In movies when you hear the sound of footsteps, cars driving by, the wind, etc., those are usually not exactly what you're seeing. Sometimes, particularly in lower budget movies, the sound will be recorded live, but for the most part what you're hearing is a recreation of those sounds either in a studio or recorded at another time, likely at a different location, by different people. If you've ever seen behind the scenes of a cartoon when they watch the clip and use whatever tools around them to try and create the sound you would hear in that situation, it's usually the same for live action sequences. This means what you are hearing is by design, it is chosen either by the director or the sound person/folly artist, or whoever. This includes wildlife documentaries, too.
If you pay close enough attention you can sometimes notice that you'll hear one thing in a shot but another, despite them being of equal distance and volume in real life. They are choosing what is important for you to hear in order to give you the impression of being there, what they think you would normally notice, or what they want you to notice in order to set the atmosphere they are looking to create in that scene.
I think about this a lot while on these walks. I consider myself a fairly observant person, but when I have these mics in my ears and I'm trying to not cough, burp, or even breathe too heavily, I start noticing even more little sounds around me.
One time I took a girl on a first date to a midnight showing of Eraseherhead, which she had never even heard of (yes, I'm that kind of white guy). Afterward she texted me that she couldn't help but hear everything around her. The sounds in her uber, the sound of her toothpaste tube, and so on. It's interesting how much we naturally filter out, either for our survival, sanity, or just out of boredom. It's even more interesting when people make those decisions for us.
In these recordings you will of course hear everything. These are largely unedited, starting when I hit record and ending when I hit stop, and mostly untouched (I will generally apply a slight limiter and then boost the volume a little or remove random clicks from the glitching microphone). You are limited only by the range of my not terribly cheap but absolutely not expensive microphones. You can imagine what it is I'm doing, you can try to paint an image of my surroundings in your mind, or you can just tune it all out and let it seep into the background as if you were on the walk yourself. At most I'd be curious if you hear anything I don't, since you don't have the same distractions I do from my other five senses on these walks, not to mention my general anxiety.
Today I went for a walk with my lady friend in the town she resides, New Brunswick. I visit her most weekends and occasionally she comes back to Philly with me for the weekdays--she's a TA, so she can currently work remotely due to the pandemic. We actually tried to record our walk yesterday, but I forgot to set my H5 to hold and then apparently hit the stop button after 18 seconds.
We walked from around her place to a little manmade pond called Passion Puddle. Yes, Passion Puddle. Toward the end you can hear me briefly talk to a woman walking her dogs about the little turtles sunbathing on rocks. You can see the one in this episode's photo, the other got cropped out. There were a whole family of them, maybe 10 in all. As soon as I got close they jumped into the water, one by one.
At the end of our walk we sat on a bench and just listened to the one horny bird above, watching another couple feed rice cake to the turtles by throwing it directly at their heads. It was nice.
I don't record all of my walks, but I like to take a picture or two each time. Follow me on instagram @thecobblestonehighway if you'd like to see more and/or say hi. I have no idea if anyone listens to this.
