During summer 2024 I stayed in a house at the edge of the woods. Halfway up the driveway a path cuts through the trees and into a circular clearing and then down into a wooded ravine. This project was an experiment in recording the sounds of the woods at night, from the dusk chorus of birds and insects through the late night, when total darkness meant I need to keep my recorder in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
One of the interesting things about field recording is the way it isolates the sonic dimension of the space. Actually being in the woods at night can put you on high alert, mainly because of the darkness, the difficulty in finding one’s way, and—one thing that does carry into the sound recordings—the variety of unexpected and unplaceable sounds, such as the crunching of last year’s dead leaves underfoot—the sound of which can change suddenly depending on the composition of the forest floor (plant litter, sticks, dead leaves over duff, the decaying under-layer) and on what falls out of the trees to hit the ground beside you.
That said, listening back to these recordings I found that the difference between dusk and deep night, for example, was clearly audible especially in the style and intensity of insect noise. The selections presented here include a range of times of night, and proximity to the road or deeper woods; represent dog walks, solo walks, and mundane errands (trash night, for example, involved rolling a wheeled garbage can along the edge of the woods and up to the road); and surprising sounds that caught me unaware, punctuating natural sounds with fireworks, trains, low flying planes, and electronic interference among other things.
The Gothic Listening Project 