Now I’m going to allow myself to be boring and brief and bring you a recording that has characterized all my recordings this summer. It’s rain and wind.
It seems to me that this year is going to be the worst I’ve ever had to record stillness, calm and birdsong. It has been both windy and quite a bit of rain where I’ve traveled to record.
The wind has, however, had the advantage that I haven’t really gotten any fly bites this summer. I’ve traveled through areas where it would have been hard to catch my breath or open my eyes because of the hovering midgets if the right recording weather had been there.
This bad weather hasn’t been universal, though. Sometimes I’ve been in the right place at the right moment. It seems to me at a glance that I’ve also managed to get a few nice recordings. I’ll have to go through all the recordings to figure out how much it is, though.
Before I embark on yet another recording journey, here is a recent recording. It was recorded on July 10th 2026 at Austursandur in Öxarfjörður, which describes the summer of 2026 quite well so far.
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I have been recording soundscapes on a piece of land I own in the western part of the country for the past few years. In the winter it has been dead silence and in the summer abundant birdlife. Some of these recordings have found their way here to my sound blog.
It is quite wooded there in the countryside, I am quite aware that this will change the composition of bird species over time. I think for example that the Golden Plover has practically disappeared from this area and has moved higher up to the heath. However, Golden Plover can be seen in groups in early spring in farmers’ fields, but then they disappear to the heath where there are no trees. I remember before tree planting became common, there were much more Golden Plovers in human settlements than today.
In the accompanying recording, however, you can hear the Golden Plover. It can also be heard in birds that have always been there, i.e. for the time of tree planting such as Whimbrel, Common Redshank, Black Tailed Godwit and Common Snipe.
Then I hear a bird that I have not heard before which I think is Common Shelduck (3:30min). It surprises me a bit because this is not the preferred area of this species, although they are seen on the move early in the spring.
The bird that has completely changed the soundscape in my county is primarily Redwing. Redwing is not my favourite songbird at all, but it can be an interesting study to study the differences in their songs based on the region. The differences are quite a bit, and I have mentioned it before. and it is work that I would like to do if I live long enough to do such a thing.
I am not going to be long in this post because I would rather be recording these days than hanging in front of the keyboard.
I must say though. This recording was recorded in IRT cross. I usually arrange the microphones clockwise 1-left, 2-right, 3-left, 4-right. I tend to do it the same way when I post content on the web. I do it because various types of background noise such as river noise and car traffic sound better balanced, which can also be constantly changing during the recording. The same can be said for wildlife. The recording sounds not unlike an AB recording.
Here, however, I arrange the channels 1-left, 2-right, 3-right, 4-left. The recording therefore sounds no different from if I had used a Jecklin disk, with a 180° sound field in each direction. This often gives a clearer stereo image of the environment, but it also sounds a little narrower. For me, who knows the recording location, this kind of mix gives me a good idea of which direction the sounds are coming from.
There is another thing that is clear about this recording. The microphones are not covered in fur but in blue Buff. The result is quite striking. Birds do not seem to make any warning sounds and are clearly not afraid of the microphones.
The recording was made between 5-6 am. This is a lowkey recording, except at one point (24:50min) where a Redwing is very close to the microphones.
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Now I’m just going to fantasize. Because some recordings are stuck in my mind.
Sometimes recordings sound different than I hoped based on the experience at the recording location. In other words, the recording didn’t live up to expectations. Here’s one of them.
I’m quite aware that this can happen and so I’m not surprised anymore. Experience is visual and auditory, sometimes also olfactory. So if one of these elements is missing, the recording can sound „bad“ when you get home.
The advantage of the human brain is that it can focus on certain sounds in the distance and exclude others, similar to vision that narrows the horizon. But when it comes to microphones and stereo sound recordings, all sounds are only two-dimensional, like a photograph on a wall.
The more sensitive to detail the microphones are and the higher the resolution, the better it will be to focus on individual things and exclude others when listening. But it often doesn’t tell you much about depth or distance. Recordings made in open spaces don’t give much information about distance. The sounds are just in front of you like an image. But if you record in a forest, for example, where distant sounds are reflected between trees, your brain can get a slightly clearer picture of depth and distance in the stereo recording.
Here’s a recording that illustrates this nicely. A large, wide area, although it’s surrounded by mountains on three sides. Natural sounds are very quiet, while the background noise is „very loud“, coming from the streams in the surrounding mountains.
When I was there, the environment sounded much more peaceful. It felt almost dead silent, probably because my focus was on the birdlife and I paid little attention to the streams. I wasn’t in the same place as the microphones. They were closer to the shore and therefore also recording the sea as it gently lapping against the gravel at the shore. But those sounds were actually added to the background noise from nearby streams and rivers. The background noise is therefore much louder than I experienced at the recording location.
You can also hear „stones being thrown into the sea“ near the recording location. But these were actually Arctic terns stepping onto the ocean surface in search of food up to 200-400 meters away. But in the recording you would think it was happening at a distance of 5-15 meters.
The picture that this audio recording is giving is therefore quite different from the visible reality at the recording location.
I am not going to spend too much time writing about this different experience, because I am quite sure that those who do field recordings know this quite well.
To give an indication of how quiet nature was at the recording site, the recording was recorded at +48dB gain and in the sound processing it was necessary to raise it by another +20dB to reach -7dB to normalize.
It should also be noted that I did not use noise reduction.
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Here is a recording that came as a surprise after I put it in Spectrogram, because I was sure that I had not recorded anything special.
Earlier the evening before the recording started, a lot of wind had been forecast for later that night. So I was not spreading recording equipment around me as I would have liked in this wonderful and secret place in the highlands.
However, I decided to use Lewitt LCT540s in an IRT cross in a sheltered place from the coming storm. Two of the four microphones were pointed as much as possible into the ground, while the other two were allowed to point out into an open area. The recording seemed to only sound interesting in the wind that was present when I started the recording. The entire time I had been at this place in the highlands, I had not heard birds or any other life. Only in the wind and the flow of water in the nearby water sources.
But later that night while I was sleeping, a completely calm weather came that seemed to awaken a lot of birdlife. Birds that I had neither seen nor heard earlier the days before.
However, I never noticed this peaceful weather that night or this bird song. I just went to sleep in the breeze and woke up in a storm. It was therefore quite amusing to discover that I had managed to record the birdsong even though the microphones were placed in the wrong place for such a thing. It was first and foremost the microphones facing the ground that captured the most bird song. Those facing out into the open mainly recorded the behavior of Red necked phalarope which were at a considerable distance and goose in far distance.
To be honest, considering the placement of the microphones, this is a surprisingly good recording. This can probably be attributed to these excellent Lewitt microphones, also because they were not very visible to the birds that are best heard because they do not emit warning sounds. But if I had worn the microphones in something other than fur and been positioned closer to where the birds were, I would have achieved incredibly clear recordings in the most subtle way. In addition, very distant sounds would have become more clear and focused. But it is always difficult to be prepared for such weather conditions that it is possible to be without fur in Iceland when such times are perhaps 6-12 hours a month.
You can hear in the entire recording running water, also a kind of rumbling from running water that I assume could be a stream of spring water below the ground. But in this area there are huge water sources that could probably serve a city of millions with fresh water. The sound was recorded at +50dB gain and increased by +20dB in post up to -10dB. No RX noise reduction, mainly because I have never been satisfied with the result when I have used the LCT540. But EQ was used. Sharply pulled down below 50hz and above 10Khz, mainly to bring down unnecessary rumble and white noise from the equipment.
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Here is an audio recording from a secret spot in the central highlands of Iceland that I have previously shared sounds from. But I will not say where that place is.
By pure coincidence, I was on the outskirts of the central highlands on June 29, 2024 when I heard that a road into the highlands that had been closed all winter had been opened. So I was among the first to enter the highlands and this secret spot this summer.
There are old stone/turf ruins at the site where I noticed a White Wagtail had made a nest inside the wall. It was quite windy so it was the perfect opportunity to record what was happening inside the ruins.
For the first few hours, I did not notice much birdlife at the ruins, until very early in the morning. The recording began soon after I noticed the birds had arrived in the area. It was clear that the birds were not happy with these gray furry neighbors so close to their nesting site. One of the birds tried to scare the microphones away with wingbeats and warning sounds. But the microphones stood firm and did not move, so later that night the birds took the microphones in peace.
Later in the morning it was heard that the White Wagtail can make various sounds, probably for communication, but that will be the subject of another post.
This area has incredibly abundant freshwater springs, so it’s a real surprise every time I visit the area. The sound of the water from these springs can be heard in the background of the recording, as well as other birdlife that is always found in such water and vegetation oases in the Icelandic highlands, which are otherwise just a black desert.
The recording was made with a Rode NT1a inside the walls of the ruins. The sound, or stereo image, is therefore a bit strange, but you get used to it.
Recorder was Zoom F3. Digital gain at 256 and HPF 40hz.
In post, add +13dB to normalize, fade in & out, and then downgraded to mp3
Early in July 2023 I spent one night at Sultártangalón lagoon recording in three locations.
In the morning when I was leaving, it was sunny, calm and very hot, in the Icelandic way. The sight over the mirror smooth lagoon made me stop the car and enjoy the view. The recorders were ready and connected in the car, so I quickly set them up by the reservoir and took a short walk while they were recording.
The result was this. Typical Icelandic highland silence. Nothing interesting as an audio recording, but what caught my attention was the background noise of waterfalls and streams across the lagoon. This noise changed the EQ slowly in a variable thermal upstream due to the influence of the sun radiation.
Several bird species can be heard in this recording. These include Raven, Golden Plover, Dunlin, White Wagtail, Meadow Pipit and Red Throated Loon.
This was recorded with MKH8020/8040 in a fur wind shield, which was not the best choice, because the silence was considerable. Audio was recorded on MP6 with 50dB gain and in post-processing the gain was increased by another 20dB so they reached -10dBu.The MKH microphones were therefore not the most suitable for this moment. It would have been better if I had recorded with the LCT540s in IRT, to better capture all the small details all around.
To cancel out the loss of certain frequencies due to the fur wind shield, I raised the mid frequency by +2dB.
This is a rather sensitive recording. So I wasn’t using RX de-noise. But instead since nothing in the recording reaches frequencies higher than 8Khz, I lowered the EQ above 10Khz by a few dB to reduce the self noise in the microphones.
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I always miss those times in the last century when I rode on a bicycle alone for weeks in the highlands. I knew every single road and trail that could be found on maps, and other routes too. I had a special ability to look at maps and make detailed travel plans based on route conditions and weather forecasts. I knew very well my physical limitations and all the places where I could seek from bad weather. Therefore I never had any problems in my travels.
Without meeting people or seeing human structure, nature and I merged into one. The journeys were therefore both mentally and physically rejuvenation.
After the year 2002, cars and traffic began to increase rapidly in Iceland. Mountain huts that used to be shelters were now closed. Many emergency huts were removed due to poor handling. It became increasingly difficult to travel without being disturbed by noisy humans and without shelter in remote locations.
One of these very few emergency huts that still exist and are open and have saved many lives is on a Kaldidalur route. For me this hut was often a first overnight stop from Reyakjavík on the way to cross the highland.
I was in Kaldidalur 28th of May 2017 to record the surroundings. I decided to record beside the hut to record a familiar sound.
This is a typical soundscape for Icelandic highland. Birds in the distance and windy and if not windy and rainy then complete silence.
Inside the hut was normally the same sound but more silent, except if there was buzzing fly in the window.
Even though it is many years since this soundscape was part of my daily experience, I get an undeniable nostalgia for the past for listening to this recording
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It has been several years since I published a recording from Flói nature reserve. The reason is more or less because of foul weather in recent years when I have had the opportunity to record there.
It was no exception last summer from late April to mid July. It was cold, windy and wet most of the time which is actually the high season for birdsong recording.
I went there on the 3rd of July 2021 and recorded overnight. The weather was calm in the beginning but the wind increased over the night. I was also struggling with increased sea tide and therefore a surf noise from the coast line, actually at the same time when the birds were most active during the dawn.
My mics were Lewitt LCT540s in IRT cross setup. Most of the bird’s activity was in front of channel 1&2. Most „silence“ was in front of channel 2&3 and most of the surf and traffic noise was at channel 4&1.
It surprised me how much traffic was there the whole night. There was almost constant rumble in the air during the ten hours I was recording, except between four and five o’clock in the morning. This noise was much more audible than I remember in my earlier recordings. The reason could be found in different mic setup and mics. Ten years ago I used to use NT1a in NOS or AB, pointing towards the open field and keeping the nearest road and coastline behind. I have also used MKH20 in AB which is less sensitive for these details than large capsule mics.
It takes time to search in this 10 hour long recording for some nice sounding 30 minutes moments. Listening to the whole four channels it starts with heavy traffic noise in all channels, then surf noise. Then traffic noise again until the wind and the sun makes the air so unstable close to noon, both traffic noise and bird activity almost disappear in the wind noise.
But with an IRT cross rig I have many options. I can turn off the channel or channels which are disturbing for the soundscape I am looking for.
The recording below is a very good example of this. Instead of using all four channels and mixing them to stereo, I use only channel 2&3 (NOS 90°/30cm) to avoid the surf noise. The time when it starts is about 04:15 so there is almost no traffic noise, but anyway, the recording starts and ends with some engine noise in the distance.
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Recorder: Sound devices MixPre6
Mics: Lewitt LCT540s, NOS 30cm/90°
Pix: Canon EOS R
There is a place near Fjallsjökull glacier I have tried to record several times in recent years. But I´ve never been happy with the result. Mainly because of noisy traffic from road no.1 and/or surf noise from Breiðamerkurfjara beach or because of weather.
But COVID19 gave me an wonderful opportunity to record this place without tourist traffic in June 2020.
This place is a small glacial corrie south of Fjallsjökull glacier. It is a small, wet area, with several fresh water springs. Arctic flora brings lots of birds to this place so the soundscape can be very interesting with a rumbling glacier in the background.
This is a part of several hours long recording. The time is around 5 o’clock in the morning. Flock of noisy Barnacle geese has already landed not far away from the microphones. Through the whole recording these Barnacle geese come closer and closer to the microphones, so be careful, in the end they get loud. Early in the recording two Whimbrels sing an interestingly long „love song“. Other birds are audible too, like Golden plover, Dunlin, Rock Ptarmigan and Red Throated Diver.
Once, about 2km away, a big piece of ice breaks off the glacier into the lagoon with noisy consequences.
Background noise is mainly a surf from the ocean behind the microphones, about 5 km away.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid level, or in speakers at low level.
(mp3 256kbps / 62Mb)
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Thanks to COVID, I got a unique opportunity this summer to record in places I have so far not been able to record because of traffic, mainly due to tourists. One such site was Skeiðarársandur, a broad sandy wasteland along Iceland’s south-eastern coast, between the Vatnajökull icecap and the sea. This area has been a „desert“ with deadly glacial rivers for centuries. But due to global warming and receding glaciers, rivers have disappeared. Instead, vegetation like moss, grass and trees has occupied some areas without human intervention.
It is therefore obvious that biodiversity will change significantly in the coming years.
Here is a part of an 8-hour-long recording that was taken just east of the dry riverbed of Skeiðarár, which was a huge glacial river for centuries until a few years ago when it disappeared due to changes in Skeiðarárjökull glacier.
This is a recording of silence. The microphones were placed beside a small creek which can be found all over Skeiðarársandur. Because of the wind I did not use a tripod, they just stood on the windshield on the ground which gave a pretty good result.
The background noise is mainly a gust of wind stroking the ground and surf among the coast, about 20-30Km away
Birds in this recording are Common Ringed Plover, European Golden Plover, Dunlin, Purple Sandpiper, Common Snipe, Whimbrel, Common Redshank, Whooper Swan, Greylag Goose.
Quality open headphones are recommended while listening at low to mid level, or in speakers at low level.
The name of this blog „Dögun við Eyrar“ means „Dawn at Eyrar“ (Eyrar is the name of the place)
Other recordings from Skeiðarársandur can be found here
( mp3 256kbps / 63Mb )
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Recorder: Sound devices MixPre6
Mics: Lewitt LCT540s (IRTcross) channels counter clockwise 1-2-3-4 = L-R-L-R
Pix: Canon Eos R
Loation: 63.972468, -16.956438
Weather: Clear sky. Gust up to 6m/sec. around 10°C
Recording time between 5.am to 6.am
HLJÓÐMYND - SOUNDIMAGE 