Month: February 2009

There are few things as palette-cleansing, at least when it comes to listening, as a field recording, especially one from deep in an environment that has largely escaped the impact of humans. Late last year, Michael Raphael, who documents his field recording work at sepulchra.com, visited the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Naples, Florida. He writes:

It is a remarkably beautiful place that features an old growth cypress forest that barely lets light pass through it. It also has a boardwalk that takes you through a healthy chunk of the swamp to areas that are normally be hard to get to. I saw herons, hawks, thrushes, and even a raccoon. I’m not talking about the kind of raccoon that eats your trash, but a real raccoon that is not fat on Whoppers from Burger King.

Of course, even a cordoned off swamp is going to experience the influence of mankind, and this sanctuary proved to be one in name only:

Corkscrew Swamp is pretty damn cool. All except for one thing: noise! All those birds and critters make great sounds, but you can’t hear them that well when planes are constantly flying over head or and heavy traffic is always driving by. Apparently, it didn’t used to be like this, but when Naples became a prime retirement location, air traffic increased and the surrounding roads were widened to accommodate more traffic. I wish I had the opportunity to record there 15 years ago.

Still, Raphael has managed to locate some relatively unsullied aural gems, including several minutes of birdsong and general ambience (MP3). More on this specific recording at sepulchra.com.

Some resolutions stick, and some don’t. And some benefit from amendment. Taylor Deupree, musician and head of the record label 12k, started the new year with a plan to post one sound each day, and he’s pretty much stuck to it (at 12k.com/onesoundeachday).

Initially, these were all “found” sounds, plucked from the ether by his field-recording equipment, like one of the trains that he uploaded on Tuesday of this week: “one of my least favorite sounds in the world. … the sound is hellish and piercing. if you have to wait a while for the right train you get bombarded with these sounds. this recording does not do justice to the physical sensation of being there” (MP3).

The day prior, Monday of this week, Deupree slightly altered his daily regimen for the second time this year, by allowing for unnatural, electronically mediated sounds, rather than just raw audio — a loop of a ukulele: “i am still recording these sounds with my field recorder, so they retain a sense of removal, noise and otherwise roomy tone” (MP3).

It has the pulse of a Buddha Machine track, and would make for a good ring tone, which I mean as a compliment, in that it’s the sort of soundbite that one wouldn’t mind hearing throughout a given day, signaling the arrival of something nice, like a friend’s call or text message, or for that matter an automated reminder on a to-do list.