Philip_Goddard

I've always been a nature lover — and have done a lot of nature photography, on and off, during my whole adult life — some 60 years in round figures. Insects, wild flowers, various non-flowering plants, fungi and lichens have all been of particular interest, as well as weather phenomena, cloud formations and geological formations.

You can see some of my photography, mostly taken on my hikes, via my Broad Horizon Photos website.

I've also composed a significant oeuvre of symphonic classical music, much of which has various nature inspirations. I made recordings of carefully prepared MIDI realizations of all my music works, and they're presented on on my Music Compositions site, where you can read detailed programme notes of the works, each work with its respective link to an MP3-quality YouTube video of the whole work. In my Music Store you can order CD-quality downloads of the one-time commercial CDs of the works.

However, arguably my greatest musical achievement started in August 2023, when I discovered that, with speed / pitch reductions and various degrees of reverberant acoustic, I could convert many of my Wind Chimes in the Wild recordings (see further below) into intense visionary music creations that I call Nature-Symphonies, which latter are remarkable parallels of many compositions of Iannis Xenakis, in their being stochastically organised (i.e., probability-driven) — the difference being that mine are nature-, rather than composer-generated. See https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/packs/39688/

I live in Exeter, UK, and for many years have made a regular practice of going out for usually long and strenuous single day hikes, hitch-hiking to the start of the walk and hitch-hiking back afterwards, within the same day.

I've benefited greatly from the Freesound resource, having compiled many CDs of natural environmental sounds for my own use (including 16 of thunderstorms as of mid-June 2012), as a much more healthy alternative to the incessant background of music or radio or television that so many people inflict upon themselves and indeed all too often upon others too.

My use of these recordings was not only for my pure enjoyment, for I was also using them as an important part of my strategy for getting clear of a gradually increasing tinnitus problem, which started to get significantly bothersome for me in 2012.

As from June 2012 I started making sound recordings myself, using a Sony PCM-M10 recorder, covering various inspiring and invigorating natural soundscapes experienced especially on my hikes, which are usually on the more rugged stretches of the coastline of Cornwall — especially the north coast and the Land's End peninsula — and from November 2012 I commenced my Wind Chimes In the Wild project, which I concluded in 2018.

I entitled the overall natural soundscapes recording project Broad Horizon Natural Soundscapes. On my own Broad Horizon Nature website I present an easy-access summary listing of all my natural soundscape and wind chimes recordings — more than I've uploaded here, especially as I largely discontinued uploading here in 2016, when I switched over to the higher-grade Sony PCM-D100 recorder.

I use a fairly precisely tailored EQ profile to compensate for the attenuation of the high frequencies of virtually all my recordings by use of a furry windshield (indeed, two nested ones for the D100, whose mics are vastly more wind-sensitive).

If you wand to see what you can learn from my own esperience(s), have a read through Recording Natural Soundscapes — Some Experience Based Tips.

Rugged Cornish coast like this (Shag Rock, near Perranporth), with Atlantic swell rolling in and having often dramatic arguments with the cliffs and little rock islands, will be found to figure a lot in my recordings.

A wind of change is afoot…
As from the spring of 2013 I started getting commercially produced CDs of my recordings set up at CreateSpace, which left me in something of a quandary as to what to do about further uploads of my recordings to Freesound.

For this reason, I put my Freesound uploading on hold pending my working out the best policy with regard to this. In any case, all the work involved with getting and processing lots of new recordings, as well as setting up the commercial CDs, really left me with no time for Freesound uploading — particularly as, I should imagine, it would not go down well if I used my Freesound uploads to advertise my commercial CDs.

In 2020 the produce-on-demand service for my CDs closed down, and I maintained my 'CD' catalogue, morphed into a CD-quality downloads catalogue.

In late 2022, having had almost no sales of my downloads, and not having time / resources to promote my work (i.e., other priorities, such as my Clarity of Being site), it occurred to me that I might as well progressively upload the best of my recordings to Freesound. I expect also to upload new, vastly improved versions of some of my previously uploaded PCM-M10 recordings, having used A1 Stereo Control VST plugin to widen and dramatically sharpen-up their woefully inadequate stereo imaging. Note that I found that I needed to apply a 7dB EQ tilt away from the treble after using that widening — though I suspect that part of that requirement was because I hadn't realized that the M10's recordings were actually a bit over-bright to start with.

That tilt is a straight line from no change at 100Hz to -7dB at 8K.

Good hi-fi speakers are NOT enough for listening to natural soundscapes!
The trouble is that any normal domestic listening space is full of resonance and cancellation points that make a mess of the bass output from your speakers, no matter how good they are and how flat their response is supposed to be, even right down to 20Hz! This means that what you actually get from your hi-fi speakers is actually not genuine hi-fi at all, at least with regard to bass reproduction.

Typically the bass is exaggerated and wallowing, usually containing some degree of boomy resonance. Most people are so used to that sound that when they hear familiar recordings without that fog of distorted, crap bass they think the particular recordings sound emasculated and lacking in bass!

The Good News is that I found that there is a device that resolves that issue at a stroke, and with its use you can hear something genuinely approximating to what was heard at the recording session, as distinct from the current norm, which is what people, conditioned to the distortions caused by their room acoustics, imagine is an accurate or correct reproduction of the original, or indeed what simply pleases them.

To find out more, please go to the introductory notes on my Broad Horizon Natural Soundscapes page.

Important advance notice

At some point soon my programme of uploading my recordings to FS is expected to terminate apparently prematurely and I would no longer then be responding to any messages. Reason? — I'd no longer exist! Please see my two relevant blog posts about my expected early 'lights-out' time (https://www.philipgoddard.com/ )