Fantastic article at NYtimes featuring sounds from Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska.

Read & Listen

Via Field Mic

Fantastic post by Tim Prebble about a field recording trip he had at PNG (Papua New Guinea).

Well it was a field recording trip that was equals parts inspiring & exhausting! By the end of the week I had recorded total data of:

744 24 bit 96kHz 4 channel audio = 70.74GB
722 24 bit 96kH 2 channel audio = 30.5GB
Canon 7D photos = 833MB
Canon s95 video & stills = 11.44GB

But please bear in mind most of the recordings from the trip I cannot post due to them being specific to the film I’m working on – the sounds I have posted below were recorded in my own free time….
To hear the remainder, you’ll just have to wait until the film is released!

Read/Listen at musicofsound

Composer Cheryl E Leonard, who you may remember from the great interview Nathan had with her here at Sonic Terrain, has published a very interesting post about the sounds she captured at Yosemite’s frozen lake, including some ambiences and also internal sounds from the lake, recorded with hydrophones.

Read and listen at Music from the Ice.

Via silent listening

Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson spends much of his time listening and recording the sounds of the natural world. When the National Gallery invited him to create a sound piece inspired by a painting of his choice, he chose Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’. This was the start of a creative and exciting project, which also involved students from Ravensbourne College of Art and Design and other professional musicians and sounds artists. The project began with audio guides for paintings selected by the artists, and then later developed into an evening event involving a live sound mix in the gallery to accompany a tour of the paintings with an art historian. NATURE uses these events to explore how painters use a range of techniques to excite the viewers senses; not only the visual sense, but the senses of smell, touch and perhaps most poignantly, hearing. The programme also explores how sound installations and sound guides may help some viewers, especially people who might feel intimidated by paintings, to engage with these works of art.

Listen

Via Chris Watson

New episode from the Nature Series 5 by BBC Radio 4.

Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson travels to India, to capture the sounds of the forest and the spine tingling roar of a Bengal Tiger.

Chris is leading a team of wildlife sound recordists on this quest. They travel to Corbett National Park which was established in 1936 as Asia’s first National Park. It stretches over some 1300 sq km. in the foothills of the Himalayas in the state of Uttarakhand.

The park is named after the legendary hunter, naturalist and author Edward James Corbett, better known as ‘Jim Corbett’. Author of ‘Man-Eaters of Kumaon’, Corbett spent many years killing tigers and leopards before concern about their future and that of their habitat, led him to playing a key role in establishing the National Park.

Today the Park is home to a rich and diverse range of wildlife including over 100 Bengal tigers. To help them, the team have several local guides; who are not only skilled in the art of tracking tigers; knowing what signs to look for; like scats on the ground, scratch marks on the trees, and perhaps most importantly, knowing how to listen to the forest and use the alarm calls of other animals such as the peacocks and samba deer to help track the tigers. It might sound easy enough but as Chris and the team discover, it’s far more difficult than it sounds.

In their search for tigers, they play a game of ‘Grandmother’s footsteps’ with a pair of elephants, encounter crocodiles in a river, are puzzled by something that sounds like rain but isn’t, and record the unusual barks of Hanaman Langurs in the forest. As for recording the roar of a tiger, they need skill, patience and, a bit of good luck.

Listen

Next episode: Painting with Sound

Frank Bry, known as The Recordist, has published a fantastic post on his blog talking about snowstorms, including sounds, videos, and some great tips.

The third week of January 2012 proved to be a goldmine for snow sound effects here on the ranch. The typical North Idaho winter finally arrived bringing with it lots of snow, wind and freezing temperatures.

The week started with a bunch of snow falling along with some very cold temperatures. As the winter storm progressed and the weather systems above were battling it out for supremacy, the wind came. Not a soft blowing winter wind but some strong sustained blizzard like winds with gusts up to 65 MPH.

The Recordist

“Suoni dal confine” a new project curated by Leandro Pisano wants to describe those transformations and transitions that traditional soundscape has gone through in the last years. In order to do that we merge together different level of arts (live performances, installations, talks and conference) and we move away from a simplistic and nostalgic interpretation of the soundscape itself. By reading the boundaries of a territory, we focus more on its acoustic symbology, considering it not anymore as a de-limited element but rather as an interaction and a system of relationships among ever shifting part: “border areas are spaces of dynamism, of conflict, of contradiction and mediation in which the apparent incoherence and extraneousness of certain sounds become the peculiar novelty” (Enrico Coniglio).

“Suoni dal confine” comes into being with an event at Spazio Thetis (Fondazione Thetis) in Venezia, on 20th of May 2011, featuring Enrico Coniglio and Yasuhiro Morinaga. An Ufficio Bifolco production. This movie was produced during 2011 by Ufficio Bifolco (ufficiobifolco.it). Film editing, camera work and postproduction: Antonello Carbone. Subtitles ENG/ITA: Anna Palmer

There’s a new episode of BBC Radio 4′s nature series 5, this time featuring sounds of Pollardstown Fen, Ireland, recorded by Tom Lawerence, truly inspiring sound recordist who sadly died during the last year. Several of these sounds can also be heard in the fantastic Gruenrekorder 087 CD: Watter Beetles of Pollardstown Fen.

For over a year, sound recordist Tom Lawrence has been capturing the sounds of Pollardstown Fen in Ireland. These are no ordinary sounds, but the sounds of a hidden world; an underwater world, where an orchestra of creatures create an extraordinary and vibrant music. Above the water’s surface, grasshoppers and crickets stridulate; that is, they rub one part of their body across another to produce ‘those fiddling tunes so evocative of summer’. Below the surface, something similar happens as water beetles, water scorpions, great diving beetles, water boatmen and lesser water boatmen and hundreds of other species produce sounds day and night at over 2Khz, reaching 99 decibels in some cases – the equivalent of sitting in the front row of an orchestra “Tapping, knocking, hammering, drumming, clicking, creaking, cracking, croaking, buzzing, fuzzing, bleeping, winding, reeling, revving, puttering, pattering, humming, pulsing, squealing, shrieking…. the insects reveal themselves”. Writer and narrator Paul Evans meets Tom Lawrence and takes a journey into the Fen to hear these sounds for himself. Tom leads the way. His friend, Jim Schofield joins them, bringing with him a boat (an inflatable boat that they first have to pump up), and then the three men ‘wobble’ along reed-lined drains into the Fen. It’s a journey of revelations; not only does Paul encounter the underwater orchestra, but also Old Ireland and with it a magical adventure; They find a snake, haul up a bag of treasure, climb the steps of a Famine Tower, experience vertigo as they stand with their heads in the clouds high above the quarried land, watch Peregrines swipe through the air like sharp knives, and learn the story of a hanged man, his lost love and a vixen who wanders amongst the reeds, her piercing cry echoing through the darkness.

Listen

Via Touch

Next Episode: The Ghost Roost, with recordist Chris Watson and sound designer Thor McIntyre Burnie.

Great article by Virginia Morell talking about nature, industrialization, quiet places, and silence. Features commentaries from recordist, composer and bioacoustician Bernie Krause, bioacoustician Kurt Fristrup and recordist Gordon Hempton.

“Listen,” said Bernie Krause. He rolled down his car window, and we sat silently for a moment. It was an hour before dawn, still dark and foggy in the Mayacamas Mountains, a northern California coastal range. But somewhere in the distance, a bird was calling—a high, bright, lively song that seemed at odds with the misty gloom. “A song sparrow,” Krause whispered. “They’re always the first to sing here.” The sparrow’s opening notes meant that this day’s dawn chorus had begun. Wherever wild birds live, mornings start this way, with males ascending to their perches to sing and welcome the day. “The dawn chorus is one of the earth’s best and oldest songs,” Krause said, grabbing his recording equipment and tripod. “But most of us in the industrialized world have never heard it. And it’s disappearing.”

Continue reading…

Via naturerecordists

One of the goals of “One Pig,” he said, is to reveal, through music, a reality of everyday life that people often wish to remain hidden.

“The pig is simply the most divisive of all animals,” Mr. Herbert, 39, said in an interview. “You probably come into contact with a pig product 10 or 20 times in one day, from ink jet paper to a glass of milk. And yet they’re the subject of so much scorn and contempt. I think it’s strange that we’ve built a society that’s so dependent on something, and yet we rarely give it a voice of its own.”

- New York Times

Accidental Records

Bonus: