Beach recordings
Aug. 26th, 2007 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaIt was on the 101 things list as a challenge from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
squirmelia; and I was going to visit lots of beaches on holiday on Cornwall so I took my trusty old minidisc and an SM57 microphone along with me. I've been meaning to post edited chunks of these for ages, of course, but it took some time stuck in a room with few distractions last week to achieve it. Here they are.
First off, apologies for the wind noise. There wasn't a lot I could do about it while recording; Cornwall is windy, and it certainly was that week - we deliberately went for a campsite on the Penzance side rather than the Land's End side when we saw a shipping forecast of Force 7-9 winds, for example. There wasn't much I could do about the wind noise in the editing either, since although it's easy to filter out of music since it's a sort of white noise, it's impossible to filter out of the sort of white noise that is the sound of waves and gravel and suchlike. I've knocked down the bass a bit so it doesn't boom as much as it originally did and that's about all. Also, apologies for these not being very loud, but the background noise of beaches really shouldn't be that loud so I've resisted boosting them too much. All the links are to files on sendspace; they're only about 1Mb/1 minute of mp3 each.
1. Polzeath
And this one really is white noise. Constant rushing of tiny waves running over a flat, sandy beach at low tide - no one wave stands out, and they didn't at the time.
2. Marazion
This was recorded from the mainland end of the causeway that leads to St. Michael's Mount. The waves were small in this sheltered bay but they were running along the edge of the stones in a distinctive way. Otherwise it's a shallow sand beach with little in the way of wave noise.
3. Sennen Cove
This was in an even more sheltered spot, in the tiny harbour at Sennen Cove. The occasional thumps you can hear near the start were a team taking out a rowed launch - I'd guess there were about twelve people involved, but they all seemed to know exactly what they were doing and barely said a word. The mournful-sounding dog was jumping in and out of the sea around them and seemed upset to be left behind; afterwards he came and sat on the old lifeboat launching ramp with me and moped.
4. Lyme Regis
Lyme Regis has a shingle beach, and sounds more like what a beach should sound like to my ear as a result. The crunching is me walking towards the water's edge, and then the noise of the waves themselves is nice and clear. Tom tried scaring up the big bunch of seagulls sitting on the other side of the harbour wall so I'd get some seagull noises, but they all took off in silence, apparently, so there's no evidence of them here.
5. Brighton
This does sound the most like the sound I think of when I think of beaches. It's not just the superficial noises, like Tom and Roger wittering in the background and the constant tink-tink-tink of wire halyards on the sailing club boats, and it's not just waves on gravel because Lyme Regis has gravel but is a short, narrow beach. It's the scope - it's lots of noisy waves on gravel, some near and some far, rising and falling over a good range because the tide was towards the lower end where the slope is shallower and the gravel is in almost continuous motion. That's what beaches should sound like, see? Shame I didn't get any of Brighton's normally ubiquitous seagulls on here, though.
squirmelia; and I was going to visit lots of beaches on holiday on Cornwall so I took my trusty old minidisc and an SM57 microphone along with me. I've been meaning to post edited chunks of these for ages, of course, but it took some time stuck in a room with few distractions last week to achieve it. Here they are.First off, apologies for the wind noise. There wasn't a lot I could do about it while recording; Cornwall is windy, and it certainly was that week - we deliberately went for a campsite on the Penzance side rather than the Land's End side when we saw a shipping forecast of Force 7-9 winds, for example. There wasn't much I could do about the wind noise in the editing either, since although it's easy to filter out of music since it's a sort of white noise, it's impossible to filter out of the sort of white noise that is the sound of waves and gravel and suchlike. I've knocked down the bass a bit so it doesn't boom as much as it originally did and that's about all. Also, apologies for these not being very loud, but the background noise of beaches really shouldn't be that loud so I've resisted boosting them too much. All the links are to files on sendspace; they're only about 1Mb/1 minute of mp3 each.
1. Polzeath
And this one really is white noise. Constant rushing of tiny waves running over a flat, sandy beach at low tide - no one wave stands out, and they didn't at the time.
2. Marazion
This was recorded from the mainland end of the causeway that leads to St. Michael's Mount. The waves were small in this sheltered bay but they were running along the edge of the stones in a distinctive way. Otherwise it's a shallow sand beach with little in the way of wave noise.
3. Sennen Cove
This was in an even more sheltered spot, in the tiny harbour at Sennen Cove. The occasional thumps you can hear near the start were a team taking out a rowed launch - I'd guess there were about twelve people involved, but they all seemed to know exactly what they were doing and barely said a word. The mournful-sounding dog was jumping in and out of the sea around them and seemed upset to be left behind; afterwards he came and sat on the old lifeboat launching ramp with me and moped.
4. Lyme Regis
Lyme Regis has a shingle beach, and sounds more like what a beach should sound like to my ear as a result. The crunching is me walking towards the water's edge, and then the noise of the waves themselves is nice and clear. Tom tried scaring up the big bunch of seagulls sitting on the other side of the harbour wall so I'd get some seagull noises, but they all took off in silence, apparently, so there's no evidence of them here.
5. Brighton
This does sound the most like the sound I think of when I think of beaches. It's not just the superficial noises, like Tom and Roger wittering in the background and the constant tink-tink-tink of wire halyards on the sailing club boats, and it's not just waves on gravel because Lyme Regis has gravel but is a short, narrow beach. It's the scope - it's lots of noisy waves on gravel, some near and some far, rising and falling over a good range because the tide was towards the lower end where the slope is shallower and the gravel is in almost continuous motion. That's what beaches should sound like, see? Shame I didn't get any of Brighton's normally ubiquitous seagulls on here, though.