I’ve recently been volunteering occasionally at local rewilding sites with the initiative Citizen Zoo. It has helped replace a sense of detachment to my neck of the woods with an opportunity to discover and interact with some beautiful green spaces close to me. Spurred by my research so far, I went field recording at one of these sites to gain some potentially usable soundscape recordings in my Aural Paper (Tolworth Court Farm Fields). Naturally contextualising what I’d learnt regarding eco-acoustics during this process, I found myself so much more attuned to the varying nature of animals and soundscapes in the meadows and along the hedgerows. Haskell’s book in particular has given me imaginative agency. When looking out at the meadow, I couldn’t help but wonder of the relationship between it’s floral diversity and acoustic make-up. Birdsong, too, prompted introspection into the inflection and frequencies I was hearing, where it hadn’t before. A lack of singing insects also came to my attention. After scanning the temporal and spatial qualities of the area by focusing only on listening, I decided to set up my recording equipment on a pathway in between two tall hedgerows that pierced the meadow, due to fairly high wind speeds. The natural shelter the hedgerows offered also made it an optimum location to record birdsong.
Having purchased a matched stereo pair of Clippy EM272 omnidirectional microphones for ambience recording, due to their low noise and high sensitivity electret capsules, I chose to experiment with the A/B spaced pair mic array. In one instance I used my stereo bar, but in order to create a wider stereo image in the second recording, I attached one of the lavaliers to my bike a considerable distance away from the other. I also chose to simultaneously record using the X/Y cardioid mics on my handheld Tascam DR44WL in order to compare the various recordings afterwards. I found the increased phase and amplitude differences from the wide A/B recording compared to the narrow configuration of the X/Y cardioids superior due to the broader and more diffuse polar pattern of the omnidirectional clippys. I tried my best to avoid pushing the gain too high in order to avoid the self (pre-amp) noise of the TDR44WL. The recordings can be found at the bottom of this blog post.
I decided to let my presence remain within the recordings. It’s all good and well curating an environment to my whims… but I was, too, part of the soundscape and thought it best to leave it that way, instead of fashioning a false sense of serenity, perhaps echoing Haskell’s ideas of beauty born from fragmentation. In between recordings, I used the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s app ‘Merlin’ to identify specific birdsong around me from within the natural symphony – I found a plentitude of Eurasian Blue tits, Parakeets, Robins, Chiffchaffs and the occasional Eurasian Wren and Goldcrest. The app uses a spectrogram to define the time span and frequency range of the birdsong it receives. I found this fascinating as it allowed me to visualise where on the frequency spectrum each species of bird generally inhabited.
I have since been devising a way to organise all my field recordings from this and previous ventures gaining inspiration from other sound designers and the Universal Category System. This has helped greatly in terms of locating relevant files easily when working.