Special thanks to Veljo Runnel for leading an excellent workshop on Nature Sound Recording, sharing his experiences from the last 10 years and extensive knowledge on bird species. The group spent one early morning and one full evening out in the field, analyzing and collecting sounds. We then listened to the recordings that were made an identified the animal species that were heard. Comparisons of different recording setups were helpful to in defining both aesthetic and scientific approaches to the sounds that were captured.

read the full summary of the workshop on the MoKS blog

listen to this mix of four recordings I made during the workshop

1. creaking tree and morning birds by the Ahja river
2. lone Tangmalm’s Owl (Karvasjalg kakk) in the forest
3. Spotted Crake (Täpikhuik)
4. Morning chorus near Ahunapalu with Cranes

26:18, listen or download via soundcloud

‘recurring incursions’ was composed in the last days of 2010 using recordings made during the previous year. No synthesis was used in the process. All sounds were analog and acoustic in origin. Some sources come from collaborative recordings. Thanks to Evelyn Müürsepp for playing tonal wood blocks in the forest and to the participants of my sound workshop in Istanbul.

The time of the white nights is quickly passing. In this part of the year I try to make regular excursions out into the countryside to record during the late evening and early morning solitude. One of my favorite places to visit is an embankment on the western shore of Peipsi lake (bordering with Russia). If the air is still enough, the subtly changing colors of the sky reflect beautifully off the surface of the water. The photos above are just a humble tribute to this magical display of light. On this particular night, it was so quiet, there was almost nothing to record sound-wise except for the occasional fish leaping up to catch insects. Below are two excepts from longer recordings made in the past month.

This first recording was made by a small pond in the forest. There are frogs moving around directly in front of the mics, but you can hear many soft sounds in the distance from the forest and a remote farm.

This recording was made after the traditional mid-summer day (St. Johns day or Jaanipäev), when the evening soundscape shifts dramatically from bird life up in the trees to cricket and grasshopper life in the grassy open fields. Unfortunately there are mosquitoes present nearly all the time and they seem to like the furry wind covers on my microphones.

Formica aquilonia or Red Wood Ant is a species of ant commonly found in the area where I live. The ant colonies are easily recognizable by the large mounds that they build out of debris from the pine forests they inhabit. The mounds also tend to be clustered together. I’m not sure what is the relation between the mounds, but the activity between them can be so frequent that “ant highways” or noticeable paths form on the forest floor. Ants are in the Family Formicidae meaning they give off formic acid when defending a territory through biting or spraying. Formic acid happens to be highly corrosive to some piezo transducer materials. This I know because one of the contact mics I used to record the ants was unprotected and went bad after about 15 seconds after I placed it on a mound.

The recording method here is something of an intervention and is not scientific in any way. If anything it is quite a provocation for the ants as I place the mics on the surface of the mound. They take it as a foreign object (which it is) and attack it. So the sound is a combination of biting, scratching and walking on the contact mics. To add some variation I used two different kinds of piezos and attached some thin brass wire to the discs. I do my very best not to harm the ants or their mounds especially since they are under a mild form of environmental protection due to threats from pollution.

contact microphone intervention with formica aqulonia – red wood ants (3:26) mp3 file

and here is a video I made about these ants:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I finally managed to visit a curious location in a forest in south Estonia and discovered that it indeed was one of the former soviet nuclear missile silos. As I’ve seen, most missile bases were mobile launching pads for missiles that were stored on trucks in bunkers. In this location the missiles were actually stored vertically in silos. It is likely that these bases were armed right up until the time of Estonian re-independance in 1991 when the soviet army pulled out. As you can see in the photos the site is being excavated and will eventually be filled in (I assume). Not having much time, I only managed to record the sound of stones dropping into the water at the bottom. The silos were quite deep and very resonant as you can hear.

stones tossed into an abandoned soviet nuclear missile silo (2:13) mp3 file

prele records has released a CD of revenant : topoló along with 12 page booklet of texts by the artists. Available from December 2008.

revenant : topoló took place on October 19th, 2006 in a forest near the border of Italy and Slovenia. participants in this action were yannick dauby, olivier feraud, john grzinich, hitoshi kojo and patrick mcginley (aka murmer).

Towards the end of our intentional gathering, two trips were made into the nearby state forest. Each time we walked until we were attracted to a particular place then settled in and set up. These in-situ ‘performances’ were made with objects brought by each person and materials found at the locations. The “goal” if there was any, was to explore the interactions between ourselves and the space around us, using sound. As there were various recording configurations made, different perspectives of the events were captured. This is an acoustically subjective approach similar to that of each of the ‘players’, I quite like, which raises the question, who or what is the “audience”? The recordings below are direct from my binaural microphone setup. Perhaps the most elaborate recording configuration was made by Eric Cordier during the second excursion, who set up multiple microphones and a battery powered mixing desk, to listen in on different angles to the complexity of events unfolding in the trees.

Perruel forest session 1 : with Thomas Tilly, Patrick McGinley, Maksims Shentelevs, Paulo Raposo, Johanna Lonka and myself (5:38): Perruel forest session 1

Perruel forest session 2 : with Eric Cordier, Patrick McGinley, Maksims Shentelevs, Johanna Lonka and myself (4:32): Perruel forest session 2