Today we have a bit of a departure. This 31 minute soundwalk was recorded at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge on January 28th, 2024. It is the flipside—both figuratively and literally—to the upcoming Oaks to Wetland Trail Soundwalk. I’m calling it Four Trains Soundwalk.
Stretches of quiet and stretches of train noise were intertwined in my lived experience, but as always, effectuating a pre-industrial soundscape requires substantial editing in the way of splices and EQ. Rather than let these appealing train recordings become so much digital ash, I’ve compiled them here. Visually speaking, this is what that looks like. The spectrograms below are basically just heat maps for sound. The first image is the natural soundscape—the birds, the creek, and the rain. The second is the four trains. (Not preserved is any aircraft noise.)
Think of this as a trainspotting album. Trainlistening? It’s really quite a treat to have just trains, wildlife and rain sounds. The low frequency hums, the clank-clank, the doppler effects, and the periodic pneumatic “psst” sounds are quite relaxing. The wildlife, creek, and rain sounds soften the industrial edges. It’s a top 3 insomnia / get-to-sleep album for me over the past several months. I’m happy to share it with you finally.
For my instrumental score, I leaned heavily into textural synth drones mirroring the energy of the passing trains.
I hope you enjoy it!
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Soundwalk to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
