Something in the air

Summary

I first heard it late one night in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Glasgow. It was October 1993 and I was on my way to the Scottish Highlands and breaking my journey overnight in a large Victorian terraced house with old, loose-fitting, sash windows. A strong northeasterly wind battered the gable end. My room was on the second floor and around 2am the blast percolated through the window frame, at first a low tone then rising in pitch and intensity as the wind strength varied. I was drawn out of sleep and lay there in the dark inside an unfamiliar room. The window rattled gently, but the sounds from it twisted and turned all around in the darkness. Warm, secure and drowsy, the details of these wildly varying sounds stirred something in my imagination as I slowly drifted back off into sleep.

As a location sound-recordist with a particular interest in wildlife sounds and their associated habitats I had, prior to this event, always tried to avoid wind ‘noise’ on my recordings. I used large efficient windshields to screen my sensitive directional microphones from the effects of the elements and later, in post-production, filtered my tracks using a variety of equalisers to reduce the broad band frequencies associated with wind noise. All that has changed. I have now radically altered my recording techniques to try to incorporate almost all the sounds I hear in any chosen location, including those made by the elements, and now regard the sounds made by the wind as just that – sound, rather than noise.