Beginnings

Hinterland began in June 2014 as an attempt to find a permanent home for a set of recordings made by S. Marchetti during a year spent in the Vodlozersky National Park in Russian Karelia. After several conversations with engineers working in similar circumstances, it became clear that no existing institution was well-suited to the kind of material the work produced: too high-fidelity for the casual streaming services, too informal for the established sound archives, too dispersed geographically for any single university to house.

We took a small office on the third floor of a building in central Vilnius and put a server in the corner. The first recording catalogued was HFR-0001, a thirty-six-minute capture of late-spring nocturnal birds from station STN-001. It is still online; nothing has ever been removed from the archive.

Contributors

Sixty-two engineers contribute to the archive on a regular basis, with a much larger pool of occasional contributors. The list below shows our most prolific recent contributors; the submissions page describes how to begin contributing your own work.

• Þóra HelgadóttirNorth Atlantic · glaciology focus82
• P. VainioBoreal forest · phenology, dawn chorus71
• V. SokolovKarelia · long-form river recordings64
• H. LindqvistNorthern Europe · ferries, ice, harbour58
• D. OrtizPatagonia · VLF and atmospheric work52
• A. RazzakovCentral Asia · markets, devotional44
• S. JónsdóttirIceland · geothermal, volcanic39
• E. DaviesWales · industrial heritage28
• R. ChenBritish Isles · devotional, bells24
• N. PereiraSouth Asia · bats, wetland edge18

Equipment

We are deliberate about equipment without being doctrinaire. The standard portable rig is a pair of Sennheiser MKH-8020 omnidirectional microphones into a Sound Devices MixPre-6 II at 96 kHz / 24-bit, capturing to Broadcast Wave Format. Hydrophone work uses the Aquarian H2a; VLF work uses an in-house two-metre coil antenna of S. Marchetti's original design. Unattended stations carry hardened Røde NT-SF1 ambisonic rigs.

All masters are stored on triplicated cold storage in three geographically distinct facilities. The original session files have never been deleted and never will be.

Licensing

Unless otherwise noted on the individual recording's page, all material is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). You are free to use the recordings in documentary, educational, artistic, and personal contexts; commercial use requires written permission, which we grant readily when the use is appropriate. Profits, when they arise, are returned to the contributing engineer.

Privacy

We do not run analytics. We do not place tracking cookies. We do not have a marketing department. Our server logs are retained for thirty days and used only to diagnose service issues. The full list of what we log and why is on a dedicated page.