Anybody who habitually records sound has those moments of serendipity when the recorder happens to be rolling while something really wonderful happens. Similarly, there are the sounds that get away, the ones that end while you're fumbling with the mic cables, or with the cell phone. Or the ones that are physically impossible to record (or close enough to it for our purposes).
I've only gotten to go to the Deep Listening Retreat once, in 2006, but it changed the way I think about sound, particularly the degree and the quality of the attention I give it. There are times when I find myself inordinately drawn to remembering the sounds that I couldn't record, and it's interesting to realize how, even though they aren't there, you can still study them, you can still notice new things about them. The richness of the sound and the experience of hearing it doesn't diminish over time. It's surprisingly unrelated to the presence or absence of a recording.
We got home the other night after sunset, but while the sky was still darkening, and as we got out of the car, a flock of geese took off. From every direction, there were loud, individual rustlings of brush and branches and leaves and a rapid beating of wings as each goose took off. You could hear the noisy ascent through the trees into open air, and you could hear them calling as they flew, the calls coming from every direction and coalescing in the distance. It was as if we had accidentally wandered into the middle of a secret goose ritual, and now that we had found them out they had to scatter, and fast. It was a surreal moment, even more so because, try as we might, we couldn't see a single goose.
I snapped this picture while grabbing for my cell phone, hoping to capture some semblance of the sound by recording a video. This is the exact color that the sky was.
How about you? Any favorites?
For me the sounds that always get away are the ones that really _occupy_ a large physical space. I think the best example would be the trains that we could hear from our old house. They always haunted me at night, but I was never able to get a good recording. There was of course the sound of the whistle, but there was an even more haunting sound from the wheels scraping where the tracks curved. Up close, it just sounded like a high-pitched squeal, but when softened by the acoustics of the surrounding hills, it sounded much more distant and almost plaintive. But of course you could never get a good recording from a distance, because you'd get the freeway and the wind and the neighbors' dogs and what not.
When I was little, I remember hearing coyotes from my bedroom window, and the sound would reverberate in a similar way. For anybody who's never heard a pack of coyotes before, take everything you imagine from hearing packs of wolves in the movies, and throw it out. Coyotes usually start out with an annoying high-pitched yipping sound, but when a pack of them gets going -- and especially when the sound echoes around the hills -- it sounds almost like singing. Really eerie, ghostly, ethereal singing. One night when I was probably around five or so, I remember hearing them and not knowing what the sound was, but being transfixed by it. The song was so musical, but so hollow and obviously not human, that I initially thought someone was playing a recorder or a pennywhistle somewhere in the forest. I processed the sound as though I were listening to a tune, and in my mind it came out atonal, mysterious, and surprisingly mournful. It struck the same sort of response that some of the more elegiac bits in Shostakovich's music do when you're really paying attention. And being the melancholy little kid I was, I of course loved it.
Anyway, that veered off topic, but I suppose that's what the trains reminded me of to an extent, and why I always wanted to get a good recording of them.
Re: train. What I remember most about the train was how pitched it was, like a major third or a minor seventh that would just stretch on forever. And the acoustics of the hillside are incredible. I went to CNMAT and described this sound at one point, and somebody suggested I just download a train sound from FreeSound since they all sound the same, and I silently thought to myself: noooooooooooooooo.
Did it ever seem strange to you that those recordings never picked up what we were hoping for, but did pick up all these other sounds that I never noticed when I was listening to the train? It was as if listening to a recording was way more objective, somehow, than normal human listening.
Re: coyotes. I heard the coyotes once. I couldn't believe it. Did I (maybe) wake you up to ask if we were going to die?
"It was as if listening to a recording was way more objective, somehow, than normal human listening."
Totally; the cocktail party effect seems to go away entirely when I'm listening to a recording. The only recordings I've ever made that seemed to capture the same mix of ambient sounds that I was actually hearing IRL are the binaural experiments I used to do. But I think that's a psychoacoustic effect, not that they're actually cleaner recordings. A stereo recording really only gives you one dimension of spatialization (left to right), but a binaural recording gives your brain at least some of the cues to recreate a 2-D or sometimes even 3-D sense of space, which makes it a lot easier to filter out. That's my theory, anyway.
And I find it kind of amazing that the human brain can do all the intricate math needed to tease out a single sound source from a stereo field, without even thinking about it.
The funny thing is that I still had the same experience with those old binaural recordings. There was one we'd made of walking to the house from campus where I wore the headphones for a while. Your voice sounded the same, but the crunching of our feet on gravel and the sounds of traffic and the little rustling sounds clothes and backpacks make all seemed surprisingly loud.
I think you're still probably right, though. My hunch is that the effect was less pronounced than it would have been if we'd recorded the conventional way.