I've been doing a bit of experimenting with microphones, audio mixers, and computer audio software (Audacity), making unbroken long-length recordings of the ambient noise (wind, distant traffic, neighbours playing with chainsaws, lawnmowers, and other power tools, passing aircraft, birdsong, and neighbourhood dogs, etc.) from the backyard, and other places.
I'm doing this mostly for my own purposes, but I see this sort of thing on sale, people do buy them, and I've wanted effect recordings myself (though most of the ones I've seen have had recordings that were far too short, to be of any use).
For $20 (Australian), copies of my recordings can be bought on audio compact disc for your own personal enjoyment, or for adding to your own recordings (e.g. adding background atmospherics to video productions, compiling soundscapes, a source of samples for musique concrète, etc.). The price is a once-off, no royalties will be demanded of you. Send a cheque or postal order to me, or use PayPal, and I'll post you a copy (cost would be higher to send overseas). Or you can arrange to pick one up in person.
I own the copyright for the recordings, but I give consent for personal copies to be made, and for partial copies to form part of other works. I do not give consent for the entirety, or even large proportions, of my work to be passed off as your own—you must combine it with plenty of other material before you can claim any derivative work as being your own product. Nor do I give consent for others to sell copies for their own profit. This is to encourage artistic creation, not lazy pirating.
I'd be keen to hear something that made use of my sound recordings, one way or another. I quite like abstract audio art, though I really don't care for “new age” style of relaxation music that mix noises into musical pieces. e.g. I find things like listening to someone trilling on a flute while dolphins splashing about, and lame music mixed in with thunderstorms, to be highly irritating.
Here's a few small samples you can download for unrestricted usage:
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Ambient sound from Modbury - ogg vorbis encoded (20 seconds duration, 366 KiB)
Ambient sound from Modbury - MP3 encoded (20 seconds duration, 313 KiB) -
Wind and magpies singing - ogg vorbis encoded (11 seconds duration, 211 KiB)
Wind and magpies singing - MP3 encoded (11 seconds duration, 181 KiB) -
Ambient sound of various birds in Modbury edited together - ogg vorbis encoded (3′51″ duration, 4.1 MiB)
Ambient sound of various birds in Modbury edited together - MP3 encoded (3′51″ duration, 3.6 MiB)
(pigeons, aircraft & magpies, parrots, and other unidentified birds)
Original recording details
For the backyard recordings (some samples, above), two CP-2 omni-directional Nakimichi microphone capsules in a CM-300 backend were placed about a foot apart from each other, and about five feet up from the ground. They were connected to an Astor audio mixer providing around 60db of gain, with one microphone panned hard to the left and the other to the right, and equalisation was bypassed (except for some recordings made on very windy days, where a low cut filter was inserted). As such, you can listen to a psuedo-stereo effect, or just use one channel by itself as a mono recording without missing hearing anything that happened, and without hearing any phasing errors that you might get by simply adding the left and right channels together.
We live about fifteen kilometres from Adelaide airport, and just a few kilometres from Parafield Airport, so you can hear periodic jets and small aircraft fly by. It's around a couple of hundred metres away to a moderately busy road, and about a few hundred metres more to a fairly busy motorway, giving a nearly constant drone of traffic noise and sporadic individual vehicle noises. I've usually picked on public holidays to do my recordings, as there's far less traffic on those days. There's quite a lot of birds in our area, so you can usually hear them as the most predominant sound. Unless it's a windy day, then the most predominant sound is probably going to be the wind through the nearby gum tree leaves.
Unless otherwise noted, recordings aren't edited. They're a straight recording, simply trimmed to length, to fit onto an audio compact disc. Once a recording level has been determined, there's no further adjustments made. The recordings are un-mixed, and un-edited, other than a simple fade in and out at the beginning and end.
This sales section of the website is dedicated to selling things, i.e. objects that already exist. There is a separate business section about hiring me to create things that don't exist, yet (video production & copying services, etc.).