Hooken undercliff with birds, wind, and sea echoes on the cliff

Beautifully, weirdly, spacey effect as the sea echoes on the cliff towering above, with many springtime bird sounds, including fulmar, raven, wren, blackcap, goldfinch, blue tit, chiffchaff. The sea has the special sound caused by waves breaking, with intervening drawbacks, upon a shingle beach, so the pebbles make their own sound as they are drawn forward and then pulled back.

I made this recording 30 April 2013 beside the coast path between Branscombe and Branscombe Landslip, Beer, Devon, UK, with recorder facing the chalk cliff towering above.

The sea sound is, shall we say, 'interesting'. Notionally we're getting the direct sea sound from behind, except that even that sound isn't fully direct because we're shielded from that by a low cliff that drops away on that side of the coast path. So, there were two quite distinct elements in the sea sound as I was facing the cliff towering above: the 'real' sound behind, and its echoes on the cliff; those echoes each moved from left to right along the cliff.

The catch is that, however wonderful the sound of the sea in this recording, it isn't exactly what I heard, because of an incredibly bad design feature of this particular recorder model. Its mics are omnidirectional, but — naturally for such a small recorder — have no effective acoustic barrier separating them, so that the stereo separation is weak, and the soundstage in its recordings is diffuse, and sounds relatively mono. Sounds that were right round on either side, or of course behind, were all placed somewhere in front in the recordings.

Using my stereo-widening software, I achieve a dramatic widening and sharpening of the soundstage to something like how it ought to be (a notional 120° angle). However, many of the sounds that the recorder has misplaced to put them within a credible stereo image are inevitably further misplaced by the widening process.

In this particular case, the 'real' sea sound from behind is blended with the echoes on the cliff above, so you can't tell which is 'real' sea and which is echo. It still sounds great, but it's quite weird for me, knowing roughly what should be behind and quite separate from the cliff echoes.

Advisory

Because of the processing to widen and sharpen the originally atrocious stereo imaging, the sea may sound rather phasey when listened to from certain speaker systems. Therefore high-grade headphones are the best solution.

Hooken undercliff during this recording. The recorder for this recording was well off to the left, facing directly up the green vegetated 'apron' occupying middle of this view.

Techie stuff:

The recorder was Sony PCM-M10, with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield (original, more effective, version). It was set up on a tree branch, using 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).

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