Running Time:

80 min

Release Date:

August 2013

Recording Location:

Grant Sequoia Grove,
King's Canyon National Park,
California

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Sequoia

This recording takes you to California's Sierra Nevada, to an ancient grove of Sequoias, the most massive trees on earth.

Imagine walking around this peaceful place. It is difficult to grasp the size of the forest giants around you. They tower above, reaching for the sky with cinnamon-coloured trunks, often dotted with woodpecker holes.

Pausing to listen, you hear small birds such as Nuthatches, Flycatchers, Brown Creepers, Kinglets, Warblers and Fox Sparrows sing from high in the canopy or among low shrubs on the forest floor. The drumming of woodpeckers large and small resounds through the forest. This place must be Woodpecker Heaven!

As you meander around the Sequoia grove, you hear other sounds: the piping of a Pygmy-Owl, a Mountain Quail, and the chatter of small mammals; Squirrels and Chipmunks. A party of Stellar's Jays move through, and the dark shape of a Raven swoops overhead on languid wingbeats.

Giant Sequoias are certainly a wonder to see, but this grove is a beautiful place for listening too.

Sarah Comments:

Sequoias are found in a limited altitudinal zone in California's Sierra Nevada. They have endured logging for fenceposts, celebrity status, and the ravages of Los Angeles' air pollution. However scientists are now concerned that declining rain and snowfall due to climate change may pose a greater threat to their long-term survival.

As massive and enduring as Sequoias are, they may be more vulnerable to small changes than we imagine.

Andrew made this recording with two sets of microphones, moving them occasionally to capture different areas of the Sequoia grove. The final album tracks are drawn from four of these recordings, each presenting a different scene. It is as if you are walking through the forest, passing from one group of bird territories to another, pausing every now and then to listen and take it all in.

Acknowledgements:

Once again, our heartleft thanks to ace-wonder-biologist and birdsong identifier Lauren Harter for her assistance in the preparation of listening notes for this album.

Audio sample of this album

1.

Flicker, Sapsucker and Smaller Woodpeckers

16:33

2.

Audubon's Warbler and Rufous Hummingbird

15:08

3.

Pileated Woodpecker and Fox Sparrow

33:30

4.

Stellar's Jays and Common Raven

14:29

This album on our blog

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About the audio formats

Mp3:

Mp3 is a universal audio format, playable on iPods, computers, media players and mobile phones.

Mp3 is a compressed format, allowing smaller filesizes, offering faster download times and requiring less storage space on players, but at some expense to the audio quality. Many listeners can't really hear the difference between mp3 and full CD-quality audio, and hence its convenience has lead to it becoming the default option for audio.

Our albums are generally encoded at around 256kbps (sometimes with VBR), balancing optimal audio quality without blowing out filesizes excessively. We encode using the Fraunhoffer algorithm, which preserves more detail in the human audible range than the lame encoder.

Our mp3 files are free of any DRM (digital rights management), so you can transfer them to any of your media technology. You've paid for them, they're yours for your personal use without restriction.

Mp3 files can be burned to disc, either as an mp3 disc, or an audio CD after converting them to a standard audio (.wav or .aif) format first.

FLAC:

FLAC is a high-quality audio format, allowing CD-resolution audio. It is ideal if you wish to burn your files to a CDR, or listen over a high resolution audio system. However files usually require special decoding by the user before playing or burning to disc.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a LOSSLESS compressed audio format. This means that it preserves the full audio quality of a CD, but optimises the filesize for downloading. Typically, file sizes of around 60% are achieved without any degradation or loss of audio quality from the source files at the CD standard of 16bit/44.1kHz.

Obviously the file sizes are larger than for the mp3 version - usually around 300-400Mb for an album, compared to 100Mb for an mp3 album.

In addition, you'll need to know what to do with the files once you've downloaded them. In most cases you'll want to decode the files to wav or aiff, either to import into programs like iTunes, or burn to CDR. Some programs will play flac files natively.

There is a lot of information about flac online (eg: http://flac.sourceforge.net/)