Running Time:

65 min

Release Date:

March 1994

Recording Location:

Mootwingee National Park, outback NSW.

Rockpool Reflections

Imagine yourself in the Australian outback - a tranquil desert waterhole is overhung by graceful gum trees, and the spring air is filled with birdsong.

Andrew weaves this inspiration into his restful music.

Featuring the gentle plucked strings of the lute, along with harp and flute, and accompanied by a tapestry of beautiful birdsong, this album evokes a natural ambience.

(Music for the lute, with birdsong from the Australian outback.
Composed, played and recorded by Andrew Skeoch)

Andrew comments:

"This is the only album in our catalogue that contains music.

It was originally recorded in 1993, and released the following year. It was a very early project for us, and our first experience of recording nature sounds. The music was composed on the lute during camping trips to the outback, and the natural soundscapes were recorded at Mootwingee National Park, in the far west of New South Wales, Australia.

Shortly after completing it, we chose to concentrate solely on creating the pure nature albums that have remained our focus since. Nevertheless, we have found many listeners enquire about this unique album, so we continue to make it available."

Listening notes for this album

Read about how we began Listening Earth and recorded this album

Audio sample of this album

 

Part 1:

 

1.

Morning at Homestead Creek (soundscape)

 

2.

Wedgetails (Sarah's Pavan)

5.47

3.

Footprints

3.14

4.

Reflections in the Rockpool

6.13

5.

The Echidna's Wanderings

5.21

6.

Wagtail Antics (with Jane Belfrage; harp)

2.47

7.

Shared Secrets

4.32

8.

Hidden Gorge

5.02

 

Part 2:

 

9.

Awaiting the Dawn (soundscape)

 

10.

From Afar (with David Brown; shakuhachi)

4.16

11.

Morning Star

4.03

12.

Dewdrops

2.21

13.

Infinite Sky (with Jane Belfrage; harp)

5.35

14.

Heartland (Red Rocks, Blue Sky)

5.18

15.

Twilight

3.44

16.

The Homeward Path (Pavan VI by Alfonso Ferabosco, 16th century Italian)

7.38

This album on our blog

Listening Earth - Our Early Years, pt.1

We were there for nearly two months; trekking, exploring, photographing, recording the music - and most importantly, discovering the local birdsong and how to record it. I clearly remember one of o...

Read more >

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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/)