I was fortunate to be asked to do a field recording project with the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere and their local Women Institute based on the works and walks of Dorothy Wordsworth, William’ s sister. It was a fantastic project to work on and comprised of recording local women reading extracts from Dorothy’s poems, which were to be placed on an AR walking map of the area, as well as making underlying field recordings for around Grasmere.

The challenge

The challenge was trying to replicate the time period of the early 1800’s, when the area in question is overwhelmed by (surprising you might think) mechanical and human sounds. From the roar of motorbikes, the constant broadband drone of traffic winding its way around the only main road in, out and through the Lake District and the background hum of plant supplying all of the local restaurants and hotels.

Needless to say this was a large issue to overcome but a problem that is found throughout the UK and the majority of the world. On average one must travel more than 30 miles into the wilderness to escape the dominance of human sonic impact into the environment, of course additionally taking into consideration that that includes even further from flight corridors, it can be argued that in the UK it is hard to find any spot that is pristinely quiet, or in my case similar to what would have been expected in the 19th century. 

The solution, as it always is in these circumstances is to get up in the middle of the night and try to make ambient recordings which are as devoid as possible for human activity. The only problem now is that the soundscape is often removed of all activity, including birds and animals which would have been present. Thankfully these are sounds which can be added and mixed in in post.

Planning

Being unsure of the locations until they were chosen by the participants, it was difficult to do a complete reccy of the area, but never the less I went out and had a walk around the potential sites I knew to get a general feel of any problems I might encounter and what gear I might need, and how long I might need to be in each location, knowing that I usually allow for an hour to 2 in each, although time was against us on this project as the field recordings and recording of the poetry all had to be done within 2 days.

It was on this recce that I discovered the noise issues so I looked at ways of shielding from the worst offenders, being in a valley did not help with sound from traffic (and bloody motorbikes!) being reflected back off the valley sides and into my mics! 

In later discussions with the local residents, it was interesting to discover how irritated they were by the noise issues in their sleepy little village brought about by tourism, although tourism is a key economic driver for the area. I think this may be a subject for some more of my soundscape research into expectation, experience, and attitudes. 

I decided that would make a series of longer term ambient recordings and some mono spot recordings of interesting sound objects in the area. I would be leaving the ambient mics, well hidden, for up to an hour and the scouting out additional sounds. The ambient mics would be placed on a stereo bar in ORTF configuration, on a lightweight lighting stand, which I find works very well in these circumstances and is extremely light. 

Gear

Gear wise, I went for portable and that which I could fit into my backpack as there was to be a lot of walking involved. I opted for the following :

Recorders

• Zoom F6 (main recorder) + Line Audio CM4 (ORTF) + RODE and Rode NTG 5 (+blimp)

• Tascam DR 100 MK III + Clippy mics for static ambiences

• Zoom H3VR for ambisonic immersive recording 

• Zoom H6 as I always take it as a backup

At the end of the day, all data was backup to my laptop and to an external hard drive, meaning that the data existed in 3 locations.

Problems

As expected the Zoom H3VR was a little noise with the very quiet soundscapes, I did see this as being an issue but at the time I couldn’t access the Sennheiser Ambeo mic. I know a lot of people write this little unit off for being noisy once you push the gain above 5-6, but that is to be expected and unless (like I was in this case) you are recording very quiet spaces.

The Zoom is an absolute steal and a great way to start in immersive audio. With some high shelving around 12kHz the recordings were ok for their intended use.

Some Sample recordings

The walking with Dorothy project was an extremely interesting and pleasant job to work on, with a great team and participants. I look forward to when the AR app is launched and hearing how it all sounds in operation.

Enjoy

Peace

Neil