Just posted an excerpt of the field recordings I did in North India earlier this year. Using SoundCloud for the first time for this.

Recorded with a Sennheiser MKH8020/ MKH30 MS stereo microphone configuration to a Sound Devices 702 recorder. MS converted to AB stereo at the recorder stage.

SoundCloud uploads are transcoded to 128 kbps mp3 format for streaming. That’s still twice as good as MySpace.

It appears to me that field recordists and phonographers are the only remaining people in the audio industry who still care about having dynamic content in their material.

The battle for the consumers money has resulted in increasingly loud music. Louder is better. Louder means more money in the bank.

Louder however also means boring song material and fatiguing music because dynamics and clarity have disappeared in the process of compressing and limiting the sound material to maximum loudness. It is not uncommon for CD’s today to peak at full scale almost throughout their entire length.

This stands in sharp contrast to the dynamics of sound in the natural world. Quiet and very quiet sounds exist alongside louder sounds. Consider a forest at dawn in spring or a tropical rain forest after a thunder storm. Quietly falling drops of water, the rustling of the foliage, birds in the trees vocalizing their songs and insects humming above the flowers, some rolling thunder in the distance. Imagine how this would sound if everything was compressed to equal loudness and normalized to peak level.

Sound artists and more so field recordists and phonographers are trying to capture the world of natural sound dynamics.

Beginning of next month I will be going on a recording trip to Corbett National Park in North India. On the trip also will be Chris Watson.

Corbett is situated in the foothills of the Himalaya mountains in the Nainital and Pauri Garhwal districts of Uttaranchal at altitudes ranging from 400m to 1100m. The forests, jungles and grasslands feature some of the richest wildlife in the Indian sub-continent.

Mammals are typically Rhesus Macaques, Langurs, Leopards, Jungle Cat, Leopard Cat, Fishing Cat, Dhole, Jackals, Red Fox, Sloth Bear and the Black Bear. Near to 600 species of birds can be observed and reptiles are typically the Gharial Crocodile, the Muggar (Marsh Crocodile) but also the Indian Python, Viper and the King Cobra.

This will be a unique opportunity once again to work with Chris and learn from the master in wildlife recording.

My recording kit so far looks like this:

Sound Devices 702 recorder
Sennheiser MKH 8020/ MKH 30 mid side kit
DPA 4060 spaced omni kit

This is slowly becoming a series.  I posted a recording to Freesound where I am testing the new Sennheiser MKH 8020 omnidirectional microphone as the mid microphone with my MKH 30 as the side mic.

The low end response of the MKH 8020 is very very impressive.  It is more sensitive than the MKH 20 omni (31mV/Pa compared to 25mV/Pa) and adds a few dB to the high end response. Beyond 20 kHz the frequency response goes all the way up to 60 kHz. It’s also very small: diameter 1.9 cm, length 7.4 cm. The pair fitted in my size 3 Rycote windjammer.

Better low end response is what you expect from an omnidirectional microphone as I explained in earlier posts but the MKH 8020 is in a league of it’s own. So, curiosity put to the test I set out in Brussels city center. The “carbon chorus” of the city never fails you if you are looking for those low frequencies. With so much low end energy setting levels proved a bit of a challenge. Dynamic bandwith gets eaten fast and limiters kicked in often.

The sample on Freesound is a recording of the air vent of an airco system. A giant outlet of 2 by 5 meter or so. That night it all came together. Traffic, airplanes, the airco system everything in perfect harmony.

Hear the recording here: Air,

or jump to the Drones Sample pack.

Going to Italy next month travelling through Tuscany and then setting up near the small town of Gubbio. I was there last year. So being more familiar with the surroundings should make things easier. 

Being mobile and travelling light is not exactly compatible with trying to make as high as possible quality recordings. The stereo rig will be a Sennheiser mid-side setup but I also plan to do as much hydrophone recordings as possible. Part of the trip will be following the River Arno upstream out of Florence. Let’s see how that goes.  Pelican cases to the rescue.

Gear:

Sennheiser MKH 60
Sennheiser MKH 30
DPA 4060
Aquarian Audio H2a-XLR hydrophone
Sound Devices 302 field mixer
Nagra ARES-PII+ recorder

The DPA’s will find their place in Chris Watson’s tried and tested sonic coathanger setup. One of the things I learned when we were with him last December.

The Nagra continues to amaze me. No other recorder delivers such high quality in so small a package. You can put it in the inside pocket of your jacket. 2-track only but such great preamps, phantom power and 24 bit resolution.

While I’ve had a hydrophone sitting in the microphone rack for a while it is only now that I am publishing two recordings of underwater atmospheres.

River is available on Freesound, River at Dusk streams from 900Hz.net. Both recordings were done at incoming tide in the river Scheldt near Antwerp, Belgium at a depth of approximately 2 metres.

More of these to come.

River
River at Dusk

Sound artist Aaron Ximm aka Quiet American included one of my recent recordings on his one-minute vacation site. Check it out under “September 3, 2007″.

Travel the world as you listen to recordings on this wonderful site.

www.quietamerican.org/vacation.html

2 field trips are upcoming that will be the source for interesting recordings I hope.

First it’s off to Aix-en-Provence and the Camargue region in southern France. Hope to catch atmospheres on the salt flats over there. Proper wind shields will be a must I expect. 

Then it’s off to Gubbio and environs in the Umbria region in Italy. Nightly summer ambiances to catch. This will all be a good opportunity to put the Nagra Ares-PII+ to the test. Still figuring out which microphones to take.

Welcome to the 900Hz blog. This space will be the place to quickly update you on 900hz