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There’s a new sound gripping Sheffield. You won’t find it at one of the city’s eclectic jazz nights; nor in any of its clubs or live music venues. You’ll find it in the back aisle of a Co-op supermarket on Ecclesall Road.
“Anyone noticed how nice the freezers sound in the eccy road co-op?” someone wrote on the Sheffield Reddit page in January. “It’s like all the fans have been carefully tuned to the calmest droning chord ever, it’s like being in an electrical gong bath.”
Earlier this week, another Redditor shared a video of the freezers in all their aural glory, later earning a huge second audience when reposted to X. A debate ensued. Was it tuned to C# major? Could you hear the opening of Nothing Compares 2 U somewhere in the electronic hum? “I think it’s developed a slight discordant edge over the last couple of months,” one Reddit user wrote. “It’s ageing like fine wine.”
I was curious, and the Ecclesall Road shop is not too far from where I live. Armed with an iPhone, I went to see if I could capture the sound.
Immediately, I was struck by how noisy the supermarket was. Alongside Co-op’s in-store radio, the fridges housing prepacked sandwiches and chilled fruit were giving off a low groan. I wondered if there could be an ambient classic hiding in every appliance, before I remembered the mechanical buzz that my own fridge makes throughout the day. That was not the calming drone I’d heard online.
I headed to the back of the shop and to a cluster of three freezers. This was it. The sound they were making was an unbelievable symphonic hum. I stood entranced; it was like listening to an orchestra playing underwater. I whipped out my phone and recorded.
Given the discussion about the freezers online, I asked staff if they had noticed the noise. One lady behind the till seemed confused and said she hadn’t seen anyone else coming in to soak up the drone. Another staff member, manning the self-checkouts, was also miffed. “We’ve only noticed it today,” he said. “It’s like an orchestra.”
There is a long history of musicians utilising found sounds and the noise of industry in their compositions. In the early 20th century, Italian futurist composer Luigi Russolo built intonarumori – noise generators designed to mimic sounds including cities and transport. Russian composer Arseny Avraamov incorporated the sounds of a flotilla, cannon, locomotives, artillery regiments, sirens, foghorns and a choir in his 1922 composition Symphony of Sirens, the city of Baku becoming his orchestra.
Later, in the mid-20th century, composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Egypt’s Halim El-Dabh developed what became known as musique concrète, a form of composition that used field recordings as instruments. It’s a technique that would evolve into the sampling used in music today, but one many musicians still embrace: in 2018, Nottingham-based label KIKS/GFR released a compilation of field recordings of different fridges.
The noise of the freezers, however, was far more harmonic. I texted the recording to my boyfriend, an aficionado of ambient and experimental music. “It sounds more like a synthesised human voice,” he said in a voice note. “The obvious reference is Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. On the second track, it’s all synthesised choral voices and they sound human but also unnervingly nonhuman.”
He’s not wrong: there are similarities between Co-op’s freezers and Eno’s 2/1 in their particular haunting qualities. What it reminded me more of, though, was the noise emitted by electric cars; which, depending on the make and model, consist of everything from orchestral samples to recordings of the didgeridoo.
But unlike Eno and the electric cars, the noise coming from the freezers, much like the music found in nature, exists without a compositional hand. It’s this, explains Dr Benjamin Tassie, an Ivor Novello-nominated composer based in Sheffield, that draws us to these sounds. “We go around the world blocking out sounds a lot of the time,” he says. “These sounds are unexpected. They jolt us out of ourselves and attune us to the world in a different way. The natural overtone series that exist in something like a drone or the squeak of a door have a harmoniousness to them.”
On my way home, I decided to see if my local Co-op freezers were also musical. To my delight, I could hear a hum – one that, despite visiting the shop many times a week, I had never noticed. I thought of all the times I’d stalked the aisles, headphones jammed in my ears, and the sounds I might have missed.
A Co-op spokesperson had this to say: “While we’re unable to confirm whether the freezers are rehearsing for their next orchestral recital, it’s good to hear our shoppers are enjoying the freezer section at Ecclesall Road Co-op.”
Given the ongoing discussion online, and the number of posts by people saying they were going to take recording equipment down to the Co-op to capture the drone, the freezer song may well go on to become something bigger. (“Can someone with skills clean this up and make a 10-hour YouTube version?” read one Reddit request.)
For me, though, the freezer’s symphony is a poignant reminder to acknowledge the surprising beauty in the world. As Tassie says: “Listening to the world around us as music can reframe and reimagine what it means to listen.” Surely, we could all do with more of that.
