We utilise a SASS, or Stereo Ambient Sampling System, to capture the directional relationships between sounds in the landscape, giving a lovely stereo field and deep sense of space.

The SASS is a microphone housing, a quasi-binaural design which aims to mimic the way your ears hear the world around you. The foam baffle between the microphones affects sound waves in much the same way the human head does, resulting in a wonderfully realistic stereo field.

Additionally, we’ve modified the SASS to fit premium microphones; a pair of Sennheiser MKH20s, one of the quietest omni-directional capsules available.

One of the unique features of the SASS is its utilisation of what is called a ‘barrier effect’; sounds are naturally amplified by the SASS to around 3dB without incurring any extra hiss.

It works like this: imagine standing near a sea wall with waves rolling in off the ocean. As each wave hits the wall you can see that the height (amplitude) of the wave briefly increases substantially. Sound waves behave the same when encountering a flat surface. Each microphone is mounted in the SASS level with the baffle surface of each ‘wing’, and as the sound arrives, it is made louder against on the microphone diaphragm.

This natural volume boost is a huge advantage when recording the delicate and often quiet sounds in the natural environment.

Here are some photos of our SASS:

A birdsong’s eye view of the SASS from the front, with windscreen on.

Rear, showing crossed pair of Sennheiser MKH20 microphones

Wind protection removed, showing foam baffle between microphone capsules, which are mounted flush with surface of ‘wings’

From above, showing microphone and front face angles

Microphone capsules align flush with face plate so as to make the most of the ‘barrier effect’.

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I recall that when I was about 10 years old, a friend and I went off to a local park armed with a cheap portable cassette recorder. We managed to record a Wattlebird screeching from a few yards away and returned with much excitement to listen to this distorted squawk lost amidst a sea of tape hiss. I can’t recall being inspired to a career by this experience, so I’ll put it down to one of the adventures of childhood.

Needless to say, nature recording these days is a little more sophisticated…

The Right Technology for the Purpose

Often, when one thinks of nature recording, one envisages parabolic dishes or highly directional microphones. Here’s a picture of our friend Howard Plowright with his ‘big’ rig.

Parabolas are designed to focus in on birdsong from a distance – sort of an audio equivalent of a telephoto lens. If you are researching the repertoire and dialect of birds and animals, this kind of equipment does a good job, recording a distant critter without the clutter of surrounding sounds.

However, in our work, I am trying to record the whole landscape with each sound in a natural balance. I need a ‘wide-angle lens’ approach, and so my rig is quite different.

Our Early Recordings

When we first began recording nature sounds nearly 20 years ago, I inherited a pair of highly directional, shotgun microphones. While these actually worked quite well for our first projects, we realised quickly that their stereo field was too narrow for the soundscapes we wished to capture.

So I soon graduated on to using wider-field microphones; the ones I chose were pair of Sennheiser MKH60s. I think of them as ’sawn-off’ shotgun mics; still directional, but with a much wider pickup. They had a field of around 30 degrees each side, before muffling off-axis sounds. Thus a pair, deployed at an angle of around 60 degrees from each other, gave an optimal field of around 120 degrees, progressively muting as sounds came from the side or rear. This is similar to the field of view of the human eye, and was surprisingly good at giving a realistic stereo image.

Most often I’d hand-hold these mics in pistol grips, which allowed me to ‘follow the action’ and compose the soundscape in the field to some extent. The disadvantage with this approach was the need to keep totally still and silent, and the limit to how long one could stand like that. I got pretty good at just meditatively standing, but was often relieved when the situation favoured tripod mounting.

My Favourite Microphones

There came a day though, recording in India during our first trip there, that I realised I wanted to capture a much wider stereo field. The birdsong was all around me, the air pulsated with it, and I felt restricted by having to focus on particular sounds in the landscape. I wanted to be able to capture all of it, even if it was bit overwhelming at times.

The system I chose to use is the SASS, or Stereo Ambient Sampling System. It is a quasi-binaural system, based on a microphone housing that is similar to the human head. It captures sounds from all directions, and presents them in a coherent stereo image.

This is actually not so easy to do, for numerous reasons to do with the difference between how our ears hear sounds around us, and how a pair of microphones can actually record them.

I have had the SASS modified to accommodate a pair of Sennheiser MKH20 microphones; premium, omni-directional mics that have a whisper quiet and fine-grained noise floor. They produce very little hiss, which is of course extremely important for quiet natural environments, and recording delicate sounds over long distances.

Here are some photos of my SASS binaural microphone system.

The sense of space that the SASS produces is absolutely lovely, and very realistic, especially when listened to on headphones (try it!).

Because the SASS has a wide stereo field, it is not so important to anticipate where the action is coming from, or follow it, and hence the way of using this rig is always on a tripod. Often I will simply set up and walk away, which allows me to get on with other things (photography or checking nearby locations), and the wildlife to act more naturally around the mic than if I was there. I’ve even had a bird use the mic itself as a perch – listen here!

Digital Audio Recorders

When we began in 1993, DAT (digital audio tape) was an exciting option for quality field recording – pure digital; high resolution, no tape hiss, no analogue distortion… But DAT tape, like any tape format, is awkward. Think of mangled cassettes; only smaller and with far more terminal outcomes if the tape ever became jammed, stretched or crinkled.

Thankfully, digital technology has advanced, and now there are a variety of hard disc audio recorders on the market. I use a Sound Devices 722, a professional, dedicated audio recorder. It is the most wonderful gadget; built like a brick, baby simple to use and functional in a wide range of climatic conditions. I often record to flash card to save on battery life, but the unit has an internal 40Gb hard drive to back up. Best of all, Sound Devices have a reputation for making the sweetest, quietest microphone pre-amplifiers in the business, so I just plug in the SASS, and I’m ready to record.

When we’re back from a field trip, I simply connect the SD 722 into the computer, and transfer the raw audio files ready for editing – which is another huge advance on transferring tapes in real time.

These technologies, including some very affordable budget gear, are opening up nature sound recording to an increasing number of amateur recordists. Which is wonderful, because obtaining technically good recordings is not the chore that it once was. What remains is the fieldcraft necessary to make great recordings, and I offer some thoughts on this here.

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Enter a good friend, Steve Craig. Steve worked for the Department of Conservation, but his passion was owls, particularly the rare Powerful Owls that live in the moist forests around Melbourne. He would track down a breeding pair, find their nesting hollow up to 60 metres up a high eucalypt, and using a steel-rope ladder, climb up to weigh and measure the owl chicks (It is one of his photos of a Powerful Owl that is on the back of the ‘Evening in the Australian Bush’ CD booklet).

He told us not only of his beloved owls, but of his adventures capturing yellow-bellied gliders for documentary film makers to photograph. And he played us recordings; the sound of gliders calling in flight was the wildest thing we’d heard! So the Gippsland forests became our next focus, a decision supported by the awareness that they were (and still are) the site of appalling clearfell logging practices.

So that’s how we came to be sheltering in our tent, as gale-force winds whipped the forest that day – wondering whether we would be granted a future at all! We had many beautiful recordings, but we hadn’t decided what to do with them. So we began debating whether our next album should be another with music, or whether featuring pure nature sounds could be viable. We wrote down the pros and cons for both, and on paper it was a no-brainer; stick with the music. Yet our experience was telling us that with music, nature sounds become relegated as ‘atmospheric background’ for most listeners, and we wanted to let nature speak for itself. The music was a distraction – it had to go.

Thus ‘Tall Forest‘, our first purely nature sound CD, was conceived.

‘Tall Forest’- album sample by Listening Earth

Once it was published, Sarah and I decided on a make-or-break move; we let go of the small bush cottage we had been renting, packed our lives in our cranky old 4-wheel-drive (no aircon, no power steering…), and set off for what became a year on the road. We travelled the length of Australia’s east coast, selling our CDs from the car, and gathering recordings for new projects.

At the time it was a complete leap of faith; we had only two CDs published, and no idea of our future. Looking back, it is amazing that our fledgling business survived that period at all.

A curious juvenile Cassowary at Lacy Creek, near Mission Beach.
In the background, our old 4-wheel-drive that we lived out of for a year.

In our meetings with prospective retailers, we would occasionally get strange responses to our nature recordings. On one afternoon we visited a ‘new-age’ shop in Byron Bay (what a friend of ours calls a ‘purple shop’). It was run by a woman who had a young assistant on the counter, and were pleased to find them both quite interested. They asked us many questions about how we had recorded ‘Tall Forest’, and the birds and animals we’d encountered. Eventually the owner disappeared ‘out the back’ to organise an order for us, leaving us chatting with the girl on the counter. She seemed as though she wanted to ask us something important, looked at us closely and asked: “When you were in those forests, with all the birds and animals, camping out at night and everything, tell me… did you ever see fairies?” Now what could we say to that? We were lost for a response. A friend later gave us a great reply line: “yes, and if you listen hard enough…”

When we eventually returned home, we had the material for what have become some of our most popular titles; ‘A Morning in the Australian Bush‘ and ‘A Walk in the Rainforest‘. With those CDs published, our business began picking up momentum. We relocated to central Victoria, and began thinking of building a home…

The rest is a story for another day… Looking back, we think it was our faith in what we were doing that kept us going – initially a mixture of naivety and enthusiasm. However we couldn’t have done it without the support of our families, friends, retailers and customers. And of course we probably wouldn’t have even started without each other.

Its curious how life’s threads weave us together in unexpected ways. Recently our friend Steve Craig passed away after a long battle with cancer. We attended his funeral and to honour his love of the bush, his family played our ‘Tall Forest’ CD at the ceremony. Sarah and I were deeply touched, as Steve had played such a role in inspiring us during our early days. The opening sequence of the album had actually been recorded in the forest gully below his house (see pic below). Shortly after the album begins, at 1 minute 57secs into track 1, a juvenile owl can be heard trilling as it follows mum to a daytime roost. For a long time we were all unsure what species we had recorded in the darkness, but a few weeks before Steve died, he finally confirmed that it was indeed a juvenile Powerful Owl.

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Sarah and I were camped out in one of the most ancient forests in Australia, and the weather was turning bad.

The dense mountain forests of East Gippsland, in far-eastern Victoria, are a realm of giant tree ferns, towering eucalypt trees and impenetrable undergrowth. They are places of peace and majesty, of sheltered gullies, birdsong and sunlight-filled mornings. We had been in these high forests for several weeks, and had driven up remote tracks to arrive at a secluded campsite known as Waratah Flat. This was only our second time of recording natural sounds, and for the preceding few days we had been enjoying a forest full of birdsong.

But now the forest had become anything but peaceful, as a massive storm system was blowing in off the southern ocean. Ferocious winds whipped the crowns of the trees, and clouds scudded low overhead, sometimes enveloping everything in mist, rain or swirls of sleet and snow. Every now and then there would be the sickening groan of a tree branch tearing loose and the heart-stopping crash of it hitting the ground. To attempt to drive out along the miles of forest tracks would have been foolhardy. The forest was being shredded, and we were huddled inside a small tent, waiting for the sound of the next branch to be tortured loose and come crashing down, unable to do anything but sit out the storm.

It seemed an opportune time to consider our future…

But first, let me backtrack a little… Sarah and I met in 1989, and right from the beginning we dreamed of working creatively together. Sarah had studied massage and worked as manager of a handcrafts shop. I was teaching voice and meditation classes, and together we were living in a very cute little mud-brick cottage in the bush outskirts of Melbourne. Eventually we established Listening Earth as our own independent label, with the idea of weaving my interests in music and nature, and Sarah’s talent for photography, into a business that could sustain us.

One of our first projects involved recording my music for lute. The lute is a lovely gentle instrument, softer than the guitar in sound, with a history dating back to the European renaissance and beyond. The character of the lute appealed to me, and during bush camping trips I would sit in the shade of a tree writing my own compositions for it. So we eventually conceived the project of recording these compositions in the ’studio’ they had been inspired by – the bush itself.

We chose to record at Mootwingee National Park in western New South Wales, an extraordinary landscape that is both a haven for wildlife in the harsh outback, and an ancestral meeting place for aboriginal peoples.

Rockpool Reflections: album sample by Listening Earth

We were there for nearly two months; trekking, exploring, photographing, recording the music – and most importantly, discovering the local birdsong and how to record it. I clearly remember one of our first mornings, standing in the semi-darkness of pre-dawn and hearing Spiny-cheeked Honeyeaters calling across the ridgelines. Those beautiful cascading ripples of sound were a revelation to us, I had no idea natural sounds like these existed. We had begun to hear the voices of the bush.

The Mutawintji mob; rangers and aboriginal staff with us at Mootwingee.
And yep, that’s a mummified Wedge-tailed Eagle behind us…

We returned home to complete the project, mixing the music and birdsong together, the resulting album being titled ‘Rockpool Reflections‘.

We began getting it out to the shops ourselves, however the feedback was mixed. Listeners loved it for the gentle music and birdsong. However this was the early 1990s, and retailers were viewing it as a ‘new-age’ album, and we found ourselves being overlooked in favour of mass-selling ‘inspired-by-nature, relaxation music’ artists. So we were unsure about how to proceed for our next project.

(‘Rockpool Reflections‘ is still available as a CD or download from our webshop. You can find out more about the album here)

Next: The Making of ‘Tall Forest’

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