suffolk, the mics capture, almost close enough to touch, a rare experience of small furry animals, scampering about with each other, on the crisp summer-dry forest floor.
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Thanks for listening and for spreading the word about Radio Lento, a self-funded podcast helped by listener recommendations and donations. Last May we went to the Podcast Show in London and walked about feeling like ducks out of water! Ad spend, business plans, audience growth and sales. We're typing this in a Youth Hostel far far away, with the mics still out on their overnight record, and being pelted by rain, we feel much better.
Here's where to listen to the full episodes featured in this daydream:
213 Sound-scenes we love from four years of Lento
Radio Lento podcast
03/29/24 • 60 min
Today marks four years of Radio Lento! We launched on 29 March 2020. Since then, a hundred and forty hours of material shared. Hundreds of thousands of ad-free and cost-free downloads. Long-form audio recordings. Of natural and empty places. In high precision spacious sound. Real aural essences of what it is to be present and immersed in a real place.
We've not missed a week since March 2020. Rural and country places. Coastal and tidal places. Edgelands. Brutal landscapes. Sonorous interior spaces. In wind and rain. Under the forces of nature. Broad daylight and the dead of night. We're interested not in any particular thing, but in the sound of every thing. In soundscapes that are most often not experienced. Because they seem empty. Places where nothing seems to be happening. Places filled with the delicate and the subtle. The soft, and the fragile. Aural environments that only through focusing over time, form in the mind's eye of the listener.
Four years of producing Lento and we do still struggle to explain to people what Lento is. Is it mindfulness? Well, it could be, but we aren't really thinking of that when we make the recordings. Is it nature? Not specifically. Is it an experimental podcast? We are definitely not experimenting. Perhaps the ordinary, the everyday, the subtle, the long-form, is just too off the beaten track. We add that Lento is slow growing, but that we do get quite a lot of good feedback. They often say why don't you do a marketing plan? We say we can't really make one because the value of the material is in the the listeners heads not ours. They say you could combine it with someone doing guided meditation. We explain that any talking at all would ruin Lento. And they ask how do people know how to listen to it? And we say they just have to work it out for themselves. And they don't say anything. And we stare at each other.
And after a few moments of thought they say your pod sounds amazing. And we ask if they have listened to it? And they say they will. And we explain it's harder than it seems to capture real authentic quiet, properly, because the places we can get to are almost always scattered with human made noise but when we do practice patience, quiet does eventually come, and that really makes each recording. And they seem to be thinking about it, but not know what to say next. And then we talk about something else. And we hope they might try listening, in a quiet place of course, with a pair of headphones or ear pods, so they can hear the captured quiet properly.
In this special edition to mark four years we retrace our steps through six 10 minute segments from these episodes:
17 Dusk in the Forest of Dean
26 Delicate sifting waves at Felixstowe Ferry
139 A passing storm from the attic of an old house
128 Persistent rain at night in an urban garden
192 Spring wildlife on the Hoo Peninsula, Kent
136 Ocean breakers near St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland
Listen to each episode in full via our blog.
Our grateful thanks to everyone who listens and supports Lento.
Daydream 2 - lazy summer days
Radio Lento podcast
08/13/22 • 5 min
Wondering along the path from Althorn to North Fambridge in Essex. Skylarks! Their contented never-ending songs, wheeling about slowly in the warm thermals somewhere, high above. Almost as far as the eye can see, a vast waist-deep plantation made of millions of waving stems and leaves is catching the breezes, shushing and sissing in sympathy with the moving air. This, is open country, crossed by the rippling River Crouch on its way to the North Sea.
A blackbird sings, out over the swirling water at Wrabness. It's perched high up in a gnarled tree, leaves catching the softly flowing breezes. It's the closest of a whole bank of trees to the estuary water, and the last before the mud of the exposed shoreline begins. The tide's just turned. A warm, quiet summer afternoon, and nobody's about.
Midday in August. Sun beating down. Strong, radiant heat. It's making the crickets cricket in the grass beside the marina. Cool, deep water, glinting, with lines of sailing boats, all moored up. Their masts knock in the wind, and sometimes sound like bells. Seagulls. Out over the basking River Crouch,
Inland, across the other side of the vast county of Essex, the churchyard of St Mary's Gilston is at rest. It's unusually peaceful because it's under a very quiet sky. Rare. A phenomenon of 2020 and 2021. A secluded spot, where walkers can stop, ease their feet on the wooden bench, and listen to wood pigeons cooing on the warm slates of the church roof.
Towards London, where the last piece of Essex country blends into the series of lakes that make the Lee Valley Park, the night is coming. The paths, usually busy with people enjoying their freedom, are empty. No more bikes and scooters. No more barking dogs. No more chasing kids with trikes and ice creams. Just dark bush crickets under the hedgerows, and swans, slowly swimming over still, twilight water. And the echoing hoots of owls.
Listen to the full episodes where these short daydreamy clips are from:
222 The trees of Kielder Forest before dawn
Radio Lento podcast
06/01/24 • 51 min
In our quest to capture the pure sound of trees in true spatial quiet, we have without realising it, been following a long and winding path that has ultimately led us here. The Kielder Forest. It's a remote place for England. A place where the sound of trees can properly be felt and heard. A place where millions upon millions of trees grow together, across an area of 250 square miles (400 square kilometres).
Planning this recording trip involved OS Explorer map OL42. We also checked flight paths and road maps to try to guess what extent human made noise might filter into the forest. From the sparse few roads and giant area of uninhabited nothingness, the location looked on-paper like a very quiet place indeed. Ideal we hoped for capturing the real sound of trees, in high definition audio.
When we say the 'real sound of trees', we mean the spatial sound of trees in an ever undulating wind. Wind that shifts in strength between soft to medium. Ideally with most variations around the 10 to 20 knot range and that peaks every now and then with slowly rising and slowly falling currents in the 25 to 30 knot range. For the spatial aspect, the trees need to be over a very wide area, and very tall. To be spruce and fir, because these make the sound-feel that we are most interested in. Evocative deep brown hushing.
Somewhat optimistic for these very particular conditions, we travelled up country and ventured deep into the forest. We found a location near the dam of Kielder Water, and in driving rain left the Lento box tied to a tree. Then returned to the village some way outside the forest to stay the night. It always feels strange to leave the box behind, alone in such a vast place. Now we are home and listening back, what it captured is magical to us. Here is the period of time from 3am to just before 4am when the majority of spring birds begin to sing in first light. The wind strengths aren't strong, but there is an undulating wind that can be clearly heard in the tall spruce and fir trees as the banks of wind move across this region of the forest. Echoes of owls can be heard too, distant geese and a strange barking which we can't quite identify. Delicate layers of bird song gradually begin to build as the time approaches 4am.
As always with Lento listen with headphones or Airpods to properly hear the full range of aural qualities we strive to capture and share.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Radio Lento podcast have?
Radio Lento podcast currently has 250 episodes available.
What topics does Radio Lento podcast cover?
The podcast is about Health & Fitness, Mental Health and Podcasts.
What is the most popular episode on Radio Lento podcast?
The episode title '191 Moorland waterfall (sleep safe natural white noise)' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Radio Lento podcast?
The average episode length on Radio Lento podcast is 41 minutes.
How often are episodes of Radio Lento podcast released?
Episodes of Radio Lento podcast are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Radio Lento podcast?
The first episode of Radio Lento podcast was released on Mar 29, 2020.
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