Click on the orange/white ‘Play’ button.
Recorded outside Dalston Kingsland Road station
at 12.20 on 19 July 2011.
In their own words …
The London Sound Survey collects the sounds of everyday public life throughout London and compiles past accounts to show how the sound environment has changed.
Amongst the daily urban hubbub there’s information about who lives here, what they get up to, how they enjoy themselves and what they believe in. Sounds come in fashions from singing canaries and windchimes to car horns that play Old Dixie. They announce developments in technology, the city’s growth, and social and demographic change. They tell us of shifts in the make-up and scattering of London’s wildlife.
Stereo sound recording and playback was the first immersive electronic medium and it’s still the only really practical one. Listening to a recording of the sounds of a place or event gets the imagination working and recreates some of the sense of being there. It feels like a worthwhile end in itself simply to share those experiences with whoever’s willing to listen.
NB: the original date for this was 9 August (we had to postpone it).
For the last few weeks, we have been showing you how to find and listen to small, independent Internet radio stations (eg: SHOUTcast Internet Radio for beginners, VLC media player and Icecast Internet radio). Now we would like you to join us in bringing to life a new community Internet radio station. It already exists. It’s provisionally called Radio Freedom Pass, and it was launched (very successfully, with a different name) 30 July at the Piccadilly Community Centre.
It’s surprisingly easy to do. You don’t need a broadcast license or special equipment – just an ordinary computer, a cheap microphone and free software. The only cost has been SHOUTcast server hosting – £5 for a basic Pay As You Go account which will last us several months.
The free software we use to stream out to the Internet is Winamp – the same program we use for streaming in from the Internet – listening to SHOUTcast stations. Winamp is on every computer at The Lawns.
Even the newest absolute beginner can get involved in Internet radio – that’s why we are doing it.
A pilot broadcast from The Lawns, Tuesday 20 September 2011.
The launch event suggested to us that community radio might be best when broadcast from places where there is a crowd – for example – a meeting, a workshop, an exhibition, a party – or an end of term event at The Lawns. As we are expecting a lot of people to come The Lawns on 20 September anyway, we thought we might wrap up our series of online music workshops with an Internet radio party – and broadcast the result. So here are some reasons to be here …
Help create a party mood.
Talk to the microphone – we hope to have somebody really good to show you how to present and interview. You can try doing it your way, as an interviewer, or an interviewee.
If you have a collection of MP3 music (the digital format for most online music), we will show you how you can become an Internet DJ with your own radio show. At the moment, we can’t broadcast music ourselves,as we don’t have the necessary music licences – but we can show you how easy it is.
If your music is on vinyl or CD, it could probably be digitised to MP3 quite easily. We could talk about that too.
Tell us your ideas for an Internet radio station run by older people.
What time, and where?
We won’t start before 3 pm – in a corner of The Lawns, while everything else is going on. When we all have nothing else to say, we will switch to a SHOUTcast music station until 6 pm. If you want to listen online instead of coming to The Lawns, visit radio.agewell.org.uk after 3 pm.
Several people have asked how to find and play the Internet Radio stations we play at Agewell Computer Club.
They are all ‘SHOUTcast’ stations. SHOUTcast is a very wonderful Internet project that helps to restore flagging faith in humanity – free software enabling almost anyone to set up an Internet Radio station without expensive equipment. There is more info on the Wikipedia SHOUTcast page.
The easiest way to play SHOUTcast stations is to use a web browser to open http://www.shoutcast.com/, then use the search form near the top of the page. The streams with the highest bitrate have the best quality sound.
A better way is to download and install ‘Winamp’ (a media player designed for SHOUTcast) from http://www.winamp.com/. Winamp is very ugly to look at, but works well.
Podcasts are series of recorded audio files that can be downloaded to your computer (or MP3 player), so that you can listen to them when it is convenient. The downloads are usually automated. Subscriptions are typically free.
A good example is the ‘Hackney Podcast’ (our Website of the Week, 14 June 2011), which has had 21 editions since it started in July 2008.
From the Podcast Wikipedia entry …
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released in episodes. The word replaced ‘webcast’ in common use with the success of the iPod and its role in the rising popularity and innovation of web feeds.
The mode of delivery differentiates podcasting from other means of accessing media files over the Internet, such as direct download, or streamed webcasting. A list of all the audio or video files currently associated with a given series is maintained centrally on the distributor’s server as a web feed, and the listener or viewer employs special software known as a podcatcher that can access this web feed, check it for updates, and download any new files in the series. This process can be automated so that new files are downloaded automatically. Files are stored locally on the user’s computer or other device ready for offline use, giving simple and convenient access to episode content.
In many respects, this is closer to traditional publishing models associated with books and magazines (as opposed to radio, which uses a live stream).
At the workshop.
We will show you how to …
Download and listen to podcasts with the free VLC media player as your podcatcher.
Search the BBC podcast directory for series that appeal to you.
This is the fourth in our series of workshops about music on the Internet.
VLC is the default media player at Agewell Computer Club. That means we use it to play all our music and video files. It’s also a very good streaming media player. The only thing we can’t use it for (at the moment) is to listen to SHOUTcast Internet radio (SHOUTcast was the topic of our 12 July 2011 workshop). However, VLC is an excellent player for Icecast Internet radio – we will pay special attention to that at the workshop.
VLC is free, open-source, not tied to any commercial interest, and very good. There is also a portable version that you can install on your own flash drive.
At the workshop.
We will show you how to …
Create music playlists with VLC.
How to use VLC to download and organise podcasts
How to use it as an Icecast Internet radio player.
This is the third in our series of workshops about music on the Internet.
From the Last.fm Wikipedia entry …
Last.fm is a music website, founded in the UK in 2002. It has claimed over 40 million active users based in more than 190 countries.
Using a music recommender system called ‘Audioscrobbler’, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of the songs the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user’s computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (‘scrobbled’) either via the music player itself or via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. By April 2011 Last.fm reported more than 50 billion scrobbles.
The service is free for users living in the UK, US, and Germany. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites.
Last.fm offers customized virtual ‘radio stations’ consisting of uninterrupted audio streams of individual tracks selected from the music files in the music library.
Stations can be based on the user’s personal profile, the user’s ‘musical neighbors’, or the user’s ‘friends’. Groups based around common interests or geography also have radio stations if there are enough members, and tags also have radio stations if enough music has the same tag. Radio stations can also be created on the fly, and each artist page allows selection of a ‘similar artists’ or ‘artist fan’ radio station.
At the workshop.
Last.fm likes to be thought of as a music discovery and recommendation service – but we will focus on Last.fm as a way of creating personalised Internet ‘radio stations’ based on your music preferences.
This is the second of our series of workshops about music on the Internet.
SHOUTcast is software for creating and listening to Internet radio. At the workshop, we will look at …
The SHOUTcast website –
A searchable directory of Internet radio stations with a built-in media player; easy to use but the search is sometimes slow.
Winamp –
A SHOUTcast player that you can download and install on your own computer. Very reliable, but remarkably ugly. We have it on most of our computers at The Lawns. There is also a portable version that you can install on a flash drive. Winamp is also a general-purpose media player – efficient, but not as good as our preferred VLC (which can do everything except stream SHOUTcast).
The Hackney Podcast was set up in 2008 to record the borough’s different faces: one of Britain’s poorest places but culturally one of its richest; an area of London profoundly marked by its history but, as the Olympics loom, caught in a frenzied period of change. From its first days, the podcast – available free to download – has provided an eclectic mix of politics, environmental issues and scenes from local life alongside cutting-edge art, literature and music.
The Festival is pleased to offer free tickets to the following performances for older adults (50+) from the London Borough of Hackney.
Explore an iconic venue and experience world-class musical performance, sharing the event with young people from schools across the borough.
Each concert will have a pre-concert talk with a music animateur providing valuable insight into the repertoire and performers.
Transport to and from the venue can be provided by the Festival.
Write about it! Following the performances, all visitors are encouraged to write a review with their thoughts and ideas about the music they have heard. More information about how to submit your reviews will follow after your ticket requests.
Eight (8) tickets are available for each of the performances below.
London Symphony Orchestra: Fauré Requiem – Tuesday 28 June 2011 (8 pm).
St Paul’s Cathedral, EC4.
London Symphony Orchestra.
Pre-concert introduction, 7 pm.
Also: JS Bach Partita No. 2 for solo violin BWV 1004 with Bach Chorales.
A message from Beth Eastwood & Fiona Roberts, BBC Radio 4 …
A BBC Radio 4 series launches next spring, presented by Joan Bakewell, following people at the forefront of the Baby Boom generation. Often pioneering in spirit, they’re tipped to redefine older age.
If you’re 65 next year (born 1946), we’d love to hear from you.
Email: sixtyfive@bbc.co.uk .
Post: Beth Eastwood & Fiona Roberts, PO Box 76, The Strand, London, WC2B 4PH .
Please include how you heard about us, and your phone number.
Many thanks.
NB: ‘how you heard about us’ means ‘Agewell in Hackney’.
Radio 2′s Get Connected campaign launches on Monday 1 March 2010. The aim of the campaign is to help more of our listeners get online and understand digital technology better. The campaign will run across the network for the entire month, with many shows involved including Weekend Wogan, The Chris Evans Breakfast Show, The Jeremy Vine Show, Steve Wright in the Afternoon, Simon Mayo’s Drivetime, Ken Bruce, Alex Lester, and Aled Jones’ Good Morning Sunday.
This is huge, so we are not going to attempt to cover all of it. However, here are some of the topics we are ready for …
Downloading and installing a media or audio player on your own computer at home. We like iTunes for organising music files, and VLC as a general-purpose media player (it’s the default at the Agewell Computer Club).
Understanding MP3 files (most digital music files are MP3 format).
Where to find music to download.
Legal and copyright issues.
Please bring your own questions to the workshop.
ACC members can reserve places on these workshops by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk (if you don’t trust your own email skills, please ask for help).
Note added 2 March: this workshop seems to be almost fully booked — perhaps one or two places available.
At this workshop we will demonstrate a USB turntable that creates MP3 versions of vinyl tracks. Conventional turntables send a signal to speakers through an amplifier. This turntable sends the signal to computer software, which converts it to a computer music file.
MP3, by the way, is a very common way of encoding music and other sound files.
The USB turntable must (of course) be attached to a computer, so that the MP3 files can be saved on the hard disk. The default storage location is within an iTunes folder – if it exists (it’s not essential).
Please bring your own questions to the workshop. Bring some vinyl too — but the vinyl must be clean.
ACC members can reserve places on these workshops by asking us directly, or by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk (if you don’t trust your own email skills, please ask for help).
Be involved in writing and performing comedy sketches for an internet radio show to be recorded at City Hall on the South Bank. A special course presented by the Capital Age Festival and Silver Comedy for anyone aged 50+.
The course is made up of 8 daytime afternoon sessions where you will learn everything you need to know about writing and performing comedy sketches for the radio, and how to put a show together.
There will then be a live recording session at City Hall as part of a special Capital Age Festival event, followed by a final follow-up session with an introduction to editing. The finished work will be put on the internet as a short series of podcasts and CDs or MP3s will be produced for everyone involved.
Workshops will be held every Monday afternoon (1 to 4 pm) at Oval House Theatre (tube: Oval, Northern Line) from 11 January 2010.
For more information or to enrol, call Capital Age Festival on 01895 675 389 or email chris.head@yahoo.co.uk .
Join the Radio Freedom Pass Party.
Several people have asked how to find and play the Internet Radio stations we play at Agewell Computer Club.
Workshop: 
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Hackney Podcast.
A message from Corinne Bass, 
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