Wood, Winter, Hollow

The cold had a certain warmth to it. Worlds, life, among the layers of ice. Complex sounds, alive, found in the darkest rocks, wet with winter’s water. These hollows, rough with age, nature’s hideouts, were the source of inspiration and sounds for the first full-length collaborative effort from Seaworthy (Cameron Webb) and Taylor Deupree.

Webb was plucked from a bushfire and flood-ridden east coast of an Australian summer and deposited via a 20h flight into a New York covered in snow. From wetlands abuzz with wildlife in the Australia to winter’s wooded trails through Pound Ridge, the sonic environments couldn’t have been more different.

Working together in person has been an important point in Deupree’s collaboratinos lately. Much preferring the human interaction and local landscapes over the soulless exchange of sound files over the internet. With this point taken care of the pair struck out in a New York February to a 4,000 acre nature preserve near Deupree’s studio called Ward Pound Ridge, a park rich in history that supports a diverse range of plant and animal life. While the cold of winter kept most of the animals quiet the landscape nonetheless teemed with sounds. The local environment was hit badly by Hurricane Sandy a few months prior and the remnants of broken trees and debris littered much of the woodland area. Deupree and Webb spent three days on the trails recording sounds and images which created direction and purpose for their album which was composed in the evenings in the 12k studio.

The resulting Wood, Winter, Hollow traces a rustic path of the days in the woods with an equally natural soundset fronted by Webb on a nylon string guitar. Bells, sticks, melodica and the occasional analog synthesizer form the sonic backdrop echoing the quiet, but lively sounds of the winter forest. Endemic field recordings, including hydrophones placed in near-frozen streams, became an integral part of the work creating a subtle narrative that places the album in its specific place in time.

The subtle crackle of a slow flowing creek working its way through a cover of ice and frozen leaves. The faint whistle of the pale leaves of the beech tree that defy mother nature by clinging to their tree’s spindling branches against the push of winter winds. The cacophony of whispered raindrops running off infrastructure and hundred year old stone structures. These are the sounds that inspire and infuse Wood, Winter, Hollow. The rawness of winter in a world clinging to fragments of warmth.

For sound samples and ordering details, please visit the 12k website. CD/Download available from June 11 2013.

Blue Mountains Botanic Garden

Approximately 90min drive from Sydney's CBD, The Blue Mountain Botanic Gardens are located at Mt Tomah. This beautiful region of the Blue Mountains is the perfect location for the Botanic Gardens. Just one part of the gardens is known as "The Jungle". For some history on this area of the gardens:

"The Jungle was originally purchased in 1929 by a group of Sydney businessmen to save the magnificent sassafras and coachwood trees from the timber mill while providing Sydney with a national park to its west. It was opened by the then Governor Admiral Sir Dudley DeChair on 23 March 1929 and the original walk was dedicated to the memory of Sir James Fairfax KBE. However, the Jungle never achieved its destiny as a national park as the Great Depression, coupled with pressure for building funds for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, led in 1934 to the land being resumed by the previous owners, the Charley family.
In 2008, 33 hectares of the original Jungle was purchased by the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, with the financial support of John and Elizabeth Fairfax and the NSW Government's Environmental Trust. Now part of the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Mount Tomah, the Jungle is again in public hands giving Sydneysiders an opportunity to experience and understand Blue Mountains' rainforest."

These recordings were made late in the afternoon on 21 November. While within the rainforest habitats you seem completely isolated, the invasive sound of traffic continues to invade these recordings. However, the diversity of bird calls here more than makes up for it. It would be nice to visit first thing in the morning to make some more recordings.

For more information on the Blue Mountains Botanic Gardens visit their website.

Blue Mountains Botanic Garden by seaworthy

Woodland behind the dunes

Recorded early one morning in April 2011. The location was a small woodland directly behind coastal sandunes near Byron Bay on the NSW farhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif north coast. The location is on the edge of the Brunswick Heads Nature Reserve, an area that forms a vital stepping stone for migrating birds. Species from north and south-east Australia overlap in the area, providing unusually diverse plant and animal communities. These types of habitats are some of my favourite to record in, there are usually lots of birds about and the dynamics of the soundscape change from day to day with the amount of swell and wave action on the beach. Sometimes the rumble of the waves is a little too much though.
Learn more about Brunswick Heads Nature Reserve here.

Behind the sand dunes by seaworthy

Minyon Falls, Nightcap National Park

Nightcap National Park contains extensive areas of lush Gondwana Rainforests and was preserved by a determined group of conservationists in the 1980s. These photos and recordings were made during a brief visit in April 2011 to Minyon Falls. The sound composition here contains a series of recordings made surrounding the creekline leading to the falls themslves. Surrounded by dense forest, there are bird calls (as well as an occasional frog croak) but dominating the recordings are the sounds of the falls themselves that create a background drone running through most of the piece.

Minyon Falls, Nightcap National Park by seaworthy

Do birds & frogs sing differently in the city?

Wildlife can use sound to communicate in many different ways but, more often than not, they may distinctive sounds to help find a mate. One of the things I've notice while recording in urban wetlands is the large amount of noise pollution caused by traffic, industry and other human activity. I know there is a dramatic reduction in frog calling activity during evenings when the wind is strong. One field trip on the south coast we recorded about 8 species of frog calling on the first night but one the second night the wind was much stronger and we only recorded 2 frog species. How are these animals responding to "human-made" noise?

There has been some media interesting in a recent Melbourne University study that has indicated that urban noise is changing the calls of some bird species. The soon to be published study titled "Geographically pervasive effects of urban noise on frequency and syllable rate of songs and calls in silvereyes (Zosterops lateralis)" by Potvin, Parris & Mulder reports on the adaptation of birds to urban environments by calling at higher frequencies. You can read the abstract here.

It also reminded me of this paper reporting a change in the frequency of frog calls in habitats close to traffic from 2009. That paper reporting on changes in frog calls, "Frogs Call at a Higher Pitch in Traffic Noise" by Parris, Velik-Lord & North is available here Turns out it is one of the same researchers, K Parris, involved in both projects!

I guess what the work of these researchers is showing is that our natural environment can be influenced as much, perhaps, by noise pollution as other forms of pollution. While bird calls may be shifting as a result of learnt behaviours, the change in frogs call may be reflecting an evolutionary shift in animals adapted to urban environments. I'll be keen to follow the continuing work of Parris and her collegues.

Cam

Forest around the lake

Surrounding the two lake systems are extensive woodland and forests dominated by eucalypts. These forests provide habitat for a number of threatened species such as powerful owls, sooty owls, masked owls, glossy black cockatoos and yellow-bellied gliders. Closer the the lake edge, there are also pockets of swamp oak woodlands that provide an eerie link between lake and forest.

Many recordings made within the forest made it onto "Two Lakes", particularly a series of songbird recordings made at day break one morning. Also, listen closely to try and spot the eastern whip bird call somewhere on the album.