Mussel Point, near Zennor — boats, seals, seagulls and curlews

(There's an improved version of this, at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/837062/ )
A vibrant, joyful gentle sea soundscape on the expanse of 'cliff apron' rocks  near the so-called 'Seal Island' and popular for the tourist mini-cruises from St Ives that plague it during the summer holiday season. We hear the excitement of the seagulls and the odd seals as the occasional boat passes by, bringing in its little wave disturbances and presumably exposing fish.

I made this recording on 18 August 2015 by Mussel Point, Zennor, Penwith, Cornwall, UK, on a rock prominence where I hadn't recorded before, whose position among the cliff 'apron' rockiness gives it very considerable shielding from direct sea sound — at least, with as small a swell as occurred on this occasion.

This enabled the seals to be heard much more strongly than in the concurrent Economy Cove recording I made, and also gave prominence to the wonderful atmospheric calls from the odd curlews that periodically flew past in one direction or the other, plus the invigorating calls of oystercatchers. Unsurprisingly, herring gulls feature strongly at times, and in the background great black-backed gulls can be heard once in a while (sounding ponderous and excruciatingly laryngitic), and very bird-savvy listeners with sharp ears may notice a few distant strange creaky utterances from the odd razorbill. The main small songbirds heard (contact calls only) are linnet and rock pipit.

This was actually a salvage operation, not only because of the many disturbances that required all this day's recordings to have cuts that amounted to approaching half the respective recordings' durations, but also because a rare malfunction of the particular recorder struck for this recording, and the left channel had almost no sound, except for about the central third, which appeared to be okay, so the edited version of that central chunk came to a princely 23' (out of the original 103').

However, in late 2019, when I was revisiting selected PCM-M10 recordings for stereo image enhancement, I was thinking what a pity it was that most of this recording was unusable, and just for the hell of it I tried selectively amplifying the 'down' sections of the left channel. To my surprise I found that with something like 13dB (yes, thirteen decibels, which I think amounts to roughly 500%!) amplification of those sections, they seemed to have just as good quality as the right channel — clarity, detail, dynamic range and lack of obvious hiss.

Therefore I then made a new, longer, edited version of the whole recording. There was still an issue, however, because by cutting out all the even slightly intrusive motorboat sound I'd reduced the recording to just some 50 minutes, and in so doing I'd cut out some of the best bits for the seals / birds. So I had another go, this time retaining additional sections with some boat sound, where there was also seal / bird sound worth keeping in.

This changed the character of the final edited version, which now sounds more 'rough and ready', but also more vibrantly authentic and engaging. In fact in this particular context the boat sounds, in moderation, and with the more intrusive sections still cut out, are a welcome aspect of the recording, even though my general policy is to edit out virtually all 'civilization' sounds in my recordings.

Advisory

High-grade headphones are particularly recommended in order to hear all the detail. Also, because the stereo imaging has been enhanced, that may cause a certain phasiness or phase cancellation points when you listen through speakers, whereas that effect doesn't occur when listening through headphones.

This recording taking place. The recorder's light grey furry windshield is a barely visible faint light speck that the arrow is pointing to. It's clearly visible in higher-resolution copies of this photo.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-M10, with just one furry windshield — a Røde DeadKitten (original, more effective, version).

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and more recent processing with the A1 Stereo Control VST plugin (200% widening).

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