A week after the end of WWII, a nightingale begins to sing in the darkness of a northwest London park. ‘Figures of listeners’ appear in the nearby lighted windows. Part of the ‘emanations of peacetime’, the mellifluous whistles and trills transfix but also unsettle those within earshot emerging as they are from an auditory wartime regime of hyper-alert listening. The bird sings ‘into incredulity […] note after note from its throat stripped everything else to silence.’ This is Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘I Hear You Say So’ (1945), but in all her fiction, and her work as a broadcaster and writer for the BBC, Bowen had a keen ear for the acoustics of modernity, particularly the uncanny and troubling properties of found sound. In this story, too, given that the nightingale’s song is acousmatic – the tiny bird unseen – Bowen plays with the confusion between ‘absolute’ and reproduced sound.