What is the sound of your National Park?
MEDIA UPLOAD PAGE
What will I need to upload?
We would like you to get your participants to make short recordings (60 seconds or less) of the emblematic sound(s) of your park.
If you already have access to recording equipment at your park, then please do use that as the highest quality possible is what we are looking for.
If not, then we recommend getting your participants to make recordings using smartphones. This can be done with the voice recording app which comes with the phone, or by downloading a specialist recording app such as Ferrite. People can also record video footage and we can take the audio from that.
Here are some useful links containing information on how you can record sound on mobile devices.
Using the Ferrite recording app (iOS)
Using the Advanced Android app (Android)
Smartphone recording tips (eBird)
Audio Recording with a Smartphone (Wild Mountain Echoes)
The best ways to record audio on your phone (Popular Science)
However you record your sound, remember three important rules:
Try to protect your microphones from the wind as this will cause distortion. Use your hand/coat as a baffle or record in a doorway, if possible.
Always use headphones when recording - preferable to earphones, but they are better than nothing! Always play back your sound once you have recorded it to check it has recorded OK.
Remember you can’t crop a sound recording in the same way you can a photo. Yes, you can chop off sounds at the beginning and the end, but you can’t remove unwanted sounds throughout your quiet recording of a stream!
Soundscape…
…is created by all the sounds around us - sounds of plants and animals, non-biological ambient sounds (wind, rain, storms, ice breaking), human sounds (people talking and walking) and mechanical sounds (traffic and construction noises). It is an auditory environment, perceived in context, by people. It changes through time and space, it changes through seasons and it changes over the territory, and is all about how those who create it interact with each other.
In National Parks this interaction becomes apparent when we realise how our presence changes the very ambience we came to experience as visitors. National Park Service in the US tries to preserve natural soundscapes that exist in the absence of human sounds and noises, as well as to restore those degraded. One Square Inch of Silence, for instance, is advertised as the quietest place in the US, and while it is not by any means large, it is far enough from any roads and flightpaths to be considered as not-affected by human and mechanical sounds. The small size of it is a worrying example of how wide-spread noise pollution is, but it is an effective tool for soundscape management, driving the environmental awareness.
In the UK, little is known about this resource. The Collecting and Mapping National Parks’ Soundscapes project hopes to provide the initial probing work in the UK, looking at what valuable soundscapes exist across the 15 parks, how are they distributed, what makes them special and how can we work together to preserve and repair them where a repair is needed.
Click here to upload media
For further information or any questions, please contact Pete Stollery (petestollery@gmail.com)
