Soon I will have to make some decisions. As well as fine suitable locations where to carry out my plans. When I was recording these Spring Peepers, they were close to an intersection with traffic coming and going all ways. It was not very busy, but this was a spot where I could find Spring Peepers.

Spring Peepers are tiny tree frogs, making a very specific sound in spring.

Often enough, as a recordist, you encounter a sound that just begs to be recorded. But it comes with “extras”, background noise, cars, or most likely some dark background rumble we don’t even hear ourselves.

Imagine this bird (not the same as in the recording, granted.

The basic sound recorded was this:

{media type=audio format=mp3 file=bird-noprocess.mp3 spectrogram=1 hipass=1000}

You can hear a basic rumble that must have been wind in the trees or something. It’s a sound I don’t need in my recording.

Ideally, I would get rid of those low frequencies as they hold no interesting information. With a bit of basic EQ in Reaper (nothing fancy) you can get this result. It sounds a lot better:

{media type=audio format=mp3 file=bird.mp3}

I've asked around for that and got plenty of interesting answers. The one that will be the very best, but the most difficult to obtain in a fairly densely populated area like Nova Scotia (Canada), is to get to a quiet area and record there. The trouble is that the birds are often in the noisy areas here; the quiet areas are really quiet. No birds, nothing much to record. Spectral editing was another suggestion, but it left me with very unnatural results. Probably, I wasn't doing it right.

Then there is the spectrogram. What does one bird tweet look like?

It seems that Audacity holds the best spectrogram out there:

But you’d need to see and hear it to follow the sound with your eyes.

So here it is; the spectrogram is basically the same but generated by a different algorithm.

{media type=audio format=mp3 file=bird02.mp3 spectrogram=1 hipass=2000}

This is how I approach the recordings that I present here. Minimal processing, as each operation will remove something but will also distort something else that I want to keep. So basic processing it will be.

Until next time…}

{opengraph type=simple imagenum=0}

For a while now, I have presented different audio clips, with or without visual connection. When you do field recording, you end up with a lot of awesome sounds. Sometimes you would like that sound to be the sound track of some video.

So the first thought is to simply overlay the sound to a silent video track and present it as an old-fashioned slide show.

Well, relaxing for as much as possible on a beach in Canada in winter. While the swimming attire had to wait at home, the weather was nice enough to present some waves on a beach with rocks. Every field recordist has something like that in his/her collection, right?

For me, this was an opportunity to try out something new.