Field recording and found sounds
Target recordings are those made of a specific sound or sounds which are distinct from the background atmosphere or the location in which they occur.
Avebury features a large prehistoric stone circle encompassing the village.
These Morris dancers performed English Country Garden near the NT cafe on a warm sunny day in late September. Somehow fitting with the prehistoric circle and the ambiance of the site.
Binaural OKMII
on radio aporee
This tawny called near the doorway of a holiday cottage in Sidmouth. It’s a lovely evocative sound. I hear them at home too, they’re common as muck according to the RSPB distribution map. This one was disturbingly close, and he was getting a reaction from another tawny. Presumably saying keep off my lawn in Owl language.
Olympus LS14 XY
Tawnies have a rep for being pugnacious and you can’t hear ’em coming . The photographer Eric Hosking lost an eye to one. I stood in the doorway, the dishwasher was running so it makes a faint background, as do the neighbours. It was a surprising encounter in Cheese Lane, Sidmouth – a row of terraced houses surrounded by other housing.
The picture’s not of this owl. Looks a bit odd for a tawny but it was a WordPress freebie. There’s a bit of an AI feel to it. The straight AI offering had gorgeous eyes but was spooky.
Owls are spooky enough on their own without added AI creepiness
terrific rasping sound from this mechanical wind pump – a slow turning sail drives a reciprocating water pump directly. The clunk is probably OK but that rasp could use some grease
I visited the Heron Hide at RSPB Swell Wood. There wasn’t much to see at the time, but I became aware of a disconcerting buzz. That didn’t sound like your average bee or wasp.
I saw some inch-long insects and figured it was time to beat it PDQ. Not gonna argue with these bad guys.
Olympus LS14 XY
At noon and 3pm a bell in rung in the Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury to invoke a minute’s silence for reflection. A wren breaks the silence, and the bell is sounded again at the end of the minute.
The bell was the old school bell, the school buildings were cleared in the 1970s which opened up the bottom of the gardens a lot.
The ritual of the Silent Minute was instigated in WW2 by Wellesley Tudor Pole, who was a key figure in the founding of the Chalice Well Trust.
OKMII binaural microphones
This pair holler at everybody walking down the footpath by the side of the house. At least there’s a tall wooden fence at the front so they don’t go off at people walking on the main road. The dogs seem to be triggered by sight rather than sound. There’s a little growl on the in-breath that gives me a feeling of aggression behind the yap.
Unusually for a soundmark, they are reactive to a listener’s presence.
This has been a good year for nightingales
but I was still surprised to hear one so close to the town, in an area very disturbed by dog-walkers.
A neighbour was having cavity wall insulation installed. This seemed to be polystyrene beads about 3mm diameter blown into a hole drilled from the outside. The machine makes a prodigious racket.
A truck was parked on the road and a massive compressor started up. The noise increased when the beads were loaded up, from big plastic sacks. Job was done in a day and a bit.
I still wonder what happens to that sort of thing in a fire. It’s better contained than the ghastly polystyrene tiles people used to insulate ceilings with decades ago. This continued until the fire brigade public service ads on TV about what happened in a fire. Polystyrene still produces nasty fumes, however.
Probably recorded with an Olympus LS something XY
There’s a satisfying noise to be had from this apple crusher – the first stages of making cider
The crunch has some of the biting into an apple sound. The ripping apart sound is ever so slightly ghoulish, one for Halloween…
After this was recorded a bunch of people joined in with their kids. Kids aren’t usually conducive to easy recording, though they did a grand job turning the handle, so I switched to using a stereo contact mic on the mechanism. My contact mic has a strong magnet on it so it’ easy to get noises from ferrous metal objects.
I had to EQ out the 3kHz resonance of the mic, but the result is less satisfying than the regular recording to my ears.
(more…)Seems like it’s been a successful year for our swifts, they have been breeding and screaming parties are heard overhead.
They’re still as hard to record as they were last year, however there are more of them it seems. I got the AT XY mics on the job this time. Maybe next year I will try a seriously long boom pole to get the mic pointed straight up in the air and use the directional pattern against some of the noise and traffic rumble of the town, but I’m still of the view swifts sound best in the city!