There is a little nature reserve by the canal near the football ground, an oasis of calm. The water is sluggish with green on top apart from where the water seems to well up from the river bed in these gently roiling clear pools. I don’t think the water makes any sound here, there is some background traffic noise which would mask it.
The nature reserve was improved by the Access to Nature project in 2012. It’s easy to be cynical about some of these projects but this one seems to have worked really well, and there was a lot more birdsong in this part of path by the canal than in the unimproved bits.
Flock of Jackdaws with young in trees by playing fields and trees by the River Test in Whitchurch. The calls of the young from all around come out in this binaural recording.
It’s R. Murray Schafer‘s birthday today. In 1973 he research the Vancouver soundscape, later extending it to compare five European villages from a soundscape point of view.
The research became the basis of ‘Acoustic Ecology’, a discipline that R. Murray Schafer developed to further investigate ‘soundscapes’, which are understood as the sonic interface between living beings and their environment.
World Listening Day is held on his birthday to celebrate Schafer’s contribution to the art of listeing to the world, rather than just hearing it. I’ve usually aimed to try and isolate sounds, other than in the lo-fi urban environment where you just can’t do that. However, in tribute to R. Murray Schafer’s ideas, I had a go, starting off with the birds at dawn. It’s a bit past the time for the classic dawn chorus, but these birds in a semi-rural location in Rushmere made a decent attempt at a soundscape for me.
XY recording
For a change I tried an urban field recording at Ipswich Marina, this recording starts with oystercatchers at the beginning, to the right is the sound of some construction work that has been restarted after a couple of years. A woman in a RIB motors to her boat moored somewhere in the marina which is mainly to the left. Some foot and bicycle traffic passes. The waterfront has been redeveloped for leisure over the last decade.
Binaural recording with Soundman OKMII
Finally I gave in to the separator in me and recorded the sound of this tarmac laying crew and their machine, in particular the backing up sound.
The reversing sound is an electronic noise played through a speaker, which highlighted one of the issues R. Murray Shafer picked up –
Swifts are one of the fantastic soundmarks of summer, and they sound at their best in the city, with their high-pitched screaming resonating from the houses all around. You get them in rural parts too, but the sound needs the hard surfaces of the city when they come in low at rooftop height in the warm summer evenings. According to the BTO they like towns.
The Devil’s Bird is the devil’s own job to record, too. You don’t try and track them, there’s just no hope to get anything directional on the job, and the screaming groups tend to spread out as they get close too. Just don’t even think of using a parabolic dish or a shotgun mic 😉
This one is basically the Olympus LS-10 with internal mics propped in a first-floor window, and snipped out of a long trawl for swifts, Then I used a parametric EQ to hit some of the town traffic rumble.
There’s a spinney nearby, so over the holidays I got myself into the tree and rigged a pair of omnis, and stood really still. The first thing I heard was the mournful repeated tone of the collared dove, a steady counterpoint to the recording, with its mournful ho-HOO-hoo, with the stress on the first syllable. Later on the woodpigeon appears, with its ho-hoo-HOO-HOO-ho-hoo, and there are various other birds flitting around in the undergrowth.
It was a very windy day, so there is a lot of wind noise in the trees, which adds atmosphere for me, reminding me of a special moment with the birds
It’s not that easy to catch the beginning of swans taking off, but these took off while I was recording near a reservoir at Grundisburgh, with the ungainly splashing and creaking of wings.
One of about twelve sparrows I saw, sounds like there were many more in the flock.
1 min continuous chirping
There’s something about rain that brings out the chirp in sparrows. I counted 12 of them, but the sound of this lot in the ivy and elder bushes sounds like a lot more. Why do sparrows all get up a chirp when it rains?
recorded from Maplin electret inserts on tree at 44.1kHz PCM to a PC via mic preamp. High-pass filtered from 440Hz at 12dB/octave to reduce traffic noise
I went to WWT Caerlaverock with the Wildlife Sound Recording society, a great opportunity to get some species sounds. This was at 7am in the Avenue hide, with the rooks playing bass and teal giving the lovely ringing counterpoint.
Caerlaverock specialises in waterfowl, of which there were many
A blackbird sings boldly into the enclosed courtyard of this hotel in Budapest. Around him, the city gets ready for the evening. The wind blows some paper cups in the cobbled floor and then some people get chairs ready.
I was in Hungary to do some bird recording, so I had an SD702 and MKH30/40 mics. I wrote this post some fifteen years after recording him, but I still remember a magical urban moment. This male used the echo of the courtyard to amplify his song, the resonance adds richness to his tone.
He was in what looks like an ash tree in this enclosed courtyard. It goes another floor down into a cobbled floor that I couldn’t get in the photo, it’s stitched from four. Towards the end the hotel staff get ready to set out some tables and chairs.
I had another charming urban field recording moment in Hungary. These women broke into song in the marbled hall of Ferihegy I as I waited for the return flight. That airport was a throwback to when flight was glamorous, and the resonance added to the song.
