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The sound of the Iceberg

Overall rating (37 ratings)
S
stormpetrel

January 4th, 2013

Follow
Sound effects > Objects / House appliances
-66.64, 139.990
Southern oceans soundscape

This is the sound of an iceberg I have recorded in Antarctica in 2009. The iceberg was a big one, more than 40m high! Despite the icebergs are trapped in the ice shelf, they move due to the tide and the low frequency waves coming from the open sea which propagate under the ice shelf. Those movements produce very powerful and impressive grinding noise!
The iceberg was 8km away from the scientific base of Dumont D'Urville in Terre Adélie and far away from the open sea (at least 100km).

It was a bit challenging to do such record. It was cold (not a surprise) and very windy most of the time! This was also a place you don't want to stay too long as pieces of ice fell around.

Microphone: Rode NT4, homemade preamp, M-Audio microtrack II.

A picture of the iceberg is visible on my flickr page here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dominique_filippi/4356182500/in/set-72157623332887396

Let me know what this sound does on you!

Sound illegal or offensive? Flag it!
air
Antarctica
atmosphere
cold
field-recording
friction
frozen
grinding
ice
iceberg
incredible
nature
NT4
ocean
rasping
rode
sea
shelf
soundscade

Type

Flac (.flac)

Duration

3:15.733

File size

17.4 MB

Sample rate

48000.0 Hz

Bit depth

16 bit

Channels

Stereo

Comments
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F
Fonthem

9 years, 10 months ago

wooooow. never heard anything like that!

bone666138

10 years, 3 months ago

Amazing! This is incredible.

S
stormpetrel

10 years, 10 months ago

No secret here. My home-made preamp is based on the SSM2019 and OPA2134 amplifier ICs. I have kept the circuit diagram as simple as possible. There is no phantom power (no need as the NT4 has its own battery). Coupling cap are Elna RFS (SILMIC II) in parallel with large 1µ polypropylene cap.
Smaller value filtering caps are styrene caps or polypropylene cap. The potentiometer is a stereo large cermet alps potentiometer. If you are interested in DIY electronic, I might drop the diagram on my blog. Just let me know.

I'm now working on a high end digital amplifier with spdif output, unfortunately I lack of free time to finish the board (I just have to finish the design of the +48V phantom power to complete the job)

B
Baldaz

10 years, 10 months ago

Can you share more info about your "homemade preamp"?? I'm curious about that :P

Cheers and thanks for the sound :)

B
babalubabilly

11 years ago

simply astounding

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  1. 1.2K downloads
  2. 28 comments
Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
You are free to share (to copy, distribute and transmit) and to remix (to adapt and modify) as long as you credit the author of the sound and do not use the sound for commercial purposes. Get attribution text...
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