Slowed flies, bees, and wind in bracken on Cranbrook Down

This is a half-speed and somewhat amplified version (with slight cathedral reverb to add resonance) of https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/757117/ . The latter is a quite busy and refreshing natural soundscape on Cranbrook Down, high up above the Teign Gorge, with flies and a fair number of bees or bumblebees, with the odd grasshopper, and a lead-in from three successive moderately distant aeroplanes. The wind sound is virtually all not microphone wind noise, but the wind in the tall stands of bracken all around.

Here we have an interesting halfway house between the original natural soundscape and one of my Nature-Symphonies. I use no layering here, so we have simply the original natural soundscape, speed-reduced and so an octave lower in pitch. The reverb makes the low buzzes impressively resonant. I made this version just as a doodling experimental fun piece, but was quite taken with the sound, which is both refreshing and good as a sleep-assist soundscape.

I made the original recording early afternoon on 30 August 2024, beside the inner perimeter track of Cranbrook Castle (an ancient hill fort), on top of Cranbrook Down, high above (south of) Fingle Bridge (Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK). The exact spot was in the south-west corner of the track, quite closely facing some by now rather tatty wood sage plants, some of which still had reasonably fresh flower spikes. The latter were getting a quite rapid succession of bees and smallish bumblebees.

Arrow shows recording position; the recorder was facing the small spikes of wood sage flowers, just to right of the arrow.

Techie stuff:

Recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was placed on a Sirui carbon-fibre tripod set at a low height.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield. For this version I reduced speed / pitch in WavePad, where I also raised the overall level by 6dB, so this isn't meant to sound much like the original. I did try a moderate amount of noise reduction in Audacity (to reduce the wind sound), but that made the flies / bees sound more anaemic than I cared for, so I stuck with no noise reduction.

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