I can hear the sea! How the sounds of the British coast are being mapped

A crowdsourced sound-recording project will supplement the British Library's archive with the sounds of the UK coastline - from waves and birds to dodgems and lobster pots

• Quiz: Can you identify the sounds of the British coastline?

Into a stuffy, windowless room in the bowels of the British Library, in London, breezes a sunny day by the sea. Cheryl Tipp clicks her mouse to play a recording of waves breaking on Totland Bay on the Isle of Wight. The waves sound abrupt and small, the tide on the ebb, perhaps, and I can almost feel the sun on my back and the sand between my toes. Then Tipp, the libary's curator of wildlife sounds, plays Atlantic breakers recorded on a Cornish beach. The sunshine vanishes as an immense roar fills the room, a second wave beginning its long run up the beach before the first has finished, and we are transported to a February storm, salt spray on our lips.

The library's archive of 6.5m sounds is the world's second largest, and includes 200,000 catalogued sounds of wildlife and the environment, from whale song to wet woodlands, thunder in the heavens to the underwater chatter of fish. The archivists aren't satisfied, however, and so the BL, in partnership with the National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland, is to create a crowdsourced sound map of the UK coast over three months this summer.