Spellbound by wave sound patterns around Salcombe Mouth!

An intoxicatingly beautiful interplay of different well separated patches of small wave action, on mostly shingle beach, around Salcombe Mouth, near Sidmouth, Devon, UK, complete with periodic serenade punctuations from the odd robin, recorded from relatively low clifftop, so all the wave action is fairly distant.

This was a serendipitous recording, made on 5 November 2014 during a coast path hike from Sidmouth to Beer. I really was quite spellbound by this soundscape, which was one of those rare ones that seem intrinsically to have some special inner meaning that goes beyond words, like some powerfully evocative and inspirational work of music. Meanwhile the robins had about them a typical air of late autumn to early winter, seeming to be announcing to this wayward recordist "We're not really singing now. This is just for your dreams of better times!".

Let me put my hand up, though and tell you that, however wonderful this sounds, certain patches of wave action — especially that around that minor headland with some rocks there, which you can see in the photo — have come out in the wrong position. Sadly that's an inevitable result of the PCM-M10 recorder having a pair of omnidirectional mics with no significant acoustic barrier between them. I was able to use software to widen the soundstage and greatly improve definition, but that then made the various wrong positions much more apparent. Anyway, hopefully some other people will be as spellbound as I was when capturing this.

Advisory

This really comes to life, and reveals masses of further detail, when listened to with high-grade headphones rather than speakers. Also, because of the stereo enhancement, listening through some speaker systems would get a phasiness of the sea sound, with possible phase cancellation points in the soundstage. Such effects don't occur when listening through headphones.

Where's the recorder? — Follow the fence posts on the right down to the light grey 'something' on one of them. That's the recorder's furry windshield, the recorder itself perched on a fence post by means of a GorillaPod. It's facing pretty-well straight out to sea, so the sea sound from the minor headland beyond should be sounding fully over on the left. — But is it? …Erm, not exactly!

I've just come down most of the steep descent from Salcombe Cliff Hill, and shortly will be going up the other side, following the coast path over Dunscombe Cliff (rising imposingly ahead), and on to Beer.

Techie stuff

The recorder was Sony PCM-M10, with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield. It was placed on top of a fence post by means of a GorillaPod.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield — and then more recently stereo widening / sharpening-up, using the VST plugin A1 Stereo Control (160% widening).

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