Nothing but Crickets
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Duration: 62 minutes 55 seconds, Size: 86.4 MB.
Nothing but Crickets — perfect for sleep and tinnitus relief. Includes only the sounds of serene shrilling crickets — there are no other sounds of birds, animals, people, wind or water.
Nothing but Crickets was binaurally recorded in Canada at night on a grassy forest meadow, under a star-swept dome of glistening white dots. We are miles deep within this secluded virgin wilderness, at complete isolation from the modern world of bustling crowds and bellowing cars.
A symphony of serenading gryllidae harmonizes beautifully throughout the recording in a constant cadenced chorus of see-sawing chirps and long, low, simultaneous hums. One group chirps, and another hums. The sound is mesmerizing, soothing, sublime — this was the perfect lullaby I needed for sleeping under the stars. (And packing up my recording equipment afterwards, as I lied there in my bivy sack I witnessed a shooting star — truly one of life's greatest moments!)
The shrilling of these crickets is an intimate performance nevertheless — it is the males who sing, either to attract the female crickets (and to repel the other males) or to broadcast their post-copulatory bliss to the heavens (the resulting “happy hum”). This is called stridulation — and the crickets do this by rubbing the top of one forewing against the teeth of their other forewing, resembling the act of one playing a violin.
The crickets' noise level remains constant all throughout, never stopping to rest as they take turns cricking and rhyming their nightly ballad. Adjust the volume to your taste to control a sense of distance and proximity.
Nothing but Crickets is a non-looped natural soundscape composed of an hour-long on-location digital stereo quasi-binaural field recording. This recording technique produces a three-dimensional audio image when listening with earphones or headphones. Bitrate encoded at 192 kbps for finest audio reproduction.