Inside and underneath: hidden sounds

N 8 -Dawn Chorus Odenwald

Kirchenglocken

Erdtöne

The small island Juist in Ostfriesland / Germany offers unusual acoustic neighborhoods of birds that usually cannot be heard together. The island is rather long but very slender, only about one kilometer from one coast to the other, with a lake in between. So, in the background chorus (which is rather quiet, listening with headphones is recommended) one can hear amongst many others: curlews, redshanks, oystercathers – Birds of the Wadden – brent geese, white-fronted geese, blackbirds, Robins – birds of the inland – that meet with arctic terns and seagulls of the ocean coast. The constant rumble comes from the North Sea waves behind some sand dunes.
Two soloists decide to enter the stage: a song thrush at 0:52 and later, after 5 minutes of only background chorus – a wren.
The recording is part of an unattended overnight recording, it starts somewhere around 5:15 am.
No digital mastering except fade in / out
Clippy em 272, Zoom H6
flac

North Sea dawn chorus – Juist, Hammersee

just for fun - a beehive in the woods near Heidelberg

beehive

Track of red ants in the black forest, southern Germany.
JrF pro contact, zoom H6

Ants

After autumn had begun, we suddenly had some very warm days. In the woods, somehow most of the life was set back into spring mode, including the insects. Suddenly, the forest floor was covered with small heaps, indicating intensive activity of earthworms. I was interested in what I could hear of their sudden liveliness, so I dug in some contact microphones and listened. Basically, they seem to be eating all the time. And sometimes, they seem to smack, they seem lo like what they eat..
There is quite a lot of hissing due to the self noise of the microphones and the impedance converters, I had to turn up the input to maximum level...
JfR contact pro, mixpre 6ii

earthworms, eating

This recording is not so much a dawn chorus, it is rather a succession of soloists entering and leaving the stage, one after the other. The stage: a bush in the dunes of Juist, near the “Hammersee”. The first to awake (at perhaps 5.00 am) is a (male) blackbird, he has to share the stage after 2 minutes with a garden warbler- but they stay a bit muffled behind the curtain until about 29: 30. Then the curtain is lifted, in the following three hours we can listen to wrens, blackcaps, thorn warblers, marsh warblers and other guests passing by.
With 3:30 length, this is the longest recording without man made noise (okay, there is an airplane or two crossing the north sea, I admit) that up to now I could make in my home country Germany – a rare experience, therefore I am posting it at full length.
The North Sea island of Juist is very slim. At the spot where I took most of the recordings, there are only 1500 meters from the mudflat side to the open North Sea. In between lies a freshwater lake called Hammersee. Due to the proximity of these very different habitats, interesting acoustic neighborhoods of birds occur, which otherwise live far apart. So, if you listen carefully, you can hear various geese (gray geese, Canada geese, barnacle geese) and different wading birds (such as oystercatchers, redshanks, curlews) in the background, along with the “soloists”, the songbirds . And behind it all is the constant rumbling of the North Sea waves, and a steady wind. For my ears, this is a very exciting blend of sounds.
Clippy EM272 in A/B, 70 cm, Zoom H6

Nature is waking up - North Sea island Juist, Hammersee (long version)

Zwergfledermaus / Common Pipistrelle

Recorded with Clippies em272 and mixpre 6-ii at 192 khz / 32bit float, slowed down to 1/10 of the original speed (about 4.5 octaves deeper) and rendered to 48 kz/24 bit.
To me, she sounds lovely…

Zwergfledermaus / Common Pipistrelle

Every summer, the „Heidelberger Schlossbeleuchtung“, the ‚castle illumination,’ is one of the highlights of the city life. Traditionally, after a first series of blasts a trumpet plays the song “Ich hab mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren”, before the firework continues. I raised this part of the recording in volume a bit, since the trumpet player is rather far away, on the other side of the Neckar river. The recording was made from a very high window on the attic of the largest church in the center of Heidelberg, the “Heiliggeistkirche”. 
Attention: the firework starts with two very loud blasts right at the beginning; another sharp blast occurs immediately after the applause for the trumpet player.
Recorded with Sennheiser MKH 8040 in ortf and mixpre 6 ii at 32bit float, normalized and rendered to 24bit.

Firework Heidelberg castle illumination

tiefe Klangschale
deep sounding singing bowl

Klangschale 3

singing gong meditation, ghostly sounds

gong built and played be Steven Cardona, Karlsruhe, Germany

gong - white sound meditation

Klangschale 2

The national park "Niedersächsisches Wattenmeer" is the largest contiguous tidal flat area in the world – a place for countless birds of all kinds to rest and breed. At night, the tidal flats – especially when the tide is receding, and the table is set – are full of calls and the sounds of wings. This recording is an acoustic panorama of the night at the tidal flats of Spiekeroog Island, covering the time from 8:30 PM to 8:30 AM, with the tide receding around 3:00 AM. At night, not only the birds are awake, but also fishing boats and planes crossing the North Sea; therefore, I have selected relatively quiet sections for this compilation. You can hear oystercatchers, brent geese, greylag geese, common shelducks, curlews, various gull species, and running horses. The recording is very quiet over long stretches, so please listen with good headphones.
Clippy EM 272 in Zoom F3, rendered at 24 bit/48kHz.

A night at the wadden sea (contains crossfades)

Where there is life, there is sound. Even inside seemingly silent creatures like here: Mushrooms in the forest. You can hear the mushroom growing, drinking, expanding - the sound of life, you just have to get to it. And in the background: sounds of birds, cars, wind. Recorded inside three different mushrooms - unfortunately I'm not a mushroom connoisseur, I can't say which mushrooms they are.
Please use headphones for better listening results.
JrF ecoutic - microphone in Leaf Audio field amp in Mixpre 6ii.

Mushroom sounds

Two different types of moss.
Recorded with JrF ecoutic microphone into Leaf Audio field amp into mixpre 6ii
please use headphones for better listening results

moss sounds

I love recording water. I have long been curious to discover what water sounds like when it flows in the earth, “underground water” so to speak. Recording this required two things: firstly, to find springs flowing underground and secondly, to be able to record them. The first became possible when I met an old farmer on vacation in the Black Forest who is an experienced dowser and who had found the springs for all the wells on the farms in his high valley using a dowsing rod; he showed me how to do it. So last week I was able to find two places in a meadow in the Odenwald with a simple “angle rod” where springs were found quite close to the surface of the earth. The second - the recording - was made possible by the JrF “ecoutic” microphones, which have a needle attached to the contact microphone that protrudes a few centimeters into the ground.
Two different underground sources can be heard on the recording; in the first, the water flows close to the needle and produces rather rumbling noises; in the second (from 1:46) it almost sounds at the beginning as if the water is flowing in a pipe (which is not the case). The hiss on both recordings is not the self noise of the devices (they are very silent, due to the wonderful pre-amp), but also water flowing in slightly deeper layers. Finally, there are always sharp clicking noises, which presumably come from small insects in the ground moving very close to the needle. The quality can still be improved, I'll keep at it...
Please use headphones for better listening results.
JrF ecoutic (modified contact microphone) in Leaf Audio field Amp in mixpre 6ii

Under the meadow: running water

Wind in a reed field, New Year's morning

It is interesting to compare the recordings of ‘beehive 1’ and ‘beehive 2’. Both hives stand next to each other in a meadow, they have exactly the same amount of sunlight, the same food conditions, are equally populated and the bees live in identically constructed wooden boxes. Nevertheless, they sound very different, they differ in the average frequency of the wing beats, the spread of the frequencies, the flight speed, even the rustling/clapping sound on landing is different. The owner said that this corresponded to the different personalities of each queen bee.
MKH 8040 in ORTF, Mixpre 6ii


beehive 1

Before dawn on the wadden sea: eiders, oystercatchers, lapwings, redshanks, black-headed gulls, curlews
Spiekeroog, June 2025
Clippies EM 272, Zoom F3


Before dawn at the wadden sea: eiders, oystercatchers, lapwings, redshanks, black-headed gulls, curlews

The mudflats never sleep....
In the mudflats of the North Sea island of Spiekeroog, around 2 o'clock at night. The tide is just going out, the mudflats are full of life, countless birds in the air and on the ground, frogs - the table is set, nobody wants to be late.

The mudflats never sleep....

This was the first time I could listen to a longer sequence of ants stridulating in their nest – and I was and am totally fascinated by these really weird sounds. Of course, there is also a lot of crawling und running going on....
Recorded in the German Alps (Allgäu) with JrF ecoutic microphone into Leaf Audio field amp into Mixpre 6ii

Stridulating ants

The other day, when I was out exploring in the woods with my 9 year old daughter she asked: “What does in sound like inside a spruce cone?” I was quite proud of her at that moment….and of course, we had to find the answer. So we laid a cone in the sunshine, poked the mic in and found this delightful gentle hidden sound….
Recorded with JrF ecoutic microphone into leaf audio field amp into mixpre 6ii


Spruce cone gently opening in the sunshine

Recorded with clippies em272 and mxpre 6ii at 192 kHz (32bit float), slowed down to 1/20 of the original speed and rendered to 24bit/48 kHz


Different species of bats circling a barn

Somehow, it was quite touching to listen to these little creatures, munching their way into a mushroom somewhere from below. I suppose they might be very small worms, but I did not see them, so I am not sure.
JrF ecoutic into leaf audio field amp into mixpre 6ii



Forest mushroom being eaten – from underneath

New bat sounds (Fledermäuse Biokulturhof 10 25)

One of many recordings on my “Heidelberg sound map.” Please feel invited to visit the entire soundmap: https://heidelberg-hoeren.de/soundmap

I deeply love to record and to listen. My everyday life is filled with urban sounds and noise. So I always wait impatiently for opportunities to get away from man-made sounds and to deeply listen to and record nature. But these opportunities are far to rare. So I asked myself: why not record the sounds that I encounter in my every day life and make a soundmap of my home town Heidelberg? It took me nearly two years until the site was ready to go online, but it was great fun and trained my listening a lot. 


AudioFokus - Axel Mecke

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