Gentle night rain with a hint of seagulls and thunder

In the small hours of 28th June 2012 it was raining a bit here in central Exeter, UK (which very rarely has thunderstorms), and I heard an occasional very distant boom of thunder. Just in case the storm was going to develop more and come over, I set up my Sony PCM-M10 raised up on a window ledge in my bedroom and set it going at 02.50, getting back into bed and leaving it to to capture whatever it would.

I'd set the recording level very low in order not to have any close lightning strikes clipped, but I needn't have worried about that because all I got was a recording of the gentle rain (only just audible) plus the more noticeable trickling of rainwater off my roof, with the occasional sound of seagulls and an almost constant deep muttering and mumbling of thunder at or just beyond the limit of audibility (you need speakers / headphones with extended low bass response to hear much of it), and with the very occasional more distinctly audible but still very quiet booms of thunder. Because of the low recording level, my normalizing the file to a genuinely representative level has meant a very considerable amplification, and I was thus really surprised how well it came out.

As the thunder was receding and the rain / trickling sounds gradually reducing while the recorder was running, after some half-hour I terminated the recording (enviously seeing extremely frequent lightning flashing far away to the south-east, meaning the storm was entertaining people somewhere else and not coming my way at all), and subsequently I cut off the last bit of the recording to improve the overall effect.

Actually that storm system remained virulently active through the day, causing widespread havoc especially in the Midlands and northern England, with flash floods, local large hail and the odd tornado. What I had missed! :-(

So, this recording is a non-event as a thunderstorm recording but is still a nice bit of quiet 'atmosphere'. The seagulls are mostly Herring Gull, but with some Lesser Black-backed Gull. The latter have a similar range of sounds to the Herring Gull, but with distinctively reedy or hoarse-sounding voice.

Please note that the volume level of this recording has been carefully adjusted for listening purposes, and ALL my recordings so far are meant to be listened to with a volume setting that would give a realistic level for playback of CLASSICAL music (a large but not exceptional symphony orchestra). If you have the right volume setting, you should not need to change that setting from one recording of mine to another.

Please remember to give this recording a rating!