Taiwan Mountain Cicadas Recording

I recorded some wicked sounding cicadas last week in the mountains. I got stopped by an old gate. When I took off my helmet to have a listen, MAN I couldn’t believe how creepy it all sounded.

I’ve been recording a lot in the mountains recently. Partially because I wanted to hear what’s out there and partially because it’s fun as hell driving those mountain trails (I always wanted a dirt bike when I was a kid!) So I bought a semi-capable over-priced enduro. Motorcycles are expensive in Taiwan!

After a while though, you realize it all starts to sound the same…for ambience at least. One day I might take my 416 out there and pick up individual sounds, but I’m not really a nature recordist; I just like location ambience.

One thing in Taiwan you can hear a lot now in the mountains are cicadas. It’s near impossible to get a recording without their presence. I’ve noticed they make their noises in “waves”: Slowly creeping up one-by-one until you have a full chorus of sound. Then slowly they’ll taper off to nothingness, finally allowing the crickets to make their noises.

This particular day I couldn’t help but record their noise; it was damn cool and creepy sounding. Here’s the look of the area.

Beyond the gate a little ways

And without further ado…here’s the sounds

(skip to 3:37 for ear splitting goodness!)

Taiwan Cicadas in the Mountains: 320kbps mp3

SPS200>Tascam DR-680 (Busman Mod)

SPACE

Taiwan Mountain Cicadas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

***On a side note, I’ve been having worse problems with my DR-680’s phantom power noise. I filtered some of it out in this recording, but you can still hear a sort of “waterfall” sounding dose of white noise in there. Oh well…