What excellent advice from John Neville (Sat, 30 Jul 2005 14:10:05 -0700) o=
n
how to get started in nature recording. Thank you John, for sharing your
knowledge and taking the time to type it up.
Just a couple of points:
John emphasised the value of getting close to the sound you wish to record,
and wrote, "Half the distance and double the signal."
Getting close is in fact even more effective than that. Signal strength is
inversely proportional to the square of the distance. So that half the
distance means four times the signal strength.
(But note that sound is commonly measured in decibels which is a logarithmi=
c
scale. Doubling the sound intensity means an increase of 6 dB.)
My second point concerns John's advice:
"With the aid of a long cable an omni-directional microphone can be
placed near a song-perch to make specific recordings of one animal."
Be aware of the implication in that final qualification: "make specific
recordings of one animal." This technique gives excellent recordings for
that purpose. If you want the detail of the song of a bird for scientific
analysis - making sonagrams, for example - it is ideal. But if your aim is
to get a faithful but beautiful-sounding recording of your favourite
songbird, a note of caution is in order.
We are used to hearing a bird singing at some distance and we hear the
general ambience of the forest or whatever as background, and often also
some echoes or reverberations of the bird song. If your microphone is very
close to the bird, you have to turn the recording level down so far that th=
e
background ambience is not recorded at all. The result may sound unnatural=
.
Always remember Klas's advice:
"Microphones are not ears,
Loudspeakers are not birds,
A listening room is not nature."
So experiment with various distances to get the result that best suits your
purposes.
Syd Curtis (Brisbane, Australia)
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