The surf pounds against the sand. A remnant of a hurricane now past.

Late Saturday night after visiting points south, a young woman walks ahead of her group through the sand lanes between Atlantique and Robbins Rest. She is lost and found.

At the edge of an undeveloped portion of the Fire Island National Seashore dawn breaks to crickets and sparse bird life.

Recorded in Robbins Rest, Fire Island NY in August of 2021. LOM Uši Pros, Sound Devices MixPre-3 II, baffled stereo array

Robbins Rest

Morning on Midway

I Hear You

Surf

Jessamine Bayou is a seasonally flooded forest in the heart of America's Amazon, the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta.

These recordings are taken from overnight "drop rigs" left at the edge of a tributary surrounded cypress swamp and adjacent to a field of saw palmetto. In the evening a diffuse chorus of bird-voiced treefrogs. Crickets and katydids tune up. A cardinal sings its dusk song. By morning the cacophony of katydids is at an end. Material falls from the trees exciting the saw palmetto. The bird song is sparse. The resident cardinal executes a series that seem tailored for the morning.

Recorded June 16-17 2021 in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta of Alabama by David Michael and Michael Clemow. Our gratitude is extended to Ben Raines for guiding us through this area.

Jessamine Bayou

Evening at Jessamine Bayou

Morning at Jessamine Bayou

Brood X: Patapsco River Valley

Duet with Riding Mower

Sipsey River Swamp

A Swampy Dawn Chorus

A series of dawn choruses recorded in Sleepy Hollow NY during the beginning of the pandemic of 2020. The lack of any real air traffic made for unique recording conditions.

Assorted Pandemic Choruses

April 09 2020

April 04 2020

Beginning of the rainy season, thunder peels across the bush. Limpopo River perspective.

Recorded during Sonic Mmabolela
November 29 - 30, 2013

Midnight On The Limpopo (Fragment)

About 12 hours into the recording session.

Recorded during Sonic Mmabolela 2013

Hippopotamuses at Mmabolel Rock (Fragment)

Recorded overnight in the dry river bed at Umzumbi in Mmabolela, South Africa as part of Sonic Mmabolela. This excerpt taken from the original 12 hour recording.

Vocalists include baboons, bats, jackals, frogs, crickets, and as yet unidentified birds.

The MP3 encoding on SoundCloud removes much of the details of the bats.

https://davidmichael.bandcamp.com/album/umzumbi-durational-field-recording-and-player-10-hours-overnight-in-limpopo-south-africa

Listen to more

Baboons, Bats, Jackals: From "Umzumbi" durational field recording, 12 hours in Limpopo, South Africa

A mix of field recordings, ambient, acousmatic and a little inbetween. Mixed live and broadcast on Deep Space Radio during the Future Current sessions hosted by Rontronic!

Playlist:

1. Breath and Drone by David Michael
2. Weddell Space by Douglas Quin 
3. Drowning Cricket Quartet by Lexaunculpt
4. Sora Dawn by Lang Elliot
5. Palimpsestes by Robert Normandeau
6. Look How Hard I've Tried by Barker
7. Nuits de Guyane by Marc Namblard
8. The Bridge to Botswana IV by David Michael
9. MM Konstruktim by Slavek Kwi
10. Lost in the Veld by Michael Clemow
11. Slávek's Dry Creek by David Michael
12. Agony by Ilhan Mimaroglu
13. Beneath The Forest Floor by Hildegard Westerkamp
14. River Dolphins Hunting Panicking Fish (Boto & Tucuxi) by David Michael
15. Point Of Gibraltar by Tom Lawrence
16. The Emergent Pond by David Dunn
17. Motmots in the Drip by Lang Elliott & Ted Mack
18. Umgebung by Markus Guentner
19. Photographer by David Michael
20. They Want To Be Eaten by David Michael
21. Drift To The Centre by Aquarius
22. Pied Butcherbirds of Spirey Creek by David Lumsdane

Guest DJ: David Michael

Future Current - Deep Space Radio - Guest Mix

HKSINTL

China

A.I.

Dreemz

Spring

Intimacy

The Excluded Middle

Into Matter

Manifest Destiny

Drone

Sonya

Peals of thunder from a passing storm. A recordist and guide. A capybara sounds the alarm call.

Recorded on April 12, 2023 using a baffled, spaced pair of LOM Uši Pro microphones fed into a Zoom F3 recorder. Site assistance provided by Jair Mariche.

Mint on Zora

Capybara

Early afternoon at Collpa Colorado. Massive flocks of macaws, parrots and parrotlets gather to consume the exposed clay.

Recorded on April 12, 2023 using a baffled, spaced pair of LOM Uši Pro microphones fed into a Zoom F3 recorder. Site assistance provided by Jair Mariche.

Collpa Colorado

Afternoon Flocks

Recorded May 22nd 2011 on a trail near Frick Pond in the Catskill Mountains, New York State. 

Pseudo-SASS with AT4022s, Tascam DR-680

A woodland chorus with Wood Thrush

This recording of a chorus of American Toads (Bufo americanus) was taken by the side of a small wooded pool in the Connecticut Hill Wildlife Management Area on the border of Tompkins and Schuyler Counties in Upstate New York.

When we arrived to the site it was about 12am and the chorus was in full swing. The attached file is a single short bout of a chorus that went on until the very early morning of June 1. I have not heard anything like the counterpoint of the singers before. A nice peppering of Spring Peepers and Green Frogs join the chorusing American Toads.

I almost dropped my bag on the fellow in the top picture.

Recorded in MS stereo using a Sennheiser MKH 30/40 pair in a Zeppelin mounted on a tripod with 10’ cable run.

If you have enjoyed this recording, please consider downloading it. 
http://davidmichael.bandcamp.com/album/american-toad-chorus


American toad chorus

Disc 2, Track 6. Taken from the "Mmabolela" double CD produced with Slavek Kwi and published by Tentacles of Perception Recordings and Gruenrekorder. Gruen 144.

Recorded during Francisco Lopez's and James Webb's Sonic Mmabolela Residency and Workshop in Mmabolela, South Africa. http://www.franciscolopez.net/field.html

Available direct from Bandcamp at
https://davidmichael.bandcamp.com/album/mmabolela

Available soon from Gruenrekorder


The Bridge To Botswana IV: from the 2xCD "Mmabolela" on Gruenrekorder, available at Bandcamp

Durational audio recording of the sound environment around a dry stretch of the Limpopo River in South Africa at the beginning of the rainy season. The recording begins just before dusk and continues through late morning.

Originally released on Time Machines 

Technical Specifications

Running time: 12 hours, 32 minutes
Audio encoding: Stereo FLAC at 48kHz, 24bit
Single board computer: Raspberry Pi Model B+, Custom software
USB DAC: TI PCM2704 "Burr Brown" chip
Enclosure: Zebrawood, brass fittings
Includes

Player
USB DAC
Cables for DAC and AC adapter
5V USB adapter not included.
The player will accept arbitrary USB DACs.
Intended for headphone listening.

Umzumbi - 004

Recorded in the Danielson Amphitheater, La Farge, WI, US on May 20th 2013  

Jesuit Of Orchards

A night chorus of frogs & toads overlaps with the dawn chorus of songbirds.

Recorded May 26th 2016 near Birmingham Alabama.

Pond Life II: Oscines & Anurans

Dawn on the Upper North Fork Flowage in Crex Meadows, Wisconsin. 

Snipe, sandhill cranes, ruffed grouse, ducks, Canada geese, as well as distant whip-poor-wills and American bittern can be heard against the backdrop of chorus frogs and spring peepers.

Recorded May 2, 2010 unattended.

Upper North Fork Flowage, Dawn

A synchronized duet by a pair of Sandhill Cranes. Recorded in the early evening at the Upper North Fork Flowage in Crex Meadows Wildlife Area near Grantsburg, WI.

Other vocalizing species include chorus frogs, spring peepers, red-winged blackbirds, and Canada geese.

Sandhill Cranes Unison Call

 The Crex Meadows Wildlife Area a 30,000 acre wildlife refuge located just north of the Village of Grantsburg in Burnett County.  This area is intensively managed to preserve and restore the increasingly rare sedge marsh and brush prairie habitats. It is home to a broad diversity of plant and animal life including 270 species of birds and 750 species of plants.

The 2010 Nature Recordists Campout, sponsored by Rich Peet and Rob Danielson, took place over the weekend of May 1, 2010. Here a number of recordists gathered to explore Crex in hopes of capturing a small piece of the spring soundscape. 

The Upper North Fork Flowage, where most of these recordings were made, is a large sedge marsh surrounded by prairies and woodland. It is host to a variety of water fowl, cranes, songbirds, frogs, and mammals including beaver, wolves, and foxes. Of the species identified in the recordings are sandhill cranes, Canada geese, spring peepers, chorus frogs, red-winged blackbirds, pickerel frogs, swamp sparrow, snipes, distant loons and grouse, and even a passing mouse. If you are able to identify other species, please notate it in the comments.

This composite recording begins with the calls chorus frogs and spring peepers preceding a unison call of sandhill cranes, geese and waterfowl call as night falls. A small mammal passes the microphones and a common snipe begins its courtship flights. Dawn excites the red-winged blackbirds, sparrows, and woodpeckers in the distant forest to sing as the wind picks up again.

The recording was made with a parallel boundary array using two AT4022 microphones set back from the edge at about 1". Additionally I used a spherical foam nose between the boundaries. The array was on a tripod about 2 feet from the ground feeding into an Edirol R-44 field recorder, recording at 24bit/44.1kHz.

Both Rob Danielson and Paul Dickinson had recording rigs in the very near vicinity. Rob's post of the evening's recording has a very detailed timeline of the area including weather, light, and events.
Rob's recording can be heard and seen at http://tinyurl.com/2endkau . Paul's recording is at http://soundcloud.com/paul-dickinson/100501-craneunisoncall 

If you have enjoyed the recording, please consider downloading it at http://davidmichael.bandcamp.com/album/crex-meadows. Included in the download are two, one hour long edits of the best portions of the overnight recording. 

David Michael 
May 2010


Upper North Fork Flowage (composite)

Near the Pocantico River, Hudson River Valley, New York State
Recorded August 4th, 2012
FR2-LE, custom Danielson boundary array on 6' tripod, 2 x AT4022 microphones

Meadow's edge, cicada, crickets, deer, cessna

http://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab053.htm

El Yunque
DAVID MICHAEL
IHab053

When I made this recording I was deeply disappointed at the results. At a campsite on the edge of the El Yunque national forest in Puerto Rico, I had held vigil all night with my recorder, attempting to capture the long sweep of the nighttime choruses of coqui.

Along with the sounds of frogs and insects, the neighborhood surrounding my campsite drifted up the mountainside and into my microphones. Cars navigated the winding roads, people cheered a boxing match, and dogs barked at the night. At daybreak, a chorus of roosters. Occasionally I fell asleep, only to wake myself up with a snore.

For the nature recording I had expected to make, it was a total travesty. These were not the sounds of the rainforest. For the nature recording that I hope to make today, I am not sure I could have planned it any better. These are the sounds of the rainforest.

This recording then is about preconceptions.

COPYLEFT:

artwork/cover design:
©2012 Chris Suspect
©2012 David Vélez
music:
©2012 David Michael
©2012 Impulsive Habitat

El Yunque

Whip-poor-will and Snipe

April 09 2020. 6 AM EST.
A dawn chorus at the edge of a meadow in Westchester County NY. In recent years this area is typically too noisy for recording. After nearly a month of lockdown, there is still relatively little air traffic. 

White-throated Sparrows lead a crush of songbirds. A Mallard joins. The quiet rush of the Pocantico River. A distant horn from the Metro North.

41°06'10.5"N 73°51'11.0"W

Recorded through a MBox 2 Pro with the input levels at 75%.

AT4022 (L) & MKH40 (R)

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