Introduction

Hi I am Stratis, welcome to my blog

MY STORY

In the past, I was a piano student, a music teacher, a composer, a sound designer, a project manager, a waiter, an arranger. Now I am a vagabond traveling, equipped with a high dose of curiosity, thirst for knowledge and adventure, some fancy microphones and my hammock.

HOW EVERYTHING BEGAN

One and a half years ago, I embarked on my first longer trip, to explore the natural beauty of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil for five months. I was equipped with a set of binaural microphones and recorded the fauna and flora of different biotopes, including mountains, oceans, deserts and various jungles, like one of the last coastal tropical rainforests on earth in Choko/Colombia, the evergreen Rainforests in the Amazon Basin deep inside the National Park Pacaya-Samiria in Peru or the cloud forests in Colombia and Peru.

This trip has changed me permanently. Back then, I had the vague idea of binaural-recordings.com for the first time, an online database of immersive natural soundscapes, recorded on different places in the world, as unaffected as possible by the noisiness of civilization. I was making field recordings before and was highly influenced by Murray Schäfer’s work on soundscapes, sound ecology and the idea of a holistic acoustical consideration of a recording. It was out of the question to create another independent SFX Library site with isolated functional sounds for the industry; firstly, because there are excellent resources on the net and secondly because I am simply not interested in that.

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT

As I decided to work on the realization of this project, I knew that it would require me to go traveling for a long time and to record a huge amount of data. To be able to do that, I was working hard for a year to save money, resigned from my jobs, quitted my apartment, packed my best gear in a backpack and booked a one-way ticket to Bangkok. Since March I have been traveling to Southeast Asia, first in Thailand, now in Laos and later…we will see.

DREAMING IS ACTING

My library of sounds shall be a window to the beauty of the sonority of nature, accessible to regular people, professionals, and scientists. I want people to close their eyes and start listening. I wish them to take a break, to stop jumping around like maniacs, rushing here and there, having to do this and that.

I may need months to get the site working and start publishing the content and even years to finish the project. Even if I like to take my time doing things, I would need to start offering some albums, libraries at one point, which, in a best-case scenario, would be purchased by professionals and support me financially.

LET´S DO IT

I start NOW with this blog, because life is short and who knows… maybe tomorrow my hard drive containing hundreds of gigabytes of already recorded material gets eaten by a viper or a huge lizard, and I then decide to find an indigenous woman and say goodbye to computers, recorders and other evil devices for good.

I start NOW to share with you chapters of my journey with a lot of sound examples and hope you will enjoy it.

IF … you want to know more about all this → THEN proceed reading text
ELSE… kill Task and format B:/Brain/System Files

print “The End”       end IF;

WHY IS THE NATURE WORTH TO BE RECORDED

We are living in the period of Anthropocene. We have altered the earth in ways that call into question our very survival over the coming centuries or decades. Until today, we haven’t found a way to live symbiotically with nature and even rapid technological developments have failed to significantly improve the quality of life of millions of people or to improve the biological condition of the earth. As a matter of fact, things are getting worse. I am traveling looking for the beauty, which is in danger. To capture the sounds, I am using “3D” recording techniques and microphones (ambisonics, binaural), ready for the next generation VR media. Yes, it is coming and it is coming fast. Still, a recording is never going to reproduce perfectly the real experience, even by using the most advanced, complex and sophisticated technologies.

THIS BLOG IS FOR YOU

One of the main reasons I am doing this is to offer my experiences to all those, who cannot live them for real. Many people do not have the option to go to the places I go. Others could theoretically travel, but to do so they would need to change their lifestyle habits, leave their comfort zone and sacrifice some things. It is not impossible to travel if you really want it.

A soundscape is a record, a snapshot of a unique, never again happening event. It is not going to change anything in the physical world. But it can maybe change some of us, at least a little, it can give us reasons to listen more carefully, to reflect on what we want to protect and why we need to evolve.

Making a nice recording, apart from having the professional gear, is not like taking a photograph. An impressive landscape may appear unspoiled on the first sight, but be seriously damaged. It may sound trivial, but if a place is too silent, something is wrong. Magic happens all the time, but not necessarily when the tape is running. I have to record and keep on recording and some few times crazy things happen. Listening and analysing a recording can also give us a much more accurate picture of the condition of the environment than a visual image. It can contain much more information about the fauna and indirectly the flora than hundreds of pictures.

Tropical forests host a huge concentration of biodiversity. The same amount of species living in the Amazon forest in a square meter may be spread over an area of some hundred meters in a European forest. If you ever happen to be in the Amazon jungle at night, you are going to experience a symphonic concert of innumerable insects, singing their courtship songs, forming polyrhythmic patterns of a seemingly contemporary, electro-acoustic composition. You are going to be surrounded by distant calls of mammals and waterfowls and the rustling and crackling noises of mystical creatures hunting in the darkness.

NATURE SOUNDS DIFFERENT THAN YOU THINK

Most people´s conception of how for instance a jungle has to sound has been formed by movies. Cinema can be an amazing artistic medium, but it’s an imaginary world, an interpretation of reality. Every single sound on every movie has been carefully designed, created, modified and serves the cause of the overall impression. In the Amazon jungle, for example, you do not hear the calls of some crazy sounding exotic birds, at least not exclusively. You are permanently surrounded by a swarm of circling flies or buzzing mosquitoes getting on your nerves. Was that your impression when you watched the new Tarzan movie?

EVERYTHING IS IN A STEADY FLOW

You know these videos on YouTube with titles like “8 hours of relaxing nature sounds” or “Ocean Waves for yoga, meditation, deep sleep, better sex, concentration, study …”? They target the growing audience of the modern man/woman/intergender, living a stressful life in a particularly noisy environment, looking for relief from daily pressures and anxiety. It’s funny, that the majority of these videos try to point out the positive effects of the otherwise “useless” nature sounds on your performance, productivity, relaxation. Yes sir, listen to the ocean when you sleep, practice yoga, take your children to the music school. These activities will make of you a more useful member of our society, a smarter, more efficient, functioning robot… hops I strayed up from the topic. There is nothing wrong with practicing yoga or listening to nature sounds through a speaker or noise-canceling headphones to fade out the sound pollution that surrounds us. Actually, I also intend to use YouTube as a medium to spread my recordings. The point is that the majority of these videos/recordings are just tiny, little repetitive loops of not more than 1-3 minutes, nicely edited by somebody who knows how to create fades; and the audience is led to praise the beautiful, repetitive nature of nature. In reality, nature is in a state of continuous transformation, where there is no repetition of identical patterns. Slightly different structures may repeat, but always with unpredictable micro-structural changes; abrupt breaks may occur, or just slow-moving transitions will transform gradually the sound image as time goes by. Imagine a soundscape like a piece of minimal music, just with ten more layers or imagine the principle of different overlapping layers or textures. This is how real nature sounds. It’s a game of alienating, alternating elements on a dance of a permanent flow.

Thank you very much for reading. Now I am offering you a binaural (3D) recording and riddle at the same time, so please put on your headphones or earplugs and listen carefully:

What are you listening to? Please comment below