Peaceful late spring afternoon in clearing in Bellever Forest, Dartmoor

Distant birds, including very persistent cuckoo, with foreground bumblebees, hoverflies and some other flies.

Advisory:
This is a very quiet soundscape. It's quite important NOT to turn up the volume to more than a level that would produce lifelike rendition of symphonic orchestral music. If you do turn it up more, the foreground insects would be too loud, and you'd almost certainly be hearing recorder self-noise.

This was the first of a whole series of concurrent pairs of recordings I made on and nearly a kilometre north of Bellever Tor, near Postbridge, in the middle of Dartmoor, Devon, UK, with two recorders in widely separated spots (almost a kilometre apart) through the afternoon of 8 June 2018 and indeed through the evening and right through the night till early morning. The whole session was intended primarily to capture the dusk and dawn nightjar choruses and get some bird choruses including cuckoos, which so far had hardly featured in any of my recordings. It was eventually a thrilling session, but I had great doubts about the afternoon recordings, not seriously expecting to keep them.

The afternoon soundscape was not only very quiet but I heard so few birds, and they were all more or less distant — and the disturbances were many and various, from aeroplanes to extended periods of semi-distant forestry machinery, not to mention a fair number of casual-walking day-trippers, who often lingered and played about on Bellever Tor itself, their hoots, shouts and laughs being clearly audible from this spot nearly a kilometre away — and of course barking dogs!

The evening recordings appeared to be doing better, for disturbances were much less, and more birds were audible, though still distant and thus very quiet — and in due course the nightjars performed excellently. And then, for the small hours into early morning again the nightjars performed perfectly, together with some excellent cuckoo performances.

Afterwards, once I'd processed and edited all the recordings, deleting the earlier of the two afternoon recordings, I queued the two evening / dusk and two pre-dawn / dawn chorus recordings for CD production, very pleased at what I'd captured, and thought the remaining afternoon recording, once intensively edited, was rather nice but probably not warranting a CD in the light of the outstanding later recordings from that session.

Then, as it was getting into winter and I was setting up the first of the Bellever Tor recordings to make a double CD album, it was then that I produced the preview excerpts for my CD Store, for the first time I noticed properly the distinct background HISS!

Indeed, also, what I was hearing that sounded like very spacious ambient background sound, but which I hadn't heard while making the recording (it was seriously, deathly, quiet out there), turned out to be simply the midrange frequencies of the recorder's self-noise. Ouch! Suddenly I had to investigate more carefully and do some rethinking.

The recorder used was the very highly regarded Sony PCM-D100, so this seemed perplexing, but it became clear that other would-be natural soundscape recordists using that model had run into the same problem. Yes, the recorder does have exceptionally 'quiet' microphone pre-amps for a notionally hand-held recorder, BUT what the sales blurb and most reviews don't tell us is that the on-board microphones themselves have a considerably higher level of self-noise. Also, as the mics are insanely wind-sensitive, I had to cover the front of each recorder with three nested furry windshields. That meant quite strong muffling of the sound, which I had to routinely correct for afterwards — which of course meant boosting the treble. And then the correction curve actually coincided with the rise of mic self-noise with increase of frequency. So I had here a 'perfect storm' situation for having obtrusive hiss!

I thus had to abandon plans to use the super-duper recordings of the really quite thrilling soundscapes, but to my surprise this one recording from the session had been spared really noticeable self-noise from the recorder. Although the birdsong element is indeed very sparse, the frequent incursions of bumblebees and hoverflies in the foreground make it overall a lovely, restful and very authentic Dartmoor forestry clearing experience, full of little pointers to the time of year. So, ironically the one recording of the session that I'd thought I wouldn't be using has turned out to be the one that I've deemed sensibly usable! One particular feature that helped give great appeal to this soundscape was a very persistent cuckoo, which continued for a good proportion of this recording before finally deciding enough was enough.

That session and its issues marked the beginning of a concerted trajectory towards my having an all-night session close to Bellever Tor the following year, which really would deliver the goods — as I explain in detail on my page The inspiring frisson of an all-night recording session alone in the wilds.

I made this recording from the position indicated by the arrow in the above photos. To maximize shelter, the recorder was actually slightly recessed in that area of regrowing plantation, facing out roughly west (to our left).

Techie stuff:

The recorder was sitting on a full-size Zipshot tripod, and was a Sony PCM-D100, with three nested custom Windcut furry windshields because of the insane wind-sensitivity of the D100's mics.

Initial post-recording processing was to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the furry windshields, which resulted in a troublesome amount of boosting of the recorder's noise floor in the treble.

Please remember to give this recording a rating!