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Hair-raising sea dramatics, captured in great detail, with quite frequent crashes, bangs, booms, thumps and great eruptions of spray — yet also an uneasily peaceful soundscape, full of a quiet writhing menace. We're below the Coast Path a little south-west of the Shag Rock headland, near Perranporth, Cornwall, UK, on a precariously steep slope that ends in cliff edge just a little further down, and as low as I dared go on the precarious sewage pipe track. The sonic panorama from here is breathtaking with the chunky breakers surging and crashing in and then booming and rumbling as they hit the cliff base hidden away below.
This was the lower of two concurrent recordings made in this session (on 18 February 2017), the recorder placed on a tripod beside the bottom inspection cover, where the narrow track gives way to steep broken rock terrain and the concrete sewage pipe is exposed on the clifftop rocky terrain. Although this is a concurrent recording of notionally the same overall soundscape as the other one, the perspective here is different, and closer to some of the, let's say, rather intimidating-sounding 'action'. To the left we often hear long-drawn-out splashdowns, though they're a bit too far away to sound spectacular. In fact they were from mighty impressive, often clifftop-height, spray eruptions when waves hit the cliff there.
Actually both these recordings were quite a disappointment for me, and I was even wondering whether to bother to upload them here (in the light of other recordings I'd made from there)!
Reason for that is that there was a lot of disturbance during that session from aeroplanes and helicopters (the former particularly including light aeroplanes from the nearby Perranporth Airfield, which latter was evidently busy this afternoon), and in addition I had to discard about the final quarter of this recording because of the breeze getting up and causing intrusive mic wind noise. Naturally, repeatedly I had to cut out superbly hair-raising 'best bits', and cut chunks out of episodes of which I managed to keep part. Thus what we hear in this edited version of the recording is rather a skeleton of the real 'wow' performance that Mother Nature was presenting me with there.
With that frustration about the two recordings, I got into 'the glass is half-empty' mode and thought them not all that worthwhile, and needing replacing. It was only when I listened carefully to both, at the proper volume level, to finally decide whether to upload either here, that I realized how superb they sounded despite all that had been cut out.
Advisory
Because of the soundscape's big dynamic range, to get a realistic sound level the playing volume needs to be set at some 9dB above a normal sensible level. In addition, high-grade headphones are strongly recommended in order to get the best out of this complex soundscape and reproduce the very low frequencies reasonably correctly.
An earlier recording (8 February 2017) being made from this exact spot — beside the bottom inspection cover, where the narrow track gives way to rocky terrain.
Earlier photo (15 June 2013), from the coast path further south-west — the arrow pointing to the exact spot on the sewage pipe track.
Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields — the inner being a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and the outer a custom Windcut one —, and it was placed on a full-size Zipshot tripod.
* Note that I WARN AGAINST use of windshields that are of any sort of box shape, for I soon found that they were inherently unsuitable for any decent-quality recording. While no doubt non-box-shaped windshields from Movo would be okay, the presence of relatively flat surfaces, edges and corners creates internal narrow resonance peaks in the treble, which give the latter an abrasive and rather 'screamy' quality, no matter who's made the particular windshields. When I realized why my recordings had developed that nasty treble quality I had to go back through all recordings made with that dratted box-shaped windshield, and use Voxengo CurveEQ to enable me to precisely neutralize two narrow treble peaks and thus enable the recordings to sound wonderfully natural rather than bafflingly stressful.
Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields and correction for the D100's weakness in very low bass — and then, later on, the aforementioned remedial EQ measure using Voxengo CurveEQ to remove the two narrow treble peaks kindly added by that rogue model of furry windshield.
Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!
This recording can be used free of charge, provided that it's not part of a materially profit-making project, and it is properly and clearly attributed. The attribution must give my name (Philip Goddard) and link to https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/686454/
Type
Flac (.flac)
Duration
75:18.680
File size
343.6 MB
Sample rate
44100.0 Hz
Bit depth
16 bit
Channels
Stereo