Boreal Forest · Karelia
Dawn chorus, week 18
A 43-minute pre-dawn capture from a continuous monitoring station in the Vodlozersky reserve. Now in its eighth season; the cumulative dataset has supported three published phenology studies.
Cover recording · published April 22
Glacier voice, late thaw
A two-hour continuous capture of the Skaftafell ice tongue retreating into a kettle lake, recorded across four nights in May. Subsonic groans, dripwater patterning, distant gull traffic. Mastered for headphones.
What surprised the engineer most was not the volume of the ice but its rhythm — long, structured intervals between calving events that bear, on slowed playback, an uncanny resemblance to whale song. We present the recording uncut, accompanied by the engineer's field notes and a temperature log from the recording site.
3,847
Recordings catalogued
62
Contributing engineers
141 TB
Lossless audio
2014
Operating continuously
Recent additions
Hydrophone · Pacific
Whale-fall thirty kilometres north
Forty hours of hydrophone capture over a confirmed whale-fall site at 1,400 m depth. The recording spans the initial mobile-scavenger phase. Submitted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute under permit.
Urban margin · Tashkent
Bazaar at closing, three perspectives
Three simultaneous recordings of the Chorsu bazaar in the final forty minutes of trading, captured from a fixed mic, a wandering binaural rig, and the rooftop of the adjacent madrasah.
Atmospheric · High desert
Solar wind, August perihelion
VLF recordings of geomagnetic activity from the Patagonian plateau during the August coronal mass ejection. Audible whistlers and a sustained chorus event near the 03:00 mark.
Geological · Reykjanes peninsula
Fumarole, slowly cooling
Twelve weeks of intermittent capture at a single fumarole as it transitioned from active venting to dormancy. Sequenced as a single twenty-eight-minute reduction.
Ritual · Western Highlands
Gaelic psalmody, full evening service
A complete recording of a precentor-led Gaelic psalm service from a Free Presbyterian congregation in Stornoway. Released with the congregation's consent and the original liner notes.
Field notes
From the editors
On the slow politics of preservation
The longer the archive runs, the more our priorities shift toward the recordings we are unlikely to be able to make again. This is not, by itself, a recipe for melancholy programming: many of the soundscapes most worth preserving are also the most exhilarating to listen to. But the editorial calendar increasingly reflects what is disappearing.
In the coming season we will publish dedicated thematic issues on the dawn choruses of three boreal forests at different latitudes; a comparative study of glacier sound across six geographic regions; and a multi-year capture of one street in central Lisbon, recorded annually on the same date.
Submissions remain open to engineers working in remote and underserved locations. We continue to provide microphone loans, rigging support, and a modest production stipend on a rolling basis. See the submissions page.
"What an archive preserves is never the sound itself but a particular relationship between a microphone and a moment. Both of those are worth thinking about."— S. Marchetti, editorial board
Quarterly listening sessions
Our public listening sessions resume this season at the Vasaparken pavilion in Stockholm and, by way of a new partnership, at the basement room of the Kabinet věd o umění in Prague. Programmes will be released a fortnight in advance.