Natures Music
Natures Music
Natures Music markets recordings worldwide of ambient nature sound field recordings. Conrad Askland from Road Records works as a field recording engineer for this and other companies. His field work and research is used for research as well as commercial nature sound recordings available to the public.
We are a member of the Nature Sound Society and are involved with the historical archiving of location recordings for scientific and commercial use. Latest research we are involved in is comparative studies of field recording techniques and whale call recording.
Nature sound recording takes a lot of patience and diligence. The studio gear must be hauled to the actual locations, usually in backpacks with full camping gear. Remote locations are harder and harder to find without interruption of human induced noises and airplane noise. The recording techniques have some similiarities to standard studio recording, but the environment is not forgiving and doesn’t always cooperate with the sound engineer! Many of the nature sounds used in the productions at Road Records are taken from libraries created by the field recording work of Conrad Askland.
Our interest in nature sounds extends beyond the audio aspect. In achieving high quality field recording we are archiving sounds for future generations. How will we know the sound of a steam locomotive once they’re all gone? Field recording is not very glamorous, in fact it’s usually downright dirty and sweaty. But it’s an important of preserving time and memory for specific locations and sounds.
Left is a photo from the Nature Sound Society annual workshop in 2002. This group is dedicated to improving the art of field recording and to archiving scientific field recording work for scientists and later generations. Our engineer Conrad is not pictured because he’s taking the picture. At far left is Frank Dorritie, noted field recording author and 2 time Grammy winning audio engineer.