We fairly quickly decided to abandon Horsey as although there were quite a few adults and juveniles at the water’s edge singing quite beautifully the conditions were not good and we could not really get close enough. We learned later that the best way to get close to the seals when they are hauled out in this way is to approach by water otherwise they simply dive into the sea and are gone. We’ll have to go back with a boat some time! We moved onto Blakeney and after a lunch of locally picked Morston mussels set out on a long walk along the spit. It didn’t take long for me to wish I had travelled a little lighter, particularly as I was carrying everything over my shoulder in a Lowepro classified 250AW (including 744, SQN 4s, various mics, 50m of xlr cables and the Collins bird guide). Unfortunately we ran out of daylight before we could reach the seal haul out spot which was a lot further than we had counted on! I did manage to get a nice few minutes of desolate salt marsh atmosphere though:

Unperturbed by the lack of acquiring our ‘targets’ we did a little research in the hotel bar and found another spectacle which looked promising, the dawn flight of thousands of pink-footed geese as the they leave their night time roosts in the RSPB reserve at Snettisham.

The following are a couple of recordings taken from the dawn chorus period (which was about 6:00AM to 7:30AM). All the sounds were recorded onto my Sound Devices 744 with a pair of Sennheiser 8040s in an ORTF arrangement.







Finally we stopped off on the way home at WWT Welney (http://www.wwt.org.uk/visit/welney/) and I took this nice recording of some Bewick’s swans as they were being fed. This time I was recording to my 744 via an SQN 4s using an old T-powered Sennheiser 416.

I wasn’t that hopeful as just two weeks ago when I had been here doing a hydrophone workshop I had been met with a barrage of silence. The warm weather we’ve had recently though must have awoken the insects as they were in full choral glory as you can hear:



After a while listening to this and explaining and sharing with the equally confused and intrigued passers by (I love the excited looks on their faces as they put on the headphones and listen to the hidden underwater world for the first time!) I decided to move the microphone around a little to see what other insects I could find, if any. I pretty quickly hit upon this really nice stridulation sound:



I then decided to switch to a totally different type of transducer, the electro-magnetic pick-up the kind you can buy from most electrical component retailers as ‘telephone pick up coils’ (which I usually cut out of their protective plastic housing in order to improve the high-frequency response). They work on the same principle as electric guitar pick-ups and instead of vibrations caused by sound they transduce electro-magnetic waves into an analogous electric current.

I made some really nice recordings walking around some electricity pylons and sub-stations but buy far the most interesting sounds came from the nearby railway line. Below are a few excerpts from a longer recording of trains passing beneath me.

The work is based on the several hours of four-channel recordings (although this is the stereo mix version) I made in the desert. I was recording with four Sennheiser MKH40s going straight into a Sound Devices 788 at 96KHz. I played around with quite a few different microphone placements mainly with the mic's arranged as two pairs of XY however as the wind wind picked over the course of the day I found that actually the best arrangement was to have the mic's spaced around six feet apart in a square and on the floor but angled up by resting them on some rocks.

The piece is much more about an evocation of the feeling of being in the Mojave certainly not an accurate phonographic documentation of the ambient sound in the desert, and as such I also made some studio recordings which I added to the piece including a heavily processed stereo recording of a bull roar.

So firstly all the technical stuff. I was recording with a pair of Sennheiser 8040s (in an approximate ORTF arrangement) then into a Sound Devices 744 by way of a Sound Devices Mix Pre.

As I began to explore the old military buildings, most of which are now sadly sealed against human entry, I stumbled across a half open concrete structure which was presumably at one point or another a lookout post with such a perspective of vantage over the estuary mouth. As soon as I stepped inside I felt the sound close in and change in a striking way as the structural resonances and reverberations enforced their colouration on the relative neutrality of the sound of waves crashing against the course sand beach and wonderfully defining the space. Below is a short excerpt of the ambient sound within the building and a few photographs.

A little further down the coast I saw part of the disused barracks with an intriguing hole in some of the metal grill being used to keep it sealed up. On closer inspection this building had obviously become the place for Columbidae to get together and hide from the harsh coastal weather.

So I placed my microphones through the hole and pressed record.

The sound inside was amazing, you can even hear their chicks demanding food a little later in the recording as well as the noise of a little Wren hopping around on the floor! The only drawback beyond the dismal weather (which is the default position for the English coast anyway!) was that since my last visit a lot of construction work appears to have begun on two different sites both no more than 100m away from the artillery so a majority of the recordings I took are not particularly clean. That is why this is ‘Shoeburyness recording part 1’ as I will be returning soon on a Sunday in the hope that it is a bit quieter and I can take some nice and clean surround recordings with my double M/S rig.

NB/ Thanks to Helen Frosi for all the wonderful photographs (and for putting up with the rain!)