Gentle sea and cave rumbling booms at Beeny Cliff — further improved

Peaceful and gentle, yes (please don't turn the volume up!), but commonplace, no — with an unusual and quite haunting aspect! — An updated version of this recording, at last with the truly optimal degree of stereo widening, and so with the best-possible stereo imaging.

I made this recording on 6th April 2013 at the same spot as a previous one of mine, at a quite exposed position on Beeny Cliff, not far from Boscastle, Cornwall, UK. This is at a point where the original and very exposed section of the coast path had been abandoned and a less exposed diversion established, but here I got onto that exposed bit, where the sea is undercutting the cliffs.

This time I chose this position for a lunch stop on a hike from Crackington Haven to Tintagel, as it was relatively sheltered from a brisk and cold breeze — but the sea was even more gentle than last time, so I had doubts as to whether any recording made here this time would be really worth keeping — the dull and commonplace is not at all what I seek or wish to share with others! Because it's relatively deep sea here against the cliff, you don't get the sound of breaking waves, but instead, with the gentle swell on this day, you get a constant gentle rippling and splashing.

So, rather disappointed at such a relatively uninteresting sound, but goaded by a 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' sort of intuition, I rather forlornly set the recording going and retreated to unpack and start my lunch. Then, after an immediate disturbance of an aeroplane passing over (a bit that I'd have to cut out of the recording), I was surprised to find that there was another disturbance — some very distant-sounding deep rumbling booms.

Initially I thought they were from some extraneous source, but soon it dawned on me that they must be not disturbances at all, but coming from a cave somewhere at the bottom of this cliff — though I couldn't actually see any cave at all down there. The boomings come at varying intervals, but typically at around 20 seconds, and have a decidedly subterranean quality about them; they also have the tone of some very distant rumbles of thunder, but with more emphasis on very low frequencies, which one doesn't get so much in thunder. Also there is a rather ill-defined cyclic variation over a few to several minutes in the strength of the booming. The picture is slightly confused at times, because there is occasionally a little microphone wind noise.

It seemed quite eerie, to be getting such booming sounds, when superficially the sea seemed so gentle and lacking in 'decent' swell. Thus my initial disappointment changed over to a certain excitement that once again I'd serendipitously got a really quite special recording.

Although over subsequent years I got many much more dramatic recordings from this alcove and cave system, none of those quite matches the peaceful menace of this serendipitous find on my naively innocent lunch-break here on 6 April 2013 — which is why I've chosen to upload here this second revision of the recording.

The very noisy birds briefly heard early in the recording are oystercatchers. A group of them was flying quite close to the sea surface, coming from the left and then flying round in a full circle way below the recorder before flying off again.

Advisory

Because of the processing to widen and sharpen the originally atrocious stereo imaging, the sea may sound rather phasey when listened to from certain speaker systems. Therefore high-grade headphones are the best solution.

This recording in progress. The arrow points to the tiny light grey speck, which is the furry windshield on the recorder.
 
Techie stuff

Recording made with a Sony PCM-M10 on a Hama mini-tripod, using the built-in microphones covered with a Rode Dead Kitten windshield. I have used Audacity to apply a custom EQ profile to correct for the high frequency muffling caused by the windshield and also to correct for the audible broad 'hump' in the bass frequencies of ALL my recordings prior to processing.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield — and then more recently stereo widening / sharpening-up using the VST plugin A1 Stereo Control (160% widening). That's in contrast with the previous 'improved' version of this recording, which overdid the widening (220%) and so had a less solid and coherent stereo soundstage. I note also that the 160%-widened versions of my M10 recordings also gets the most three-dimensional soundstage.

Please remember to give this recording a rating!