River Teign from south end of Hunter's Tor, Teign Gorge

Made on 5th March 2013, this was actually a secondary recording that I made while the other recorder was (supposed to be) making a super-duper wind chimes recording on the edge of the woods. That recording, however, never happened, because of some glitch that I wasn't aware of till I got back home and found that all I had of the the '45-minute' chimes recording was just a one-second recording of background sound! Maybe I'd been clumsy with the Pause button and not looked carefully enough to see that I'd re-paused the recording with an unintentional additional press.

Hunter's Tor, Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, is a narrow fairly rocky crest that extends southwards from the Hunter's Path, with only minor altitude changes, jutting out from the general steep valley slope and ending in a precipitous drop into the lower wooded slope that bounds the north side of the Fisherman's Path beside the River Teign. It would have been nice to record wind chimes at this southern end of the Hunter's Tor crest, but trees were limited to that crest's northern end, and so my wind chimes recording was (supposedly!) running there, and now I could set up the recorder somewhere here at the south end to get a different perspective.

Here the River Teign sound was stronger, but there was no point in my putting the recorder right on the tip of the Hunter's Tor 'nose', for it was too windy there. I then found that I could get the recorder reasonably sheltered from the wind at a spot on the left-hand side (looking south), having backed off from the final rocky rise. Also, interestingly, the river sound seemed much closer from this particular spot - not only louder but more detailed too, indeed making it sound closer than it really was.

From this spot the river sound has two main components. there is a continuous 'white-noisy' element that is straight ahead (i.e. probably some 35 to 40 degrees below my level), and there are also watery 'babblings', which extend leftwards from that continuous sound, and away from the recorder. That is because we are directly overlooking Drogo Weir (albeit hidden below trees), and it is that which produces the continuous sound, with the babbling extending downstream from it.

We are far enough from the trees where my wind chimes are hanging, that you hardly hear the chimes at all - though one is bound to be hearing them at times subliminally. Similarly, we are far enough from those trees not to hear the birds there very much, and so birdsong is quite sparse in this recording, although what there is feels to have quite a telling effect. At one point late in the recording is a single occurrence of an odd transient sound that seems to be animal-produced, and I suspect that it is a very transient close encounter with a passing bumblebee or similar.

Recording made with a Sony PCM-M10 on a Hama mini-tripod, using the built-in microphones covered with a Rode Dead Kitten windshield. I have used Audacity to apply a custom EQ profile to correct for the slight high frequency attenuation caused by the windshield and to correct for a broad 'hump' in the lower bass frequencies, which is initially audible in ALL my recordings.

Please note that the volume level of this recording has been carefully adjusted for listening purposes, and ALL my recordings so far are meant to be listened to with a volume setting that would give a realistic level for playback of CLASSICAL music (a large but not exceptional symphony orchestra). If you have the right volume setting, you should not need to change that setting from one recording of mine to another.

(Later note: This recording - with better sound than here - is one of my CD-quality downloads, and can be found in my e-Store.)

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