Broad Horizon Nature
— sounds and photos
At a glance…
Photos and natural soundscape recordings, to invigorate and inspire, and cultivate health in body and 'mind',
…by a lifelong naturalist, who is also composer and writer with a challenging and stimulating angle on the importance to us of grounding our awareness in 'Mother Nature' instead of the harmful fixations and addictions that are the centre of the impoverished and distorted lifestyles followed by the vast majority of people.
The natural soundscape recordings include a sub-project called Wind Chimes in the Wild. Many of those particular recordings are now the basis of the Author's prolific Nature-Symphonies project — powerful and normally intense nature-generated stochastic (probability-driven) musical creations that are a remarkable parallel to various of the most compelling and visionary compositions of Iannis Xenakis.
The main repositories / showcases of the Author's / Composer's work are on other sites — Flickr, Freesound and YouTube, so this site acts as a basic introduction, with links to the remote collections.
Also on this site are some useful and — hopefully! — inspirational pages relating some of the Author's experiences, to encourage and motivate others to enrich their lives by getting out into the wilds and develop various avenues of natural history interest.
A
Resource of High Grade
Sound
Recordings / Photo Images
of Nature and Wild Scenery
Two sites in one…
In 2013 I gathered together Broad Horizon Photos, which was a site in its own right, with the much newer Broad Horizon Natural Soundscapes project and, as you can see, made both of them subdivisions of one site under a very appropriate new domain name. This made sense because I was wanting to rationalize (and keep to a minimum) my use of multiple domains, which all cost me money, and actually Broad Horizon Photos was getting very little traffic since I switched to Flickr for the hosting of the photos, and thus not really justifying the cost of a domain all to itself.
As with the photos previously, in my sound recordings I'm seeking to share what is beautiful and inspiring in my experience of nature and wild landscapes. What this is NOT about is some sort of soporific New-Agey sort of thing — even with my Wind Chimes in the Wild series of recordings, which in fact are natural soundscapes 'out in the sticks', incorporating wind chimes that are moved and sounded only by the wind, whereas in all commercial wind chimes recordings of which I'm aware, they contain various degrees of faking, which render them greatly disappointing as a listening experience.
Although my earlier recordings (up to the time I started producing CD versions of them) can be found at Freesound.org, the real place to find my recordings — all of them — is on my Broad Horizon Natural Soundscapes page here, together with my now large Digital Download Catalogue, from which latter you can buy CD-quality digital downloads of most of them — a much healthier alternative to loading oneself with masses and masses of music.
As from late 2022, I've started a drip-feed programme (probably very roughly one a week) of uploading to Freesound a good selection of my premium recordings, because in practice almost no-one was buying my CDs, and then the same except worse for my CD-quality downloads once the 'produce on demand' CD service I was using had closed down.
It was a bit baffling that the downloads had so little take-up (just two small orders early-on in over two years), because while the CDs were available quite a succession of people told me that they really wanted downloads, not CDs, and would buy the download versions if I made them available. — Which all goes to remind one how empty are the promises and declared aspirations of the vast majority of people!
As each recording gets put on Freesound, I'll replace its 'buy download' details in my Digital Download Catalogue with a link to its page on Freesound. However, some recordings currently not in the Store are expected to appear on Freesound. Maybe I'll add those to the Store.
But then again, maybe I'll simplify things and remove the Digital Downloads Store altogether, simply putting the respective Freesound page links on my chronological list of recordings — we'll see…
Website designed and built by Philip Goddard