SOUNDS OF AUTUMN: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE RECORDIST

The crisp air and falling leaves signal the annual changeover from heat to chill, life to death. As the landscape transforms with vivid hues of red, orange, and yellow, the sounds of the season evoke a peaceful, nostalgic feeling. From the wind rustling the trees in a grove of pine to the pitter-patter of the year’s first melting frosts in an alpine valley, Autumn has its own unique auditory experience.

To help you translate that perfect autumnal mood to your projects, we again sent out one of our top recordists to capture the sounds of the season. SEASONS OF EARTH – AUTUMN is our latest addition to the acclaimed SEASONS OF EARTH series, offering a rich tapestry of fall sounds that embody the season’s essence. From the rustle of fallen leaves to the distant calls of hawks and owls, the library is a curated collection of audio that perfectly captures the atmospheric tone of the changing season. You can use the library on its own or with other season-themed libraries to give you a full experience of nature’s soundtrack for any video project.

The sounds of Autumn

Autumn is a season of change. There’s a lot happening to the ecosystems, to the plants and the animals, as they prepare for the coming season of frost and cold. “It’s a really interesting time to observe what’s happening,” Matt said. “There are obviously different things that are happening in different parts of the US. There are these really iconic sounds of fall that we think of, like falling leaves or the rustling of dry foliage. But then there’s a lot of stuff happening that you don’t necessarily think about, like the insect activity that’s at its peak in early fall when it’s still warm out.”

It can be hard to grasp how different the sounds of autumn can be to the other seasons. Spring is all about birds, summer is about vivid pictures of life, winter is all about stillness. So, Matt had to think hard about the sounds he was going to capture that makes us think of the season.

“I found myself having to sit and listen more and really feel a place, asking myself, ‘Okay, what is happening sonically to this place and how does it indicate the change of the season?’ I ended up with a lot of dry leaf textures as different types of trees obviously have different leaves and when those leaves dry out and fall to the ground, they make different sounds. You also have different insect activity in the meadows than you do in the forest and on the borders of lakes. It took more time to record this library because I really had to hung for those special moments that make it sound like fall.”

The results are a beautiful and dynamic soundscape, complete with dripping snowmelt, choruses of insects, and rustling wind. “Beautiful still evenings with the chirping crickets and katydids and cicadas,” he describes. “The morning birds coming in and the coyotes; the first snow of winter with the melt dripping off sagebrush… you can hear the snow melting onto the dry foliage.”

All about location

The soundscapes of autumn captured in SEASONS OF EARTH – AUTUMN are a product of extensive fieldwork across diverse landscapes. The recordings include a variety of locations each offering unique sonic elements, from the whispering grasses of open fields to the serene flow of creeks, and the soft patter of rain on forest canopies.

Matt traversed the US and Canada to get these sounds, venturing into the boreal forests of the North, high sagebrush prairies of the Rockies, the deep desert of the Mojave, the grasslands of the Plains, the wetlands feeding the Mississippi. “A lot of locations are similar places to where I recorded SPRING and SUMMER. They’re really free from noise pollution and are really diverse ecosystems and provide a really good example of what’s happening throughout different seasons. And they really showcase that seasonality.”

The variety of this library not only showcases the richness of the season but also provides creatives with a broad spectrum of sounds to match any autumnal scene they wish to portray.

Capturing the sounds

Matt used the same recording rig with every SEASONS OF EARTH production – his highly prized 8-Channel Schoeps ORTF-3D outdoor set. The Schoeps 3D ORTF microphone rig in the recording of SEASONS OF EARTH – AUTUMN brings a three-dimensional auditory experience to the listener. This advanced recording setup captures sound with such spatial precision and depth that it places the listener right in the middle of an autumnal scene. The rig’s configuration allows for a natural replication of human hearing, which results in a more immersive soundscape, providing content creators with a powerful tool to create a palpable sense of place in their work.

“Depending on how you listen to these libraries…” Matt starts to explain, getting excited about the rigs expansive surround capabilities, “when you use them in a surround sound format or in a spatial format, you really start to see the benefits, especially in the vertical.”

Microphone experiments

Over the last summer, Matt spent some time testing other spatial microphones. He gathered scores of high-end ambisonics microphones, 51 systems, 71 systems, quad systems, double mid-side systems. We put them all to the test. Long story short, there was no comparison. The Schoep’s rig was just better than every one of them we tested in almost every regard, which was surprising for me because I was expecting the tonality of the microphones to be better, or the spatial localization of being able to pinpoint a sound source would have been better with the ambisonics microphones. But we had the opposite result. With these second order ambisonics microphones we were using, the 8-channel ones, you couldn’t quite localize a specific bird call as well as with the Schoeps.

“The Schoeps is just a phenomenal microphone to use, and I’ve never found a playback format it doesn’t excel at. I’ve been on big film mix stages where they drop in the 8-channels into an Atmos mix and it’s like an incredibly immersive experience and you can also throw the same thing into a third order and all-of-a-sudden you get head-tracked and it’s playing back really nicely there.”

Improving on the rig

But the set is not perfect and has some of the same limitations as other mic sets, which can even be harder to resolve. “Most of us recordists learn to record sounds using a mono source, like a shotgun microphone or something like that, or to record in stereo. When you have 8 microphones in a three-dimensional space, you have to consider how your spatial image sounds – the front, back, top, sides – there’s a lot more.”

It also means you might not be able to apply simple solutions to otherwise simple problems. Whether because of rain, wind, or other unforeseen conditions, Matt’s had to find different ways to use it and protect it, which has also meant creating a cage for the set.

“The rig is my never-ending arts and crafts project,” Matt says regarding the variety of upgrades and changes he’s made to it. “I come up with new improvements for it with every recording trip. We recently designed a whole different cage system for our microphones so that the top ceiling of it can be raised a lot higher, so you don’t get the rain taps too close. It’s part of the job I really love – yes, there’s all this technical stuff about microphone placement and gain staging but there’s also these things like building storm cages that you just have to use your imagination and listen.

“I’m constantly going to the hardware store and buying new things and trying new setups and listening and then going back to the hardware store. It changes a lot based on what I’m trying to record and what materials I have at my disposal.”

Challenges in field recordings

Recording natural sounds is fraught with unforeseen challenges, and Matt faced numerous hurdles. Weather conditions, unwanted background noise, and the unpredictability of wildlife all posed significant issues during the recording process. These challenges required a blend of patience, technical expertise, and sometimes just good fortune to overcome, ensuring that the final library consists only of the purest and most evocative autumnal sounds.

Outside of the elements that he had to combat in recording, there was also the matter of choosing places and getting to them. In fall, especially in late fall with the snowmelt, everything turns really muddy. “And then the other thing is access to a lot of these places becomes more difficult because you’re getting more moisture. After a summer of people using these dirt roads, the roads are degraded a bit. So, things like rain and snow have a much heavier impact on the quality of the roads. So, it’s always fun and you need a good 4×4 to do this work for use.

“I definitely got my car stuck one time in Wyoming pretty badly trying to record the snow melt. It was firm and cold at night and then during the day when I was done recording and I was trying to leave, I was like, ‘Wait a second’.”

Dealing with noise pollution

Finding places free of noise pollution is always a struggle for nature recordists, and this was no exception for Matt’s quest to record AUTUMN. “I don’t use any recordings that have noise pollution in them, not on AUTUMN or anywhere. That means a single recording out of this library, there might be a 5-minute-long piece that took me 4 hours to record. And sometimes you drive for a day or two just to get to one location that you think is promising, you get there and then it’s just too noisy. You have to get back in the car and try again.

“One place that always proves to be difficult to record is in the Colorado Desert Plateau. Air traffic makes it really, really difficult. I spent weeks in the Anza Borrego desert driving around and sometimes the places that were free from noise were just very barren in terms of their soundscape. Then there’s California – even though there’s a lot of beautiful nature, there’s a lot of air traffic and people. So, I spent a few weeks roaming around the California deserts searching for quiet, and I did find some and it’s in the library.

“There’s another place in Tennessee and Kentucky I like to go. It’s a piece of land bordered by two rivers on each side, and they use them for commercial shipping. So even though there were no road noise or plane noise, you have that other variable of hearing distant ships and the sound from a ship can carry for miles and miles and miles. So I get to a location in the afternoon and think it would be great and then find out that a ship 5 miles up the river was coming down and I’d have to wait a few hours for it to pass and hope there wasn’t another one behind it. So, I end up using apps that track ships and things like this.”

Final thoughts

With AUTUMN, Matt has finally completed the SEASONS OF EARTH series, exploring so many nooks and crannies of the North American countryside. “It’s a really long and intense series, even though it’s just four libraries,” he says. “It was put together over years and years of recordings with hundreds of hours spent on editing. I’d say I’ve driven more than 20,000 miles on roads in the US just to bring these collections to folks.”

The immersive quality of SEASONS OF EARTH – AUTUMN is not just an auditory treat but an invaluable resource for creators looking to enhance the sensory dimension of their projects. This library can serve as the backdrop for film scenes, the ambient bed for video games, or even an authentic setting for immersive VR experiences. It’s a versatile library that can really bring a genuine autumnal atmosphere to any storytelling medium.

Get AUTUMN alone in Surround or Stereo or in a bundle with the other three SEASONS OF EARTH.