Chris Watson, wildlife sound recordist chose the SoundField ST350 portable microphone system for recording in the harshest of conditions.
Watson has worked closely with respected broadcaster Sir David Attenborough ever since work began on the BBC series The Life Of Birds in 1996.
In recent years, he has worked as a location recording engineer and sound consultant on feature films such as The Meerkats and National Geographic’s Galapagos, which required his recordings to be made in surround.
After years of experimenting with multi-microphone arrays, he began working with SoundField microphones late last year.
SoundField’s multi-capsule microphone systems capture the entire soundscape around the mic in three dimensions as a proprietary four-channel signal. SoundField B-Format, may be decoded to mono, stereo or many forms of surround.
This has made SoundField’s systems ideal for broadcasters that need to be able to generate surround audio for high-definition transmission or use in cinema sound, but who also require a phase-coherent stereo version for broadcast on standard-definition TV networks.
Watson was introduced to the SoundField SPS200 software controlled microphone last year by Tony Myatt of York University’s music department, who demonstrated the mic’s abilities to capture audio in three dimensions – including height information, or periphony – with the aid of a custom twenty-channel Ambisonics speaker array in the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings, Suffolk.
“One of the things I like about SoundField’s mics is that you can capture all of this information with one microphone, with one cable,” commented Watson.
“In the jungles of Madagascar, you have to carry all of your kit yourself – you can’t put it in a car, because there aren’t many roads – so the smaller and lighter your rig is, the better. I was using a three-microphone double Mid & Side array to record in surround, before I was introduced to the SoundField.”
“SoundField very kindly lent me an SPS200 to experiment with, and I made some wildlife surround recordings on the Wash in Norfolk which turned out well. I then bought the ST350, as it’s really robust, because some of the locations I record in can be very demanding places for microphones…!”
As David Attenborough’s sound man, Watson is frequently found in inhospitable parts of the globe, capturing the sound of monsoon downpours in tropical rainforests or recording the sounds of the activity inside termite mounds in the stifling deserts of Namibia. His first project with the ST350, however, was a trial not by fire, but by ice.
He’s spending early 2010 recording David Attenborough in Antarctica for his next BBC series, “The Frozen Planet”.
“I’m getting some great recordings down here with my ST350,” said Watson. “It takes a bit to warm up, but so do I! Recently I was out at an Adelie penguin colony, where I got some really good, close-up tracks in stereo and B-Format.”
“I’ve also had the mic out on the sea ice recording the shifting and groaning of icebergs. I was also out in the midnight sun, standing on just two meters of frozen sea ice, twelve kilometers from land, with 750m of ocean beneath my feet, recording pods of killer whales surfacing to breathe in a narrow crack in the sea ice, just three meters away.”
“I could steer the capsules of my ST350 to create a wonderful stereo balance as groups of these predators appeared from out of the depths – astonishing sounds from a really spectacular place!”
