I made the big mistake of formatting an HD disk with photos I took throughout 2023 and into the winter of 2024, but in my absolute stupidity I didn’t have a backup. So I always run into problems if I’m going to post audio from this time period here on this blog.
But I also take photos on my SLR camera which has a fairly large card so I have consciously allowed photos to be on the card precisely to save such accidents and losing photos.
I don’t actually have a lot of good audio recordings from this summer. Both because the weather was boring most of the summer and I had the flu most of the summer vacation.
But there are a few recordings that I think are interesting from this summer. Especially the ones I took in Steingrímsfjörður and around Drangsnes in western Iceland.
I had a few pictures on my SLR SD card that saved me from being able to put these recordings on the web.
This is part 2. But part 1 was recorded at midnight, before the sunlight hit the recording location. Here in part 2 the sun has risen. Just a minute before the recording started I had to move the microphones to a slightly more sheltered spot, because over the night the wind started to increase which unfortunately can still be heard in the recording.
The recording is „unprocessed“. Recorded at +50dB gain, normalized up to -7dB by adding +20dB in post, fade in and out and then converted to mp3.
The recording starts exactly at 4:00 in the morning on June 22, 2023 and ends just over half an hour later. After a high tide earlier in the night, the tide was already starting to recede. The seaweed on the shore was still wet, which makes a soft clicking and dripping sound, which can be heard differently well with different headphones. The birds are slightly quieter than earlier this night, but the soundscape is still magnificent.
There was several gull species, at last great black backed gull. arctic tern, common eider, whimbrel, European golden plover, red throated loon, common loon, arctic puffin and eurasian oystercatcher.
There you can hear me getting in and out of the car to take pictures. Including the accompanying picture. At least one truck can be heard from across the fjord. It can also be heard in small fishing boats at the beginning and end of the recording.
It is clearly a new day rising.
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(mp3 256kbps / 64Mb)
Recorder: Sound Devices MixPre6 24/48
Mics: Lewitt LCT540s (IRT quad 90°/30cm)
Pix: Canon Eos R
In recent years, I feel that Iceland has cooled down and the summers have also been colder and more rainy. This should not be surprising because the meteorologists who have predicted the consequences of „global warming“ have predicted this weather pattern due to changes in the Gulf Stream. Added to this are natural fluctuations that could explain why it has been colder the last two years than the years before. This is all an emotional assessment so it is best not to say anything further about this. But this cold weather has offered the possibility of recording under frozen lakes near the capital. Something that I have not been able to do since I acquired hydrophones, except by difficult trips to remote places up in the highlands. The only thing I have to strive for is to get suitable recording weather on the weekend so that I am less busy at work. The possibilities for getting good recordings therefore have a few hours a year.
The little experience I have with these recordings has told me that it is not enough to find icy water, drill a hole and record. I can get very different recordings by finding the right hydrophone location, such as depth and the gap between two hydrophones. Then the frost must be below -5°C and the frosty days must have lasted for more than 5 days. Whether there is a thick layer of snow on the surface or naked ice, windy or calm weather. Size and depth of the lake and the thickness of the ice.
For me, this is always a bit of an issue. I have always traveled alone and been very careful when traveling and avoided all risks. Traveling on ice of varying thickness where no one sees or knows about me is therefore unexciting.
It was like that when I arrived at Skorradalsvatn (lake) in the dark and -8°C frost on January 5, 2025. I just went a few meters out onto the ice and drilled two holes there. The ice turned out to be about 25cm thick and the depth under it was almost a metre. Even though it was calm, sounds from the ice could still be heard on the surface. Sounds that would have been much clearer in the wind earlier that day.
I had to start recording immediately if I was going to be able to record these sounds under the ice. If it gets calm for a few more hours the lake will get very quiet.
The sounds heard in the recording are heard just as well on the surface, except that they are heard much louder under the ice, plus all kinds of smaller details.
Since I was not far from land, the rumble of a car driving along a road about 100 metres away is also heard through the ground. Then you can hear the rumble of air traffic very well, which is probably because the ice on the lake acts like a membrane on a microphone. At the same time, I climbed out onto the ice to take pictures so that my footsteps could be clearly heard.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid volume. There are a lot of very powerful sounds in this recording that can easily damage your hearing and speakers. I therefore do not recommend high volume
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Some of the loudest pitch there seems to be have some distortion. I didn’t notice this until the recording was transfered to mp3. But this is not a problem on the original recording WAV 24bit/48Khz. Let’s just leave it like this
Here is a difficult and poor recording that probably should not have taken place on this blog site, except because this is a recording of „HUM“.
This is the second Hum recording I have managed to record. In the first one, the origin of the sound was obvious, but in this recording the rumble, or drone sound, is slightly incomprehensible.
This recording was recorded in quite a bit of wind. I therefore had to hide the microphones behind a small stone cairn which in a way affects the recording and is heard differently in different headphones. It was a total coincidence that I heard this HUM because I was not walking or riding a bicycle, but in a car, which usually takes away all natural experience.
There at the top of the Vikurheiði heath I decided to stop and brew myself a coffee. That’s how I became aware of the HUM that filled the air around me. I somehow couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. It was coming from literally all directions, but somehow I convinced myself it probably originated from the mountaintops beyond the fjord. I tried to listen for engine noise through this rumble noise, but it wasn’t exactly clear, except twice.
The remarkable thing about this noise was that, considering the wind and turbulence in the air, the sound was surprisingly loud. Not least if the sound originated from the aluminum plant in Reyðarfjörður, which was 17km away (in a straight line). Later that day it was confirmed that this noise was not heard from the aluminum plant.
Out in the fjord were two feeding or service boats around aquaculture. But they weren’t moving so the sounds were hardly coming from there.
At the pier by the aluminum plant there was a large bulk ship that turned its exhaust pipe towards me. But it was motionless the entire 3 hours I was up on the heath, so the sounds definitely didn’t come from the ship’s main engines.
The only explanation I have for the origin of these sounds is probably this:
The mountain slopes in Reyðarfjörður are many shaped like parabolas. They can therefore amplify sounds in certain places and directions. I therefore assume that the sounds came from the bulk ship’s generators, mixed with traffic noise in the fjord, as well as noise from the aluminum plant.
It can be assumed that this HUM will be heard differently in different headphones or speakers. Therefore, it should not be surprising if some listeners are disappointed.
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More about this phenomenon „Global HUM“
My erlier „Hum“ recording „Waste of power“
Here is an old recording that was found in storage after Dad died in 2011. Is it a recording that his parents, ie. my grandparents did, possibly in a few days, but there is one date, which is February 3, 1963.
My grandfather was Jón Björnsson (b.1903 – d.1985) from Karlsskála in Reyðarfjörður, east Iceland, but he lived most of his life in Reykjavík.
My grandmother Guðrún Bergþóra Bergsdóttir (b.1904 – d.1972) lived all her life in Reykjavík.
The reason for the recording was that Dad was studying electrical engineering in Germany. He was among the first engineering students who left Iceland to study in Europe after World War II.
Although there was a telephone between Iceland and mainland Europe, it was not possible for the public to make daily calls. But in those days it was customary to correspond and send letters. Around and after 1960, people began to acquire tape recorders and then the idea arose among Icelandic students to not only send letters, but also to use this new medium where people could hear the voices of their loved ones.
Unfortunately, not much of these recordings have survived, because tapes were expensive at these times. It was therefore customary to send the same tape back and forth with new recorded material each time. Something I unfortunately also did 10-20 years later with the cassettes.
Here in this recording, my grandfather and grandmother talk about the social life in Reykjavík, talk about the high frequency of accidents, possibly marine accidents that were almost a monthly occurrence, not least in the winter of those years. Then they talk about friends who are moving into a new flat, others having children and then others buying a new car. Grandfather talks about having a dream of me (Magnus) from when I was young, until I was old. Then he calls me, and asks me If I recognize his voice.
Then he mentions a beautifully carved cigar box that I inherited from my grandmother’s brother, Magnús Bergsson, who was a baker, but later went into the fishing industry with his son-in-law.
Most of the material on the recording is, however, mainly a recording from the Icelandic national broadcast service (RUV), which was at that time the only Icelandic radio station. The program was sent out on Long Wave so it could reach the whole country, but only during the day time.
Both grandparents enjoy listening to music and or dancing at all times and have fun. Therefore, you can hear both Icelandic piano music and Icelandic opera. At the end of the recording there is an educational episode about „automation“ in production and machinery, which my grandparents have been thinking my father would like to hear in Germany.
This recording below was in incredibly bad condition and of very poor recording quality. The volume was extremely fluctuating, probably because it wasn’t recorded on the same day. You could barely hear what was said in the recording due to the 50Hz hum and accompanying harmonics frequencies. Grandpa actually mentions in the recording that both the radio and the tape recorder are broken. The recorder even broke apart the tape so he had to fix it.
I was never able to clean this recording acceptably when I had the Izotope RX5 or RX8. It wasn’t until I got the RX10 that it went much better. However, I didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning everything or fixing it, simply because it would have changed the character of the bad sound quality that people were struggling with at these times. At least now you could hear what was being said.
The reason I released this recording on the web now, is that earlier this month it was 120 years since my grandmother was born.
I think it is worth mentioning that, some years ago I published another tape recording from the sixties, which was most likely a multimedia message from my parents in Germany to my grandparents in Iceland. It was from the Christmas 1964
(mp3 256kbps / 64Mb)
Recorder: unknown open reel deck.
Transferred from Revox B77 MkII to Sound devices 744 (24/48)
Mic. Unkown
Pix: Jón Björsson and Bergþóra Bergsóttir at home, close to the year 1964
I think I have annual recordings from the same place in the nature reserve in Flói in southwest Iceland almost since 2009. The reason is simple. It’s always interesting to follow the local acoustics from year to year. So I don’t have to spend a lot of time finding a location for the microphone. They stand in the same place unless something else disturbs it, e.g. high ground water level or something else that hasn’t yet happened to me. I go to the place hoping that there is no one in „my place“ in the parking lot where I can pull out my 75 meter 4ch long cable to the place where I have always recorded. I find a good ground for the microphones, get in the car, start recording and go to sleep.
I usually wake up when someone comes driving into the parking lot about 4-6 hours later.
I usually never listen to what I recorded, except when I need to look for something interesting to post on this audio blog like now.
It is well worth having a recording from Flói this month when 15 years have passed since this audio blog went online. Flói has followed this blog ever since I got my first HD recorder. It was then that the batteries suddenly lasted longer than 30 minutes, but it opened up a whole new world for me to record in nature.
Here is an audio recording from June 13, 2023. The area was extremely wet after heavy rains. I positioned the microphones to be in close proximity to the Read necked phalarope. But maybe there wasn’t as much activity as I wanted. But instead you can hear various sounds that I am not quite sure where they are coming from. There are weak „clicks“ that can be heard e.g. for 1:30 min in this recording as well during the 30 minutes that the recording lasts.
As usual, there are many species of birds in Flói. Red-throated Loon. Red-necked Phalarope, Common Snipe, Golden Plover, Whimbrel, Common Eider and certainly other duck species as well. Common Redshank, White Wagtail, Winter Wren, Northern Wheatear, Common Redpoll, Snow Bunting, Swan and maybe other bird species that I cannot name.
Background noise is some traffic and surf from the south coast and air traffic.
You can hear it occasionally in the wind because I covered the wind shield with buff but not fur. Instead, you can hear much better in subtlety details.
This is an extremely low-key recording, except where you hear the Red-throated Loon. The recording was recorded with 50db gain (40Hz HPF), then the gain was further increased by +10dB in post-processing.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid volume.
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Here is one of those recordings that I record without being directly aware of what will come out of it. Equipment is placed in a suitable location where the wind was minimal and left there for 30-40 minutes while taking a walk. So I really don’t know what is being recorded until much later when you have time to listen and process the recording.
In fact, I knew of a rockfall at this location and was rather afraid about leaving the equipment behind, because the ice cave that the recording equipment was in might as well collapse. Then there would be a mud and rock slide from the mountain slope that would submerge everything.
This ice cave was at the end of Breiðamerkurjökull icefall, in a place where the glacier was probably 300 meters thicker only 40 years ago when I first came to this part of Iceland. Now the glacier is not more than dirty, „dead“ ice. A lot of it is buried under sand and rocks.
For centuries, the glacier has scraped the slopes of the mountains in Suðursveit. When the glacier retreated, gravel and rocks fell from the mountain slopes on the glacier below, which then formed a thick insulating layer over the ice closest to the mountain slopes. Under normal circumstances for centuries, the advance of the glacier would have carried this gravel down to the glacier toe. But the glacier has for two decades stopped advancing in this place. The glacier has lost all its mass so it will not crawl anymore in this place. The glacier lies flat and dirty towards the sun in the south, thin and melts rapidly. However, the ice that is covered with gravel and rocks melts much more slowly. Therefore, e.g. still possible to see ice high up on the mountain slope of Vestur Miðfell, although it is probably 30-40 years since the glacier was there and reach so high in the mountain slope
The pleasant surprise of this recording was that the wind did not interfere with the recording. You can hear mudslides sliding down the ice-covered mountain slope with all kinds of sounds that sometimes remind of car traffic. Sharp clicks in the rock as it bounces all around the mic and in good headphones you can hear the rock bouncing over the mic.
You will hear people speaking in the distance, which was several hikers coming from the glacier.
You might hear a lot of „white noise“ in this recording but it is mainly coming from nearby rivers, the wind and rapidly melting glaciers which are usually astonishingly noisy when they melt fast .
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at medium to high volume.
But be careful. This recording has a high dynamic range and can damage both speakers and your hearing if it is played too high.
The summer of 2023 was difficult when it came to recording nature sound. It was always windy, except for a few moments here and there. So I got only a few recordings that I was satisfied with. But this summer 2024, the weather was even worse. The summer started with a snowstorm in the north of the country when many migratory birds had started nesting and everything disappeared under the snow. Actually the whole summer has been both cold and wet, which will not change now in late August .
I haven’t asked any experts in that field, but in my opinion, birdlife has been extremely dull or quiet all over the country. That’s why everything I recorded this summer in places where I should have heard a rich birdlife is almost nothing, except wind and rain sound recorded in temperature between 0-7 °C.
Keep in mind that when the wind exceeds 2-4 m/sec, many sounds that could otherwise travel long distances disappear. In addition, sounds that travel a relatively short distance sound much further away than if it were calm.
On June 1, 2024, I began to realize the situation because I had not been able to record bird life for a whole month of May due to the weather.
So I took the opportunity when I noticed a starling nest inside a wall in an abandoned barn to record a birdlife inside. I was able to record through a small hole in the wall but the bird had access to the nest on the outside.
I used a Nevaton MC50 quad and a Zoom F3 recorder, but made the mistake of recording in X/Y rather than in MS. I say that because the weather sound in this barn was no less interesting than what happens in the starling’s nest.
The background noise is primarily from trees blowing in the wind outside. Some of the windows in the barn are covered with plastic film, so from them comes the sound of drums in gusts and sometimes you can hear rain. You can hear a few migratory birds outside, but otherwise it’s not very lively
Because I record this in a tight situation, close to a corner, I don’t seem to have placed the microphone in the best place. There is therefore not a perfect balance between the right and left channels plus the stereo image is rather tight.
But let’s not let that distract the audience.
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It took me a while to make that decision to put this recording on the web. Mainly because then I would normally have had to tell about the recording location.
But I’m going to say as little as possible, even though the story of the location is for me more interesting than this recording.
The location will therefore be a mysterious part of this recording.
The reason I don’t want this place to be attractive is mainly because then I am sure this place is likely to be destroyed.
Every time I visit this place it is like the time is standing still.
In some weather conditions, getting to this location from a busy road can be like going through a time machine.
Quite a few people know about this house, and it’s not quite in the public eye today.
This is a stone-clad house, built in 1883. It was supposed to serve as a shelter for travelers and mail carriers, but it fell into disuse because of ghosts.
I have been coming there regularly for nearly 40 years, mostly before the turn of the century in my bicycle tours, sometimes staying overnight and seeking shelter, or just sweeping the floor and writing in the guest book. The place is therefore quite dear to me.
The weather in Iceland so far this summer has been both cold and windy, and although I am much better equipped for traveling today than I was last century, I felt the need to seek shelter at the house this summer. There were quite familiar sounds in the house that I recorded there in 3 different places. Here is one of those recordings. Rain and wind hit the windows intensely and the front door from time to time, which is most likely the ghost knocking the door.
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I have posted a protest against the western genocide in Palestine twice in the last few months and will continue to do so while the ruling elite of the West is killing people and ethnic groups to serve its imperialism in Palestine and all over the world.
A few days before I recorded this protest, the police had used tear gas on the protesters, so I also expected it could happen again. But it didn’t, except protesters use a smoke bomb.
These protests were held in front of the Icelandic Parliament during a parliamentary session. Icelandic parliamentarians are ALL puppets of the government in Washington, so the Icelandic government is complicit in the horrors that are taking place in the Middle East, both today and in the past, and elsewhere where Western imperialism attacks the world’s inhabitants.
This recording is about 35 minute long, but the whole protest lasted for approx. two hours.
The sound quality in the speaker system that was used by the protestors was terrible, but they were directed towards the parliament building. So I decided to stand behind them rather than in front so therefore It can be heard a little better in the people themselves.
(mp3 256kbps / 66Mb)
Recorder: Sound devices MixPre6
Mics: Primo EM172 parallel double capsule in baffled – binaural setup
Pix: Samsung S6
Skorradalsvatn lake is located in the western part of Iceland, about an hour’s drive from Reykjavík. In the winter of 2023, I had the opportunity to record under the ice under ideal weather conditions. That was in good wind and good frost after 2-3 weeks of frost.
The winter of 2023 to 2024 was similar in many ways when looking at temperature numbers, but I only managed to record under the ice once. It was calm weather and the ice therefore did not make any sounds.
But then just a few days before the spring arrived there was one windy weekend so I made a trip to the lake even though I knew the frost had only lasted more than a week.
When the lake was reached, the ice was solid, but quiet in all this the wind, which indicated that it could be soft and not human-proof. Among the banks were many polynyas with broken ice. This broken ice was turbulent due to currents and under waves from the ice-covered water.
It was therefore stupit to try to get out on the lake, even though the ice seemed thicker there. I was also traveling alone, so no risks were taken this year.
This turbulent dancing ice in the polynyas makes pleasant natural music. So I had not come to the place to do nothing. There was considerable wind or about 12-20 m/sec. But what saved me was a wooded mountainside behind me so the wind was not constant, but occasionally came in with strong gusts.
The wind made a lot of pink noise in the forest. Quiet microphone was therefore not important. Two cardioids would have been the best choice for this project, but I did not have them in a good windshield. I simply chose the one that suited the weather best. It was my home-made Primo EM172 Binaural/baffled stereo microphone which I put on ice close to the one polynya.
When I got home, things got worse. The gusts had been so strong that even my best set of mics for these conditions failed.
I don’t have Advanced Izotope RX, so I don’t have the De Wind plugin, which is sorely missing from the RX Standard version. So I got my soulmate in sound, Buzby Birchall to run the recording through his RX De Wind software. The result was interesting and made me feel like I didn’t really need to own or use the RX De Wind. After I had set the HPF on the original recording to 111Hz / 1.7oct, the recording was „no worse“ than the one that had received the RX De Wind treatment. However, you could clearly hear that the HPF recording had a bit more wind noise below 200Hz, but on the other hand, other details sounded somehow better and tighter than on the De Wind recording. When inspecting the Spectrogram, it was clear from the De wind recording that frequencies below 100Hz had somewhat deteriorated, also slightly below 1.2Khz. This visible attenuation was not audible in all headphones, but was audible in the HD650 headphones at 24bit/48Khz.
Below are both the HPF version and the DeWind version.
Feel free to judge the difference and comment below.
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HLJÓÐMYND - SOUNDIMAGE 