After a great + diverse day of everyone’s fine talks and activities, rather than drinking beer I’ve got waylaid watching washing machine videos on youtube, e.g.:

There’s hundreds of them, including some real enthusiasts recording and uploading full cycles of washing machines from what seems to be an extensive collection in some cases. One of Emily‘s animations used washing machine sounds and movements, and being slightly sleep deprived I see other tenuous but somehow interesting connections leading from this.. Fabric and threads came up a lot, as did falling rain, and there was also a passing conversation about annoying environmental rhythms, e.g. I think Laura was annoyed by unpredictability of woodpigeon calls that don’t always reach resolution, and it turns out that roofers working on tin roofs can annoy people less by adding otherwise non-functional scraping movements to their banging. Washing machine sounds are very homely to me, it’s not surprising to find people use the sound to help them relax and sleep.. Somehow there’s a link to waulking song too.

All this reminds me that I should read into Felicity Ford‘s work on the domestic soundscape..