Alone in the Trees

Tags

nablopomo, sound art, sound design, sound recording, soundscapes

During the summer, I stumbled across a call for contributors, for a sound art project that would be part of the Sanctuary Labs festival that takes place in the Galloway Forest Dark Skies Park each September. Sound artist Claire Archibald was looking for female audio contributors to share their memories/thoughts/emotional responses to the idea of being a woman alone in the woods and thereby create site specific installation that would be a ‘lone woman wood’ for festival goers to experience. Having grown up in a house surrounded by a small wood, the project immediately caught my imagination.

The project call out had a variety of prompts to get potential contributors thinking about the project’s areas of interest. One of the prompts involved pieces of music or field recordings, and I was reminded that I made a variety of field recordings in various woodlands over the pandemic. I’ve talked before about my adventures recording at the Merkinch Nature Reserve and down by the canal and used many of my recordings on the Ness Islands in my Out of Doors Soundscape last year. However, they weren’t the only woodland recordings. Back in April when only essential travel was allowed, I found myself in Portree for work, and took great pleasure in gathering some early morning field recordings, including in the little wood above the bay and behind the hospital. (There was a path, up the side of the hill into the trees, with a bi-lingual sign: how could I resist?) But the recordings that came immediately to mind were ones I made before that when we still couldn’t go anywhere at all, and my regular walks around Inverness, uncovered a pocket woodland just off an otherwise suburban street. Aultnaskiach Dell is a pocket wood, a rare urban community buyout, and the unusual geography of the place means that as soon as you get into the Dell proper, all sounds of the outside world disappear. As though you’ve stepped through a portal into a rather more rural area, or in my case, it felt like I stepped through a portal in time and space, back into the woods of my childhood. The perfect place for a bit of forest bathing, if that’s your thing. Even just listening back to the recordings I took that first day is transporting and soothing, like being wrapped briefly in a bit of another, safer, simpler, time and place. I knew they were the perfect recordings to accompany my forest thoughts.

Even after having filmed a short horror film in a forest as a student, I’m still less unnerved by the thought of being alone in a forest than many other people I know, regardless of gender. (As I write this it occurs to me that that is not the only time I’ve worked on a film in the forest. When I was still freelancing a few years ago, I did a short stint working on the kids show Raven in the woods near Lagganlia in the Caingorms.) After all, to me, the real fear is not that you’re alone in the woods – it’s that you’re not alone in the woods.

In the end they received 140 submissions across 11 different languages. Enough that each of the 17 trees that they were using as anchors could play a different loop of sounds, so that no two wanders through that wood would be the same, with the sounds combining, collaborating or clashing in different ways depending on the route the visitor took or the time of day they visited. Although I knew from the start that with the festival taking place at almost exactly the opposite end of the country from me, I was unlikely to be able to attend, and even if I were the chances of hearing my piece in situ during the short window I would have been able to be in the actual location, I was still a little sad to have to miss out on experiencing it first hand. The little snippets I got to experience second hand through social media, only succeeding in leaving me wanting more.

lostpenguin · Lone Trees

Nature Recording

Tags

nature, sound effects, sound recording

One of the interesting side-effects of the various lockdowns is how much more sound recording I’ve done over the last year. Initially it was driven by an urge to capture the changed soundscape of life but it turned out that the sound of the world around me hadn’t changed as dramatically as it did in other places. If anything, I think the soundscape of Inverness was more changed by the second lockdown than the first. Perhaps it was the weather, perhaps it was the higher transmission rate in the Highlands this time around making people more cautious and rule-abiding. When there isn’t a lot else to do other than take long walks, having the aim of sound recording was at first a solid excuse to get out of the house for some fresh air, and later much needed motivation to get out of the house when the lockdown slump set in. Over time it just became a habit, carrying my recorder everywhere, whipping it out to capture a specific sound or interesting combination of sounds, rather than only taking it on specific sound recording trips.

There are lots of things that I always think I would do if I only had the time that this last year has shown me that actually I wouldn’t do – it turns out that film is primarily a collective experience for me, whether in the cinema or a friend’s sofa and if I really want to read a book I’ll carve out the time, if I don’t I won’t – and also that there are definitely things that I will do given enough time and that I should make space for more generally. Since I moved to Inverness I’ve made more of an effort to take specific sound recording trips and in doing so I’ve accidentally associated the activity with holidays and day trips – I have folders of sounds from Budapest, Riga, Helsinki and the Western Isles. Over the last year, I’ve got to know a different side of the city, the sounds of it’s different areas. It shouldn’t be surprising, given that I’ve explored a lot of cities I’ve visited on holiday via this method, but it was a surprise to me how much I enjoyed making this new map of the city. I don’t think I’ve spent this much time outdoors since I was a kid, or at least since I lived in Bournemouth, where the sea called us down to the beach regardless of weather or season.

One of the main factors in my choice of replacement recorder – and also why I stuck for so long with my previous recorder despite it’s age – was the size. My old recorder came with a handy case that could be looped onto a belt, was just large enough to contain it’s cable and mic while being small enough to fit easily in a coat pocket. Having a recorder small enough to tuck into a coat pocket or the side pocket of a travel bag made it’s regular use exponentially more likely. As a wise sound recordist once told me when I was a student, the best sound recorder for making any kind of field recordings, is the one you have on you at the time. (For related reasons I did experiment for a while with Audioboo(m) on my phone for spur of the moment recordings of interesting sounds, but I abandoned that as if you lost network connectivity it didn’t/wouldn’t save the recording locally and instead it disappeared into the ether. It’s a shame the company ended up going in a different direction entirely, because it had a lot of potential it never lived up to in favour of becoming just another podcast hosting/distribution service.) My current recorder’s main foible is that it’s case is only big enough for it on it’s own. It doesn’t even fit the fluffy wind-shield – for that matter it doesn’t even fit the smaller foam pop shield – let alone the tiny tripod or the cable, which kind of defeats the point of the case and it’s belt loop. It does however mean it can live in my bag without me worrying about it getting fluff or crumbs anywhere it shouldn’t. It is, however, highly portable easily fitting into a coat pocket and that means it regularly gets grabbed at the last moment and taken along on trips for other purposes.

Until this year with very few exceptions – crows, seagulls, pigeons and woodpeckers mostly, with some honourable mentions for distinctive birds like corncrakes, oyster catchers and kittiwakes – I couldn’t positively identify a wild bird I recorded unless I literally saw it making the sound. I’m still a long way from being an expert – I’ve taken to photographing the birds I record so I can double check – but I can at least pick out individual birds from a wider soundscape so that I can label recordings more helpfully than ‘birdsong’. (The RSPB’s bird identification database is hugely helpful on this front, at least if the bird was singing, it’s not quite as useful if the bird was just sitting chirping on a gutter or branch.) I’ve gotten to know the different sounds of morning birds as the seasons change. I may never grow to love the sound of gulls at 5am, but oyster catchers parading along the roof line are a morning joy, and the crows, blackbirds and jackdaws have become friendly companions to my early morning commutes. I’ve learned to not mix up female blackbirds and starlings – though the lbbs (little brown birds) that plague all beginner birders remain a source of bafflement to me both visually and aurally.

A few years ago I wrote about exploring the local nature reserve and at the time I noted that it was Autumn and that didn’t seem to be the ideal time to go exploring there. That’s been the real theme of my recordings this last year, getting to know the sound of places through different seasons. I now have a year of changing recordings of the places close by that I like to walk and to record. I can compare my pre-lockdown autumnal recordings of the canal, with the spring recordings I made for my soundscape early in lockdown, with last winter’s crunching through the ice and snow, to more recent summery adventures when things had begun to open up again. I sort my sound recordings by date and by location, but I’ve done so much recording over the last year that this is a less helpful distinction than it used to be – however there’s a definite pleasure to searching for recordings tagged ‘nairn’ and getting results back that span several years and as many different seasons. It’s a different kind of familiarity, to know a place through its sounds, through the way they change with the season – a different but no less important sense of place.

I remember, a few years ago, setting myself the new year’s resolution of going out and getting some field recordings once a month – just an afternoon, not even a full day – in an attempt to get myself back into the habit of it. I was chuffed back then that I managed a handful of occasions. Throughout the pandemic I’d be hard pushed to think of a month when I haven’t gone sound recording. Even when I wasn’t actively going sound recording, I’ve picked up the habit of carrying my recorder in my bag, almost everywhere, so that if I hear an interesting sound in the wild – a juvenile robin singing it’s heart out on the way to the shops, the weird Doppler effect the traffic lights across from my regular coffee place make, some inexplicable church bells I heard drifting along the river from an apparently closed up church – I can stop and capture it.

Second Contact

Tags

field recording, location recording, microphones, sound recording

I’ve talked before about how much I love hydrophones, the why’s and wherefores of their continued fascination for me, and the ways in which every time I encounter them I lose time researching them and debating the feasibility of getting my own. However, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately making contact mic recordings, and realised that I pretty much never write about contact mics which I’ve loved for far longer.

I first encountered contact microphones as a student. At the time contact mics were pretty expensive to buy – certainly out of a student’s price-range – but our course technician came across instructions to make your own and passed them on to us with the warning to be careful what you attached them to as he’d accidentally eavesdropped on adjacent offices trying to record some gurgling radiators. A course mate and I spent a delightful afternoon building some together and attaching them to things gleefully, and though they long since burned out, I still have one in my cable drawer for sentimental value.

Many moons later, though still quite a while ago, I ended up chatting about contact microphones with the then-artist-in-residence at the hospital radio station I volunteered with. We had a good chat about building our own contact mics and the way the components burned out after so long, and then he pointed out that you can now get them pretty reasonably online so you don’t need to build them yourself anymore if you don’t want to. The idea lodged itself in my brain and a few years ago I did in fact get myself a cheap little contact mic to see how it turned out. I was never particularly impressed by it, I figured either it didn’t work properly or it really needed a pre-amp, but it never did work well with my old – and much beloved – sound recorder.

However, back in the Summer of last year, I finally got round to treating myself to a new sound recorder – a Zoom H2n, I prefer the H5n but the H2n wins on portability, it literally fits in my pocket – and when I was listening to Deep Blue Notes and falling down the hydrophone rabbit hole I told myself sternly that I wasn’t allowed to buy one until I’d got my contact microphone situation sorted. I hadn’t tried it out with the new recorder, as I’d previously had enough to experiment with trying out it’s different built-in microphone configurations – it has X/Y, Mid-Side, 2 channel surround and 4 channel surround options, after years of using an X/Y set up for recording atmos on location it remains my go-to but I’m trying to be more adventurous and make better use of the surround options. In the course of my most recent hydrophone researching I’d been looking at the compatibility requirements for them and it noted that they needed ‘plug-in-power’ – which if it’s a new one on you as it was to me, is similar to phantom power, just a considerably lower voltage – and when it turned out that my new recorder did in fact have that, it occurred that that might be what my contact microphone needed. Indeed that made all the difference and while I suspect it would benefit from a preamp, I was able to once again enjoy the delightful world of secret sounds that a contact microphone reveals and make some delightful new recordings. I’ve spent the last couple of months delightedly attaching my contact microphone to everything I could imagine.

In practical terms the best element of contact microphones is the way they allow me to capture a sound in isolation. The sound of a clock ticking without the sound of the room around it, the otherwise nearly inaudible sounds of a sound desk’s faders in motion or the sound of a swing bridge clanking and rumbling as traffic trundles across it. (As you’ll hear from the recording embedded above, it does collect a certain amount of ambient noise but that is pushed into the background, allowing me to collect a particular sound without it being overwhelmed by it’s surroundings. Allowing the sound to shine, without having to remove the item from it’s context in order to record it – something that really isn’t possible when it comes to the clanking bridge, you need traffic for it to make the sound, but normally you wouldn’t be able to hear it over the traffic.) But there are also the secret joys of the contact microphone, the gorgeous, resonate bell tones of a fire extinguisher – CO2 is far superior to foam in this matter – the differing sounds of the bannisters in my office, that I have no practical use for but were a joy to capture and left me feeling as though I knew a secret about the building I’ve worked in for large chunks of the last seven years.

Deep Blue Notes

Tags

hydrophones, nature, podcasts, sound effects, sound recording, sound science, soundscapes

Deep Blue Notes is a three part podcast, by wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson and Professor Tony Myatt a spatial audio sound artist, released through the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast. It follows them on their quest – at the start of the year – to record Blue Whales in the Sea of Cortez – off Loreto, Mexico – creatures whose sounds have eluded Watson throughout his long career as a wildlife sound recordist. The two of them are collaborating on a sound installation for Oceans 21 – a project on the fascination and endangerment of the oceans – called Seaphony, which premiers in Berlin in May of next year.

The podcast uses their quest for these very specific sounds as a jumping off point to talk to a variety of specialists about a variety of issues around sound and sea-life, from how sound carries through water, through the impact of climate change – both human driven and natural phenomena like El Niño – to how human noise – essentially sound pollution – impacts on sealife. It’s all fascinating stuff, and I always love listening to recordings from hydrophones – I definitely spent part of at least two of the episodes looking at hydrophones online and checking specs to see if a reasonably affordable one would be compatible with my new sound recorder – but it also made me want to introduce Watson and Myatt to the fine folks at the Lighthouse Field Station. I suspect, in these travel limited times, they could probably recommend some good marine life recording spots that are a little closer to home than Mexico.

One of the most interesting aspects of the whole podcast, to me, is that they made a three-part podcast about their quest to record Blue Whale vocalisations, and in the end they didn’t succeed in recording the Whales. They spent time among the whales, sometimes with them being almost in touching distance and the whales just, didn’t sing for them. Of course, that’s the reality of sound recording, especially when you’re recording wildlife. On a trip this summer to record a variety of other sounds, I came across a frog, sitting in the middle of the road. It seemed quite happy for me to crouch down beside it – making no attempt to hop away or otherwise escape – and settle my recorder close by, but while other frogs in the hedgerows nearby croaked away quietly, the one literally at my feet, remained completely silent. It’s one of the great frustrations of sound recording, that so often you’ll hear an interesting sound and the minute you get your recorder out and running, it will stop. So theoretically that’s actually the most likely outcome of any given recording trip, yet narrative documentaries have taught us to expect a final act triumph, and I was definitely expecting one right up until the end. Yet that simple unapologetic acknowledgement that these things happen, that they knew that was a likely outcome, and have learned a lot from the experience so that they’ll do better next time they try, was so very refreshing and dare I say it, quite affirming too.

An Out of Doors Soundscape

Tags

sound art, sound recording, soundscapes

In the early days of lockdown, far enough in that it was obvious this wasn’t going to be a couple of weeks of strangeness but early enough that the novelty hadn’t yet worn off, I started making sound recordings. I think, initially I was intending to contribute them to Cities and Memories lockdown sounds or perhaps make some kind of sound walk installation with them but as time went on and I gradually collected more and more sounds, it became clear that I while I definitely wanted to make some art with them, I needed a bigger canvas for them. I needed a focal point, something to hang a piece on and do the wealth of material justice.

In July, Radio 3 put out a call for proposals for their Slow Radio strand, and one of the producers at work thought of me and my sound recordings and sent it on to me. Between us we put together a pitch – a new experience for me, as for most of the last decade I’ve generally been handed a brief and been expected to fulfil it – and submitted it off to them. This led to some rather entertaining socially distanced location recording adventures – the kind of location sound recording that I normally do is a rather solitary affair which was definitely a contributing factor to why I got so much of it done in lockdown – as my producer had come across some excellent sounds that he thought would add to my soundscape, and we got to re-negotiate how to work together on this sort of thing, within the somewhat safer space of the great outdoors.

Although we were ultimately unsuccessful in our pitching to Radio 3, we did succeed in interesting a Radio Scotland producer – who was also pitching – and so I ended up making a mini version of the programme for Out of Doors. It’s been ages since I made a soundscape that’s needed to stand alone but also told a story rather than being abstract. It was initially intended to have far less voiceover than it ultimately ended up with. I wrote the script to get the story of the piece straight in my head and essentially act as a guide track for me to edit around, but somewhere along the way I rediscovered my radio voice and a surprising amount of voice over made the final cut. Albeit after a fair amount of it had been rewritten and condensed and I definitely had to have a word with myself about killing my darlings. Having mostly worked in news over the last six years, it felt strangely decadent to have the luxury of time to work on a project, leave it to rest for a bit and then make more changes with fresh ears, rather than working against the clock. It was strangely thrilling to hear my own voice on the radio for the first time in years.

lostpenguin · Lockdown Soundscape

After that success my producer buddy casually suggested that I should translate my script into Gaelic and re-record it so that we could use that to pitch our original idea to Radio Nan Gaidheal. As the original programme proposal focused on my other lockdown project – attempting to upgrade my Gaelic from intermediate level where it has plateaued these last few years – it seemed a fitting way to quantify my progress, with a proper translation and something ‘real’ to work towards. I expected the translation part to be the difficult bit – usually if I’m writing something in Gaelic I’m just, writing it in Gaelic rather than translating from English so I’m leaning more on vocabulary and turns of phrase that I’m familiar with and comfortable using. This was very different; a challenge but a good one, and one that I could easily get help and feedback on from fluent colleagues. The difficult bit was reading it aloud. One of the things about learning a language as an adult is that you don’t learn to read the same way as you would as a child. You learn to read in the sense that you can read words and understand what they mean, but you do very little reading aloud. You read aloud sentences you wrote and get your pronunciation corrected but you don’t start with first principals and phonetics, so you don’t really acquire an instinctive understanding of how sounds fit together in words. Which means that often I can pronounce all the words in an individual sentence perfectly well but stringing them together is a different matter entirely.

The other challenge that I kept running up against is that I don’t have a ‘radio voice’ in Gaelic. I’ve had feedback and tutoring from various colleagues who all say I’m ‘almost there’ both in terms of pronunciation and radio voice – apparently I slip into and out of it as I go, and I know what they mean. I suspect it would be less frustrating if my Gaelic radio voice was further away? If I listened back to recordings and thought it was terrible, or that it had potential but not yet, I could just ask someone else to voice it and that would be that. That state of almost but not quite there is deeply frustrating. (It feels a bit metaphorical for my level of Gaelic fluency too.) I’m trying not to be too hard on myself, as it took months of being a radio trainee, doing two hours a week of talking on the radio to find my voice in English and I definitely don’t get that much solid time speaking Gaelic every week, let alone speaking it into a microphone.

So that’s where that project is at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have a Gaelic version to share reasonably early in the new year but for the moment I’m focusing I can make the soundscape itself reflect the same core truths in a different way.

The Sound of Trees

Tags

location recording, nablopomo, nature, sound recording

On Saturday I stumbled across a radio programme about trees, more properly a love letter to trees, or at least to the sounds that they make. It starts with Thomas Hardy’s assertion that it was possible to learn to identify trees by their sound alone, and speaks to arboriculturalists, poets and composers along the way to testing this hypothesis.

The Susurrations of Trees is the kind of programme that I most strongly associate with Radio 4 – though it’s particular use of music means it could have slotted easily into Radio 3’s output. A gently fascinating programme well suited to being background listening while you work on something else – something perhaps repetitive but necessary, that can be easily paused when the presenter tells you something particularly interesting you need to focus on. I found myself searching for a task of that kind barely a few minutes into listening, and ended up listening with my head out the window as I pruned back my winter-bare herbs, while Bob Gilbert’s reassuring tones drifted up to me. I needed to be able to concentrate on listening but also to be doing something with my hands.

It got me thinking about how different a process it is recording the sounds of the natural world as opposed to recording the human world. Despite having grown up in the countryside, I am primarily a recorder of urban soundscapes. Perhaps it was because when I first started to make my own location recordings, the sound of urban environments were more novel to my ears so more likely to pique my interest and therefore get recorded. I first started making my own recordings while at university in Bournemouth, where my locations for recordings were shaped and circumscribed by not having a car. If I wanted to record something or somewhere, I needed to be able to get there by public transport. The earliest recordings I have that were worth keeping were made inside Christchurch Priory and outside in it’s graveyard, though I distinctly remember filling in a risk assessment for taking the recorder out to record the waves on Bournemouth beach. This seems a sensible reason for why it rarely occurs to me to take my recorder when I’m driving somewhere, but associate it more with trips that involve at least a couple of forms of public transport.

So perhaps it would be more apt to say that I’m a recorder of in between places, transitory places, seashores, graveyards, and public transport. There are so few places that are truly one thing or the other these days. Most location sound recordists have a story about having to call a pause in filming because despite standing in a field in the apparent middle of nowhere due to a plane or a distant quad bike. (Aircon units are my personal bugbear – as if they don’t cause enough problems indoors, their outlets will often ruin the soundscape of an alley or wooded space behind a building with their omnipresence.) Equally though, for every time distant traffic has interfered with my nature recordings, I have been plagued by nature in urban environments – mostly seagulls, but pigeons, cats, dogs and once, memorably a heron, have all made my recordings seem rather more rural.

Last month I spent some time recording – or attempting to make recordings – in Merkinch nature reserve at the edge of Inverness. I probably picked the wrong time of year for it – I’d perhaps have had better luck in Spring rather than Autumn – but despite being a peaceful and pleasant place to walk and feeling like a respite from the surrounding city, the sounds of urban life were obvious and intrusive the moment I turned on the recorder. Recording nature requires much more stillness and patience than recording the human world. Man-made objects are far less likely to stop making a noise the moment you point a recorder at them. The audio cycles of clocks and traffic lights or automated announcements are much more predictable than those of birds or foxes or storms.