Rainy Morning in Wales

This spring season I wanted to record a local dawn chorus that was relatively free from distant engine and aircraft sounds. Wales is generally less populated and more “wild” than south-east England where I live, and I felt like I hadn’t explored it properly. So we jumped into the car and drove to Carmarthenshire looking for good soundscapes.

Strictly looking at the map, this place we settled on seemed promising. A bunch of valleys nestled between rolling hills with lots of woodland and hedgerows – plenty of places to hide from distant anthropophony and lots of shelter for wildlife. Of course, the reality on the ground was slightly different.

The sound of a distant road travelled through the valleys and being many miles away was not enough to stop hearing traffic. There was plenty of aircraft flying over (I completely forgot to check flight paths, so this is my mistake). Closer by, there were several farms with their own selection of man-made noise. During the day, there was light traffic on the one-lane farm roads. At one of these farms there was loud music blaring into the void of the countryside. The place we stayed at used a very nice and environmentally-friendly heat pump instead of gas heating – the downside being that it was comparatively loud, especially on quiet nights. Lastly, the calls of livestock were omnipresent since it was lambing season.

We spent two long days hiking and listening – looking for a naturally quiet spot. At times it felt like a futile endeavour, but eventually we found a little wooded valley that seemed better suited for our purposes than anything else we’d seen so far. The only way to record there was to put the mics on a big tree close to the ground, facing away from a nearby creek. Oh, did I forget to mention there was flooding everywhere? While not man-made, the distant sound of water flowing sounded very similar to equipment self-noise and made the soundscape very unappealing. At any rate, we proceeded to set up this tree ears drop rig. The forecast didn’t look great, but I had planned for rain and took precautions to avoid my equipment ending up drowned.

The recordings turned out a mixed bag. Out of around 40 hours, this one hour part is the absolute best. Everything else is marred by distant road noise, aircraft sounds, too much wind, too much rain etc. One interesting side effect of having recorded at ground level is how present the raindrops feel. It’s not a natural way of hearing rain, at least for an adult. When your ears are 1.5 to 2 metres off the ground, rain sounds fairly distant and not very detailed. If you are a child, or if you intentionally lower your head while out in the rain (one of the many weird things I like to do) you will notice a lot more presence, brightness and detail in the sounds of raindrops hitting the ground. And that’s what this recording achieves.

This is not exactly my best recording of nature, rain or birdsong. It’s not even my best countryside recording. It is however an experiment worth the time and energy spent, and it shows that with a bit of work you can still record decent soundscapes even in a busy place such as the UK.