Hi Everyone. We’re getting a cold spell this weekend in Estonia. I’ve decided to set up my stream box. It’s placed 10m from our house near our apple trees where we have a bird feeder. You’ll hear the bird activity in the morning. Right now it’s quiet except for the cold north wind, my wind instruments (wind harp and chimes) and some trees cracking because the temperature is dropping rapidly. https://aporee.org:8443/mobilemic18

nice, and happy new year john!!

so nice how wind & harp sound together. Some times it sounds like the score of a Bela Tarr movie..

Nice thought. Very still air this morning. Lots of blue tit activity.

It’s really beautiful. You‘re a lucky man, John, to live in such sonic environment 🍀

sometimes I have the feeling that listening to such live soundscapes relieves my desire to be in such environments. This does not happen when watching a BBC documentary about nature, planet earth etc., so my hearing seems to play an important role here, and the paradox presence of live listening maybe. anybody with similar feelings? ...
Wonder what that means for (future) nature experience.

Yes, true! I said John must be a lucky man - and I hope he is 🙂 - but for example I need big cities, so listening to (or sometimes being in) such a sonic environment is like a short mental trip to “nature”. I am sure the live aspect is an important part of it, it is a calming experience that there are such places while oneself is in the Berlin underground, for example.

I do feel fortunate to live where I do, but it is also a conscious choice. I have lived in rural south Estonia for close to 20 years now. So I have a deeper perspective on the dynamics of the environment here. One of the biggest shifts for me in terms of listening has been the understanding of ‘acoustic horizons’. I’m not sure where I first heard this term but it has stuck with me. In visual culture we talk about people’s preferences for ‘visual horizons’ based often on where they grew up, if you lived by the seaside, in a rural setting or in the mountains etc, it is generally about the relation between the land and the sky and whether one prefers more open or enclosed (horizontal vs vertical?) horizons. I think there is some kind of parallel for the auditory, with the ‘horizon’ about the relative distances of sounds being perceived. It is something one adapts to and get used to. I could write a lot about the ‘acoustic dynamics’ of where I live but I think you can also hear it, the intimacy of the birds nearby mixed with the farm equipment 2km away and the road about 4km. This is a wide expanse. For me it is also an important qualitative difference beyond the urban vs nature dichotomy.

interesting. this idea or concept of the acoustic horizon reminds me on the dazzling notion of landscape, as in Simon Schama’s monumental study of nature and its representations, Landscape and Memory: "Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock"

a helicopter at night?

dogs and tawny owls
(still on https://aporee.org:8443/mobilemic18)

Interesting conversation. I really like the idea of an acoustic horizon. I am interested in how it’s really a physical experience, the body stores all kind of spatial information and is informed by it. Not only the mind - if that’s separate at all

we will hit -18C tonight. trees are cracking again. one practical example of acoustic horizon is the long reverberations of the cracking sounds. some of these trees can be 300-500m away

hi john ,..I like very much your example for acoustic horizon..you really have a big one

Good morning. Thanks for all your comments. I’ll let the stream run until tomorrow night.

I’ve been thinking about the “live” aspect of listening to the streams on here and whether the reason their affect is different from the recorded soundscape is because of the framing. That of an autonomous unmediated ear to the world, not filtered through the acoustic sensibilities of the recordist. A sense of a shared “listening with” which takes us back to the early days of radio perhaps…

thank you for sharing the foto,..with the snow around and the (open)shield from above and behind ….the sound of the stream makes to me now much more sense..I was really wondering how you have placed the mics

Absolutely, i could not agree more with @artofnoises above. It's also about the transience, knowing it'll be gone, not recorded... always a unique situation here and now, out there... another place, but same time

It did help to have some slight shielding from the wind and potential snow. I have to say, Udo’s mobile mic rigs are very resilient. This allows us to really embed the rig in different environments.

this pair runs for about 2 years now in Brno Luzanky park, without any problems 😎

Wow impressive. It looks to be placed up on a roof, quite exposed I guess. How does it manage to wthstand windnoise?

well, probably it doesn't, if wind is strong enough... but I'm happy that it survived all weathers so far.

Yes, obviously! But does the wind noise bother you in the stream?

While there is some wind noise these mics don’t distort like other capsules

Wow, wonderful. i will find out myself soon enough… will install one semi permanently in Driemond.

nice! do you have wifi and grid power there?

Semi permanent i should have said. There is no wifi but power is available…

Dear friends, suddenly the weather has warmed and a light rain is falling. I felt ispired to start the stream again (actually it runs on a semi-permanent basis). With some personal intervention you could think of this as a more organic orchestral version of George Brecht’s 1959 piece “Drip Music” https://aporee.org:8443/mobilemic18

Beautiful, really very ‚musical‘

water drums!

Hi everybody, I try to configure my streambox on locusonus since tree days but I have some issues. I have a raspberry pi zero and a iq-audio zero codec, I download the streambox-4.1-dev-armv6 version, I configure the soundcard in config.txt like dtoverlay=iqaudio-codec, but it seems like the problem is the audio encoder. And I have this message on the raspberry screen : "ASoc : error at soc_component_read_no_lock on da7213.1-001a: -121". I tried many things I learnt a lot but now I'm going crazy if someone can help me I will be eternally grateful.

hi user i could help w this

Hi Grant, thanks for respond me. I did it in streambox.txt, but I read in the folder overlays/readme that we can configure the soundcard. But yes let's speak about it off-list.

hei John … nice! I used that as my lay-in-bed-waiting-to-get-up sonic stimulation … it significantly delayed the process! ;-)

drip and drop, wind/harp, an owl in the distance... intense

lovely

the always echoing harp sound with the delicate wind dynamics..very fine

what a great rhythm

I’m surprised at how consisten some of the drips are. Yes, there’s been an owl hanging around the last few evenings. Someone was cutting trees in the forest behind us. I’m worried they disturbed a nesting place.

this water drop rhythm is hypnotic for me

this is extraordinary. we are now all 'practicum recordists'. https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/university-cancels-use-of-the-word-field-because-of-racist-connotations/

As a secular athiest, we should ban the word professor because “This sense is traced to 1530s, but is perhaps a revival by the English Puritans of the use of the word from c. 1400 in the sense of "one who openly professes religious faith."

how about ‘sonic facilitator’ …. ?

I think the term ‘field recordist’ is difficult to replace. I have stopped using the term ‘capturing sounds’