legends · 4 min read ·
Field Recording, Dawn
A sound recordist's dawn chorus contains a liturgy spoken by a voice on every track.
**Session log — Dawn Chorus, Fenmoor Reserve.**
**Recordist: Ione Baxter. Equipment: stereo pair (omni), parabolic dish, handheld recorder, 24-bit/96 kHz.**
**Purpose: ambient bed for a nature documentary. 90 minutes, from first light.**
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**04:12.** On site. Temperature 3 °C. Mist on the water. Set up the pair on the edge of the reed bed, 1.5 m high, spaced at 40 cm. Dish aimed at the willow stand. Levels checked. Wind: negligible.
**04:31.** Starting. Blackbird first, as always, from the west. A song thrush. A wren, absurdly loud for its size. The reeds begin to creak as the light comes.
**04:50.** Robins. A pair of mute swans. A cuckoo, far off. The chorus builds, layer on layer. I always forget how beautiful it is until I'm sitting in it. I have been doing this for twenty years and I still get goose-flesh.
**05:05.** Peak. Forty or fifty species, I'd say, all going at once. I'm monitoring in headphones. In the headphones it is a wall of sound, shimmering.
**05:12.** In the headphones, under the birds, a voice.
It's not loud. It's about thirty dB under the chorus. A human voice, speaking in the pauses between the song. A low, level, conversational voice, a man's, reading. I can't make out words. It sounds like someone reading a long text aloud at the other side of the lake.
I lifted the headphones. The air was quiet but for the birds. I put them back on. The voice was there.
**05:14.** Checked the parabolic. The voice is not coming from where the dish is pointed. It is not on the stereo pair either. It's on the handheld, at the base of the tripod.
**05:20.** Played the segment back in the field. It's not words. It's a series of what I can only call notes: pitched, rhythmic, a kind of syllabic chanting. And as I played it I realised the birds were doing it too. Every species in the chorus was singing in the pauses of that voice. Waiting for it. Responding.
**05:30.** It has a rhythm. A call and response. The voice phrases; the birds answer. I began to pick out which. The blackbird answered the second line. The wren came in on the fourth. It's a liturgy.
**05:45.** I moved the handheld to the reeds, away from the pair. The voice moved with it, in the headphones. I took the recorder off the tripod, switched it off. The voice continued. In the headphones, through the cable, from nothing.
I took the headphones off. I held them in my hand. I could hear it, faintly, in the air. Coming from the plastic.
**06:00.** The sun is up. The light is on the water. The birds are tapering off. The voice, in the headphones, has become clearer, as if the dawn has given it room. It's reading a long list. It has reached what sounds like a name.
I'm going to quote the transcription from the recorder, such as it is.
- *...and the heron on the north shore, and the grebes by the island, and the one in the willow whom we do not call by name, and the woman with the microphone.*
I stopped the recording. There was a long silence on the water. The only sound was a coot, far off.
**06:05.** I packed the gear. I walked back along the causeway with my bag, in the mist, which was lifting. At the car I sat for a while with the engine off.
**06:30.** I played back the whole session in the car. The voice is on every channel. It is on the dish, the pair and the handheld. It's on the raw files. It is present from the first minute. It was there when I set up.
I listened to the very beginning. I'm on the track, setting up. I can hear myself, clearly, muttering to myself as I always do, adjusting the dish. And I can hear, softly, under my breath, a second voice, the same low voice, saying exactly what I am saying a half-second before I say it.
**Postscript (next day).** I rang the producer to say I'd had a bad session and the files were unusable. She said she'd listened and thought they were wonderful. She said the beauty of the chorus was extraordinary, and the voice was a stroke of genius. She'd been calling it the narrator. She wanted to use it as the main track. She asked who the voice actor was.
I told her there wasn't one. She said, "Then it must be you."