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.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid volume.
If the media player doesn’t start to play, please reload this individual blog in a new tab or frame.
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.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid volume.
If the media player doesn’t start to play, please reload this individual blog in a new tab or frame.
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.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid volume.
If the media player doesn’t start to play, please reload this individual blog in a new tab or frame.
Although Iceland produces the most electricity per capita of any nation, wind turbines are not common in Iceland. They have either burned or overturned or something else. They are also not eye-catching, so fortunately there are no more than two that come to mind.
But that could change. Many energy oligarchs, domestic and foreign, have worked hard to be allowed to do what they want when it comes to building power plants of all kinds in Icelandic nature. They are mainly interested in it because the price of energy to the Icelandic public is not yet as extreme as in most other parts of the western world. So these Oligarchs see great profit prospects by imposing dividend taxes on the public in the future.
But stop now talking about this miserable situation and future in Iceland. I’m going crazy just thinking about it.
Let’s talk about the recording below.
Although this is a sound that is heard in many places, especially in the Western countries, these sounds from wind turbines are not yet common in Iceland. I therefore allow myself to share this recording.
It wasn’t until I started listening to it that I noticed the wide variation in the sounds, or noise coming from such structures. This is one of Iceland’s two 900KW wind turbines, of the type Enercon E-44. This wind generator reaches a height of 77 meters, with a rotor blades width of 44 meters and a generator height of 55 meters.
The wind was quite stable and directional, but you can clearly hear the hydraulic pumps that are either turning the rotor blades into the wind direction, or changing the rotation of the blades to get maximum energy each time. You can also hear when the wind sounds change in the blades after such control. Then you can hear quite a lot of „electrical noise“ which is either vibration from the generator or from the energy regulators up in the generator carrier. You can also hear that one blade make more noise than other two. It is either because that blade has a scratched surface, or that blade is dirtier than the other two.
More than 5 months have passed and the genocide is still going on in Gaza in occupied Palestine. Since the Western-backed Zionists started destroying Gaza and the West Bank and the genocide of the people of Gaza, the Iceland-Palestine Association and other peace activists have been holding actions in various places in Reykjavik almost every week all this winter.
I myself have not been able to attend all these solidarity marches, but I did so here when they marched through the center of Reykjavik to the British and German embassies on March 2, 2024.
I encourage people to attend such solidarity marches with Palestine around the world and record them. We must end the horrors that Western imperialism and colonialism have cost the rest of the world for centuries, and most recently in Palestine.
It was quite cold but sunny, and sometimes there was a gust of wind that sometimes interrupted the recording because I didn’t use HPF. Here I am recording in binaural and using Primo EM 172 capsules which are located near my ears and point 180° in each direction.
The recording was done on a Sony PCM-D100 so the equipment fit in a pocket, was light and compact.
At the first peace meeting I attended in October, I used a Baffled-AB-Binaural microphone set based on 2×2 EM172 capsules, which can withstand much higher winds, but at the same time requires more bulky and heavier equipment.
(mp3 256kbps / 53Mb)
Recorder: Sony PCM-D100
Mics: Primo EM172 binaural
Pix: Samsung S22
Weather: Clear sky. Gust 1-10 m/sec -2°C
Last summer 2023 I went to a place I haven’t recorded much. Was it at Strandir in northwest Iceland. A friend invited me to stay in an apartment for a few days in Drangsnes, so I tried to use the time as well as I could for field recordings in the area.
It actually didn’t go very well. I had come down with a bad flu the same week as summer vacation started so I had little to no energy for many weeks. I was also facing another problem. The whole time I was in the area there was a strong wind except for maybe 1-2 hours during some nights. It was also rather cold, so nature was rather silent. Much of the material I caught these days was therefore not particularly interesting.
However, I had the opportunity one calm night to record a nice peace at the coastline. Part of it is here below. It’s very likely that I will put more of this recording on the web later, because the soundscape changed a bit during the 3-4 hours I was recording.
It is the summer solstice so it is therefore bright all day long. The recording starts at 23:45 and ends at 00:20 o´clock.
This is a typical soundscape in fjords in northern Iceland and in fact everywhere around the arctic circles.
This is a high gain recording. Recorded at +50 db. Then add about 20dB up to -7dB peak RMS. No noise reduction in post. Just fade in and out.
Many bird species are in this recording. 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. Sheep were not far away and seals were lying on rocks near the beach.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid volume.
If the media player doesn’t start to play, please reload this individual blog in a new tab or frame.
Recording fireworks is probably like photographing a sunset for a photographer. Nothing special but there is always some duty that calls for it to be done.
It is not the loud sound that fascinates, but the interaction of the sound with the environment. Reflection of a sound wave. e.g. the echoes from houses, mountains or trees that make it interesting to record fireworks. The problem, however, is that I am often confined to staying at home with my family on this day. I am therefore not in different places from year to year, and therefore I have to say that I have not made a good or interesting recording of fireworks, apart from maybe one recording in Tenerife. I’m also always experimenting with microphone setups, which usually don’t work out well when there’s a lot of other things going on.
It is with mixed feelings that I put a fireworks recording on the web this time. Have done it before and therefore not urgent to do it again because it always sounds as a loud noise which is not healthy for the ears or speakers.
But this new year is marked by terrible wars, which unfortunately all have their origins to the western hegemony and imperialism, as usual. Most recently with the targeted genocide in Palestine which as of this writing can easily escalate into an even bigger war, more or less all over the middle east.
The NATO proxy war in Ukraine is still going on after almost ten years conflict. It has destroyed Ukraine and seems to be also destroying Europe in coming years, if not in decades because of politicians stupidity. This time, the West, led by the United States, EU & GB has lost both credibility and the trust of most nations in the world.
The world is changing. US unipolar empire is falling and new multipolar empires are rising. At the same time, the US will drag Europe down in the fall and destroy Europe as a flourishing continent, only because of insane hatred towards Russia.
The new year therefore does not seem to offer anything good for many nations, but only continued with conflict and disaster. Fireworks with all its noise are therefore no longer part of entertainment in my mind, but a reminder of war with destruction, killings and mutilations.
This recording was made in my backyard, between houses with LCT540s in IRT. You can hear that the echo time is short. Some might think it’s because I used a Limiter. But the Limiter was turned off, as always should be done when recording fireworks. Recording sound pressure rose to a peak of +7.7dB (-7.4 LUFS-S) .
Details that can often be heard in fireworks when they are launched are not heard clearly in this recording because they were launched from beyond the houses in this backyard. However, I had another microphone set (MKH20/40 parallel AB) close to a place where people were setting off fireworks, but that recording did not go well for various reasons.
Even though this recording has been downgraded to mp3, be careful when listening to this recording. Don´t put up the volume, especially not when listening with speakers.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at mid/high-level.
Following picture shows the spectrogram of the whole recording this new years eve. But following recording start at 22:30min. Midnight is at 30:00min and the recording end at 52:30min
If the media player doesn’t start to play, please reload this individual blog in a new tab or frame.
I do quite a bit of recording music, so it would be nice to be able to publish some of it here, especially music that I think is extremely well played and where the recording has been successful. For example, I have often wanted to put classical music on the web in December and January. But professionals have little interest in giving permission for this, possibly because I only ask these people once.
So I’m going to share different music instead, which is even more beautiful than all music, but it’s birdsong in the spring.
Here is a recording from last spring that I had forgotten I had recorded.
I had a Zoom F3 device recording in several places almost non-stop for several days in Stafholtstungur, western Iceland. I used Rode NT1 microphones and set them up to NOS 90°/30cm. It can hardly be considered the best setup for such long nature recordings. The reason is that sounds such as background noise from the wind, rustling of leaves, running streams and traffic can change a lot in 24 hours, so the sound pressure between channels can easily go out of balance. It can even be detected in this recording. Some traffic can be detected at a distance of 5-10 km in the (left) channel. That’s why it’s usually best to record in AB 40-50cm, if you’re going to record for a long time.
But since I primarily record natural „silence“, there are not many microphones that handle silence well and the ones that do it best are all cardioid, which has led me to start recording a lot in IRT (4ch 90°/30cm)
In some cases, it is possible to set the cardioid up to AB 40-50cm, but you cannot do that unless you intend to record from one direction. In this place the sounds were coming from all directions so it was not available.
It’s a low-key recording, actually amplified silence. Recorded at „Zoom gain at 256“ and HPF 40hz. In post-processing the recording was normalized (+25) up to -7dB
There is a lot of recorded material here that I feel is a shame to be forgotten on hard disks, so I’m going to allow myself to call this „Part 1“ because Part 2 and 3 and more also need to get here on the web.
The footage will therefore not be exactly from the recording location, but not further than 500 meters away.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid volume.
If the media player doesn’t start to play, please reload this individual blog in a new tab or frame.
(mp3 256kbps /66,5Mb)
Recorder: Zoom F3
Mics Rode NT1 (NOS 90°/30cm)
Mics: Canon EOS R
Weather: Calm, partly cloudy, around 7 to 10°C
On October 15, 2023, a solidarity meeting with Palestine was held at Austurvelli in downtown Reykjavík. I think I could estimate that about 5-6 hundred people came to the meeting, which can be considered quite good by Icelandic standards
The week before, on October 7th, western propaganda media had reported some vague attack by „Hamas“ forces that was considered terrorism against civilians of the so-called „state of Israel“. Much is still unclear about what will happen on this October day. Even the occupiers themselves were not all on the same page about what really happened that day, as it became clear that Apache military helicopters from the occupying forces had probably caused more damage and killed even more people than „Hamas“ forces in some places.
But if Hamas had done something, it was enough for the „Israeli“ occupation authorities to think they had the right to let bombs rain on innocent civilians in the world’s most densely populated area, the Gaza strip. Gaza is nothing more than a concentration camp, fully controlled by this „Israel“ fascist colony state, supported by the west since 1948.
More about this conflict: The untold history of Hamas. The ‘Hamas human shield’ justification for Israeli war crimes Why does the US support Israel?
I am not going to comment further on these miserable conditions that the Palestinians have had to withstand for 75 years. It is quite clear that the legacy of Hitler and the imperialist policies of the West is ruling the occupied Palestine.
At Austurvöllur on October 15, several speeches were given as well as songs. To be able to stick to the time frame, I took out one speech and the songs.
(mp3 256kbps / 60Mb)
Recorder: Sound devices MixPre6
Mics: DIY Stereo mic. Double Primo EM172 capsules in AB baffled/binaural setup
Pix: Samsung G22
Weather: Cloudy, wind up to 4m/s, about 2°C
Location: 64.147308, -21.940289
HLJÓÐMYND - SOUNDIMAGE 