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Fascinating 'split-personality' evening sea soundscape, with guillemots

Overall rating (3 ratings)
Philip_Goddard

March 31st, 2023

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Soundscapes > Urban
Boscastle, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom
Cornish coast - Boscastle to Tintagel

A beautiful (potentially sleep-assist) soundscape, on the south end of Beeny Cliff, looking across the mouth of Pentargon Cove (near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK), to the cave-punctuated cliffs beyond. We hear distant very gentle sea action on those cliffs, and gentle sea action much closer to the right, with entertainment from the guillemot bedlams (with razorbills) in the big cave across the way, to left.

Those comic episodes gradually die out, leaving the final half-hour almost completely to the sea sound. Meanwhile, the closer sea sound to the right becomes gradually more pronounced, so then balancing better with the sound-level of the more distant sea against cliffs to left.

It worked out as rather a 'sideshow' recording in a quite fruitful session with three recorders, primarily to capture really comical guillemot bedlams in the large two-entrance cave you can see a bit left of centre in the photo below. I give an account of the session at: https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/681098/ .

I had this recording running for pretty-well the whole evening, but once it was early dusk the regular dusk-time cold katabatic wind struck up and trashed the later part of it, so what we have here is everything before that frustrating point.

Also, a nagging gentle breeze was catching the recorder (mostly from the left), and actually I originally discarded all but the final half-hour of what we have here, which was a 'window' between disturbance from the daytime gentle breeze and the bigger disturbance from the ;ater katabatic wind. I've now revisited the full recording and was able to process it so we can enjoy the whole recording up to the latter point.

Advisory
The residual microphone wind noise is very gentle, BUT that would probably still be troublesomely boomy on playback systems affected by a resonance of 'boomy' bass frequencies. That resonance could be in the speakers or (particularly) room acoustics, or of course both. In any case, I strongly recommend listening with high-grade headphones for the best listening experience.

This recording taking place, from south end of Beeny Cliff
This recording taking place, on minor prominence over alcove housing Beeny Cliff's southernmost roughly west-facing cave entrance. The recorder is facing the more distant headlands and cliffs on the right, so it hears the sea around the guillemots' cave on left, while hearing much closer gentle sea action off to right, on the cliff base on the northern (to right and somewhat behind) side of the cave alcove directly below.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with three nested custom Windcut furry windshields, placed on a 'mini'-size Zipshot tripod.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields and correction for the D100's weakness in very low bass, much belatedly followed by dynamic EQ from TDR Nova GE VST plugin to reduce the gentle microphone wind noise.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!

This recording can be used free of charge, provided that it's not part of a materially profit-making project, and it is properly and clearly attributed. The attribution must give my name (Philip Goddard) and link to https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/681578/

Sound illegal or offensive? Flag it!
Atlantic
Beeny-Cliff
bird-calls
birds
Boscastle
cave
cliff
coast-path
Cornwall
England
field-recording
Great-Britain
guillemot
national-trail
natural-soundscape
nature
north-coast
Pentargon
Pentargon-Cove
sea
seabirds
South-West-Coast-Path
South-West-England
UK
United-Kingdom
waves

Type

Flac (.flac)

Duration

100:50.020

File size

544.7 MB

Sample rate

44100.0 Hz

Bit depth

16 bit

Channels

Stereo

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Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
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