Recording The Natural World

Thomas Rex Beverly is a US field recordist and former composer who specializes in field recordings of the natural world, and his take on outdoor recording is quite different.

“The audio engineering skills I learned and the ears that I have as a composer means I approach the field of recording with a musical ear,” he says. “For many nature projects like Planet Earth, the audio is often a mix of recordings taken on set when the crew are filming augmented with sounds in post-production.

“Typically, I’m using what I call a drop rig, which is a microphone setup that I leave out in the field for anywhere from 12 hours to 10 days. On a single trip I can use eight different microphone rigs running for different amounts of time depending on the number of mics I’m using and their power usage. I’ll record hundreds of hours of material from all sorts of different locations within a region, and then I’ll go through those and find the best recordings.”

Although it’s a very different approach from most traditional field recording, it’s essential to be able to capture unpredictable sounds like bird sounds, wind or the sound of icebergs calving in Greenland. Meanwhile, recording in remote locations – yes, we’re back on locations again – means that size, weight and power are all vital considerations.

“On a recent trip to Patagonia I had a checklist of things that I wanted to record, but you don’t always know what you’re going to find,” says Beverly. “I have a 75kg kit limit with an assortment of equipment including ambience rigs, contact mics, hydrophones and a parabolic dish microphone if I’m trying to capture a specific animal.

“I have around eight different rigs with eight recorders and eight sets of microphones. Many mics will take 48v phantom power, but there’s a whole category of mics that use plug-in power of around 5v which can run for much longer on the same size battery. I can run four 48v mics for 12 hours on one battery, but run the same rig run for multiple days on 5v. Power management is an important consideration because if there’s a big weather system coming in or multiple days of dawn choruses to record, I might want to leave some of the rigs out for days at a time.”

The Audience

Whether it’s the wind or an exotic bird, the subject is another influence. For light entertainment, the sound of the audience creates all the energy; it enables people at home to be swept up into something bigger, and as before, it does it invisibly without the viewer even realizing.

With an audience, an engineer like Peter Bridges will try to minimise spill from the studio PA with shotgun and hypercardioid mics hung over the audience.

“The audience mics are a combination of Sennheiser MKH 416 supercardioid shotguns and AKG CK63 hypercardioids. Both are great at minimising spill due to their tighter polar patterns. They’re placed on poles strapped to the seating rostra to get them close to the audience. We also use MKH 8070 shotguns hung from the roof to give a slightly different coverage. They provide enough of the audience without too much room spill.”

UK show Dancing on Ice, filmed at Bovingdon Airfield Studios, presents an especially difficult environment. It’s an echoey space with a hard ice rink floor and long reverb tails, and like many modern entertainment shows, the show employs a rock and roll style PA system. From a broadcast point of view, trying to capture audience reactions without too much room ambience is tricky.

“The audience mics are a combination of shotguns. We use the MKH 416 because their tighter polar pattern is better at minimising spill from the room. We place them closer to the audience on poles strapped to the seating, and we’ve also got MKH 8060 mics hanging down from the roof just to give a slightly different coverage. It gives us enough of the audience without too much of the room spill.”

Choosing The Right Mic

Everything we have discussed is fundamentally about the same thing; microphone decisions are not made based on how good a microphone might sound but based on a range of external factors. The environment, the space, access to power, costume requirements, the subject matter and the format.

”The environment that you’re working in tends to dictate the microphones that you want to use,” says Richardson. “An interior workhorse that I use is the DPA 4017. There is a certain amount of diffusion that it has which is great, and how it works on- and off-axis works really well for dialogue. I might use DPA 4018s as plant mics in conjunction with the 4017s when I’m working on interior sets because mixing between the two is particularly good.”

Appropriate microphone choices can help manage these environments, which in turn enable sound engineers to support the visuals in the best way possible. It is always about practicality and often about compromise.

Compromise is something that Beverly always has to consider, especially when working in hostile conditions where gear can be damaged by the extreme weather, or by rodents chewing through the cables!

“Sometimes you just need to record for a long time; a glacier might make a sound once every three hours,” he says. “Sometimes you’re waiting for a storm to arrive. Sometimes you’re trying to get a specific animal and trying to figure out where their den is to set up your mics close by.

“In all these environments, the self-noise and sensitivity of the mics are important factors. In a jungle I can use noisier mics because the ambient noise of the jungle is so loud, but if I’m recording in a very quiet place, I need a mic with lower self-noise. An MKH 8020 has 10 dBA of self-noise, while a lot of lavalier mics will have 20+ dBA. That extra 10 dBA makes a big difference.

“I’m always trying to get a balance, and it’s a trade off with different kinds of microphones which often don’t matter to other sound mixers if the lavalier is recording dialogue and it’s clipped to the subject.”

Closing Thoughts

It could be argued that technology has got very good at getting rid of the bits of audio that we don’t want, like background and self-noise, and that AI is driving a lot of noise reduction in modern programming. It could also be argued that many people will put up with lower quality audio as long as they can hear clearly what’s going on. But that’s missing the point.

“It depends how you measure the quality,” says Curry. ”Are you measuring it from the perspective of it being the nicest representation of that voice, or whether you can hear clearly what is being said?”

Either way, the sound engineer’s job will continue to be under the radar, silently improving all our content for the benefit of the viewer. As Bridges says, “The number one thing for me as a sound supervisor in TV is that production isn’t interested in the detail of what I do; they just want their show to work and sound good. And who can blame them?”