Michigan Writeup and Thoughts on Field Recording
Note: I wrote this in June of 2021 regarding a trip taken a week or so prior for a friend’s website. That website was abandoned before it was uploaded so now it finally has a home here. Enjoy.
So I went up to Michigan recently to visit a friend, and I was inspired by darkf’s mini-travelogue to do a writeup of the trip for the irc. It’s mostly pictures of cool things I saw up there, with some things tailored towards the interests of the channel and a lot of ranting about sound. Let’s go.
I’m gonna skip over the flight and whatnot. The first real day I spent in Michigan was at my friend’s cabin, which was really close to this lovely lake.
Very calm and peaceful, we spent a few hours just chilling on a dock and watching the water. There was a beetle stuck swimming pretty far out, so we saved it with a stick.
Anyway, enough of the peaceful lake, time for adventure!
The next day we drove over Lake Michigan, which was absolutely gorgeous.
I sadly didn’t have my microphone out while driving over it, but the under-construction Mackinac Bridge made an absolutely ghastly sound as we drove over it. I did manage to pick it up on the drive back down, but by then a wind warning was in place and our car was slowed down on the bridge, so I could only get the weaker sound of other cars driving by.
I was pretty irritated that I couldn’t get the full sound, but trust me, it’s a bizarrely frightening sound when you suddenly hear nothing but that metallic moan.
Once we finished crossing the bridge, we hopped on a ferry and went to Mackinac Island. No cars are allowed there, so I was expecting some very pretty views and not a lot of concrete.
Immediately on the island we were greeted with this burned-out house, which had apparently just been ablaze a few days before we arrived.
Once we were passed all the houses, the island had more nature. Not a lot though, sadly. The big attraction there was Arch Rock, which gets its name for obvious reasons:
The thing is, as pretty as Arch Rock is, there are an unavoidable amount of people there. You can see them down on the beach below. You can see the arm of a woman walking along the railing and paved pathway they built out to this natural beauty. Motor vehicles aren’t allowed on the island, but horses are, and horse-carriages full of tourists unloaded every 5 minutes to go run around and scream and play music and go up to the rock and take selfies. I know this sounds very whiney and hypocritical: I’m a tourist there taking a photo too. But goddammit, sometimes you just want to see something pretty without a million people running around.
The rest of the island was also full of people, the one other place that was really lovely was the butterfly sanctuary.
The videos are nice, but they really don’t do the place justice. I’ve never been a huge butterfly guy, but after this I have to say: I’m a fan. These are some of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen, and so many fluttering about at once is just magical.
A shot of the island as we left:
On the ride back, I spotted some strange stone and steel structures out in the water. I have no clue what they were (maybe one of you know), but I thought they were pretty cool. They reminded me a bit of SSR.
After we got back, we drove to our campsite. Though there were tons of mosquitos, we had this gorgeous, natural view of Lake Michigan:
You can just feel the stress of modern life melting away, right? Nope! Just turn the camera a bit to the right and you see this:
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very pretty. But it’s a very different feeling you get from it now. It’s not some unspoilt eden, but a pretty view of a bridge. Photos can lie like that, and very easily. When we think about ‘lying with photos,’ we tend to imagine photoshop or staged events, but it really can be as easy as just moving the camera a bit to the left. Now compare that to the audio recording I took in the exact spot I took those pictures.
You can still hear the waves and the wind, but no matter where I point the mic, you can always hear those cars driving by to the right. It’s not that it’s impossible to lie with sound, but that it is far more difficult to construct a blank base from which to fabricate a lie. Unlike an image, you can’t cut and past only the parts of an audio recording you like together. Sounds have overlapping frequencies, and once they’re recorded become impossibly tangled together, a Gordian knot of audio bands. If you don’t work with sound at all, the easiest way I can explain the issue is like this: imagine your job is to get a clean cut and paste of an image of someone standing in a crowd. Instead of having any select tools that you can use to trace the person, you can only selectively strengthen and weaken colors in the image as a whole. No matter how hard you try to get only the colors that the person has to show, you’ll inevitably end up with ghost images of other people, or a half-colored main subject. This is what it’s like working with audio recordings. You can’t just airbrush out those cars on the bridge; you can’t just move the mic a bit to the left.
It’s one of those things that you don’t really realize until you stop and pay attention, but people are constantly making noise. It’s one of their favorite things to do. So if you’re someone who, like me, likes to get recordings of the interesting natural places you visit, you’ll find yourself growing more and more tired of the endless noise that people produce. Nothing makes you more silent than truly listening to the noise of other people. I didn’t expect it, but a large part of this trip became me trying to find a place where I could get some pretty audio recordings without constant people noises. If you keep reading, you’ll suffer with me.
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The next day was a ton of driving. Eight hours. It was rough. On the way to our destination, we stopped a few times, but the most interesting was to check out this abandoned ore dock in Marquette, a leftover from when the town was a major mining hub, according to my friend. It reminded me a bit of SSR, but I think that abandoned concrete things may just ping as being like SSR in my head now, so I’m really not sure.
Interesting bit of Hyperart Thomasson at the end of the dock here.
Also along the way we stopped at this random little lake.
Very pretty, I took a recording while there. Again, you can hear constant sounds of the freeway and people talking.
We drove for the final stretch without the top on the Jeep (bad idea, the sun wiped us out), and eventually found this lovely beach along Lake Superior a few miles from our campsite.
There was also a random pile of butterflies here, the same species as one that had been in the habitat a few days before. They were all alive, I have no idea what they were doing (well, I can guess).
Of course, I also took an audio recording. I wandered a good hundred feet from where we got off the highway, but still you can hear the traffic and a very loud family that pulled in a minute after us and proceeded to stand on the beach and scream and smack rocks with sticks. You can still hear the peaceful waves, but man, those people just would not leave.
Tricked you! Well, kind of. That’s not the actual recording, I modified it slightly. The original had a really irritating wind sound starting around a third of the way in, which when listened to with earphones feels like something drilling into your skull. I was able to remove most of it by entirely eliminating the lower frequencies of the recording, but if you listen closely, you can still hear some ‘ghost wind,’ where the you just hear the higher frequencies of the wind, which sound unnatural since you don’t have the full context of the wind sound to understand it in. Here’s the actual recording:
Wind is really one of the only sounds that you can eliminate pretty seamlessly from nature recordings, as it exists mostly in the lower frequencies of the audio spectrum, where not many natural sounds exist. I wasn’t even able to do it completely, as the aforementioned ‘ghost wind’ still appears in some parts. Trying to remove a recording of wind from something low-pitched, like a didgeridoo, is next to impossible.
Every other audio recording in this writeup is untouched though, I promise. I both wanted to make a point and spare you all from hearing that terrible sound. The wind is left in in all other recordings, for better or worse.
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After leaving the beach, we went to our campsite. We decided to car camp this time around because both of us are camping noobs and we didn’t want to die in the wilderness because we had an ego about only camping the real way. We’ll do it some other time; this was just practice. Anyway, our campsite was at the base of the Porcupine Mountains, a range known to the locals as “The Porkies.”
Our site also bordered on Lake Superior, and walking only a few hundred feet would put you on the shore. After setting up our tents it was getting dark, and I made my way down to the beach. I’m not being dramatic when I say it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. My camera does not do this scene justice, so I ask you to take my word for what you don’t see in the pictures.
The beach in the area is composed of large slate rocks, overlapping and jutting out at odd angles in both directions. A calm breeze was blowing, and the waves lapped gently on the shore. Looking forward, you could see a distant shore where two lighthouses spun every few seconds.
Over to the left, you could see a lightning storm, miles and miles out.
And up above, the sky cleared up after a few minutes until it was entirely full of stars. I’m someone who has spent pretty much my whole life in and around cities, and I truly have never seen so many stars in my life. It was breathtaking. My camera couldn’t capture the half of it though, so you’ll just have to imagine.
As if all this wasn’t enough, you couldn’t hear anybody whatsoever. This place was maybe 30 feet from where over 100 people had their trailers, their fires, their tents, and all you could hear was the waves, the wind, and the wildlife.
I also got a closer recording of the waves.
And even a recording towards the campsite just to see if the mic could hear anything I couldn’t. Nope, nothing.
The trip was worth it for this place alone. I sat out there for a while by myself, before my friend came out to join me with binoculars so we could look at the stars more closely. After a long while, we went back to our tents. I had difficulty falling asleep due to the heat in my tent, and the last thing I remember hearing before passing out was the cool rush of wind brought by the storm I had watched over the lake finally coming to the campsite, followed by rain.
The next day we went to check out Cloud Lake, which is the big draw of the Porcupine Mountains. You just drive up to a lookout (unless you want to hike 24 miles there and back to the lake through the valley), so it was only a brief trip before we were looking down on it.
It’s certainly pretty, but what really caught my attention was the view to the right, where you could see for 25 miles on a clear day.
Now that’s a view. After looking for a while, my friend and I got back into the car and drove to the start of the hike we had planned out. We were going to hike to Mirror Lake, the other lake in The Porkies. It was only 5 miles of walking roundtrip, but neither of us had done much physical activity in the last year so we thought something easier would be best.
I normally like hikes, but god damn this one was rough. Not because we were really out of shape (that proved to not be much of an issue), but because of one major unforeseen factor: the mosquitos. We both covered ourselves in bug spray before venturing into the woods, but the bugs were undeterred. I thought I had covered myself all over in spray, but apparently I forgot up my sleeves and around my ears. I will never forget again.
Most of the forest looked like this, but there were some cooler sections where everything switched to pines and the mosquitos let up a bit. I didn’t get many photos of the variety of the forest, as stopping for more than a few seconds invited every bug in a 10 mile radius to swarm you.
After 2.5 miles of hiking, we made our way to Mirror Lake.
Looking at it now, it’s actually quite pretty, but that wasn’t my impression at the time. We were so sick of the bugs and the sweltering heat that our reward being a fairly-standard looking lake felt pretty insulting. That may seem extreme, but just listen to this audio recording, and remember that there are more bugs swarming me than the mic:
You can see why we might not have been in the best of spirits.
Also, what the hell is that weird thing that sounds like someone switching a bullhorn on and off in the beginning? It came from the lower right area of that picture, in the water. Is it a duck? I have no clue.
After we made our way back, we fussed around with some wet wood for the campfire, managed to pull together a dinner, and then went down to a different section of the beach than last night.
You can see the slate beach I was talking about earlier more clearly here. Again, the sound was totally untainted by the nearby campground, and you can really hear the waves, which were much more fierce this night:
Although the hike was a bit disappointing, I honestly cannot recommend Lake Superior enough. It’s an incredibly beautiful place, and I could spend hours just sitting there watching it.
We headed back down to the Lower Peninsula the next day, and I got some really lovely shots of Lake Michigan.
…and that’s pretty much it! I had a really lovely trip to Michigan, and I hope to visit again some time in the future. I’m not really used to taking photos of my vacations (I’m of the mindset that it’s best to experience things naturally rather than try and constantly capture the moment in pictures), but this was a nice change of pace. I also hope that maybe by writing this I can get some people to listen more mindfully to their surroundings, which is always a good exercise and can be very calming. Then again I’d be shocked if anyone outside the irc reads this, and I have a feeling that most of you guys are already pretty mindful. I might do this again for future trips, I might not. It was a good experiment, regardless.
- Woland