Nature Sounds Society Weblog

Nature Sounds Society 2010 Workshop

by Greg WeddigJack, Jesikah, Alan in Sierra Valley - photo by Dan Dugan

This year was a bountiful one at the San Francisco State University Sierra Nevada Field Campus. In addition to the wonderful location there were many recordists with diverse interests ready to record or try recording for the first time. A documentary film about the Soundtracker, Gordon Hempton, was presented by its filmmaker Nick Sherman, keep your eye out for it on the festival circuit. The film was an excellent portrait of one of the foremost nature recordists in the world.

Also John Muir Laws was in attendance providing a much welcome background and context about the natural world (which I sorely need).  John is the author of the definitive Field Guide(s) to the Sierras. John introduced us to drawing techniques and suggested we look behind the names and explore the systems that work together to create the ecosystems that we live in.

All in all it was a wonderful weekend, many old friends and new were made and remade. Some other links from the weekend are below. For now enjoy a clip from Carman Valley:

Download Cavl-576-edit

Some photos I took:http://www.flickr.com/photos/gweddig/sets/72157624270428383/

Other recordings:

Rudy Trubitt: Link #1

Nathan Moody: Link #2

and: Link #3

These Carman Valley recordings by GT Weddig are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Annual Listening Party 12/5/2009

 Dave Parks presenting in Dan Dugan's lab.

Attending were Lon Yarbrough & Kat (they came down from Carmichael), Blair Collins, Dave Parks and Maggie Sharp, Patrick Cress, Ken Osborn and Betty Graham, and Steve Sergeant, with hosts Dan Dugan and Sharon Perry.

After pot-luck dinner, the sounds we played included files contributed by members who couldn't attend. We watched a streaming video of an installation Hugh Livingston recently completed in Kansas. Bernie Krause sent three pieces, Spread Creek Pond at Jackson Hole (Clark’s nutcrackers, rosy finches, white-crowned sparrows, vesper sparrows, robins, Lincoln sparrows, pileated woodpecker); Sugarloaf State Park (mostly fluttering, pre-spring, Black eyed Junco, Black-headed Grosbeak, Rufous Sided Towhee, Song Sparrow, American Robin, Common Crow), and the North Sea grinding a gravel beach, recorded with shoulder-mounted DPA 4060s borrowed from Chris Watson. Bernie said he was so impressed with them that he bought a pair. We heard three contributions made at this year's Workshop by Greg Weddig: morning ambience at Yuba Pass, mid-morning at Madora Lake, and morning at Carman Valley. 

Contributions by people who came included a piece with Yosemite soundscapes of running water and frogs serving as bridges and background for alto saxophone and bass clarinet by NSS grant recipient Patrick Cress. Dan Dugan played three four-channel surround pieces from the Merced National Wildlife Refuge: huge flock takeoffs, great horned owls before dawn, and coyotes that stepped up to the mic while the rig was running unattended. From Yosemite's McGurk Meadow Dan played a bit of a deer eating and splashing in the stream, bats obligingly flying around the mic array at night, and a dawn chorus, all from this July. Dave Parks played a number of short excerpts of raw material from Australia, including white-lipped frogs, bower birds, and bell birds. Lon Yarbrough presented some close-up sandhill crane recordings made with his new telinga.