Philip Goddard's Digital Download Catalogue — Natural Soundscapes (Section 1)
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Natural Soundscape recordings for everyone!

People often ask me what one would use such recordings for. The answer is simple: for pretty well everyone they're the much healthier alternative to listening to lots and lots of music. While listening to healthy types of music (which only a small minority do to start with) can be positive and beneficial in small measure, listening to even the healthiest music choices regularly for extended periods is harmful for anyone.

That is why it makes really great sense to play a good variety of harmonious and engaging natural soundscape recordings instead for much of the time (i.e., of the time in which one plays any recorded sound at all). The use of such recordings comes into its own especially for city dwellers and others whose surroundings are either too silent or are replete with inharmonious sounds such as traffic.

The recordings that I offer differ markedly from the vast majority of those sold as 'relaxation sounds', because the 'relaxation' that those sources are meaning is actually a very unhealthy state of collapse and mental non-function. By contrast, a healthy relaxed state is a vibrant, aware and alert one — and the sort of recordings that I'm offering are aimed to support and cultivate such a healthy relaxed state. Instead of boring you to sleep or into some sort of ungrounded blank 'meditational' state, my recordings are generally full of variety and detail, and engage the listener and encourage a joyful and observant harmony with one's natural surroundings — a really healthy state of mindfulness.

These recordings thus can be listened to both as background for attending to other things, and also at other times more like a work of classical music, where one listens attentively to it and gains a major and really active experience from it.

A few of the recordings are special purpose ones, too unvarying for regular listening but particularly effective for assisting going to sleep. I strongly recommend that if you do want recorded natural sounds to assist your getting to sleep, you try using other, more varied recordings first, such as certain of the sea or wind-in-trees recordings listed in this catalogue. I recommend the special purpose sleep-assist recordings ONLY where you cannot get to sleep with a more varied sound.

Important! — Accurate, not 'hi-fi', speaker system required to hear these recordings properly!

Sea sounds in particular sound wrong (typically much too boomy) even from the best of speakers if you don't apply effective measures to correct for room resonances and other acoustic quirks. I explain on my Broad Horizon Natural Soundscapes page what you can do to get sea and other natural soundscapes reasonably faithfully reproduced.

Reducing hearing loss and clearing tinnitus

You may have read on other sites, or been told by a 'specialist', that in order to combat tinnitus you need to be listening, even as much as 24/7, to recordings of relatively unvaried white-noisy* natural sounds such as sea, waterfalls or rain (indeed, even just pure white noise itself), and you need to avoid anything in the recordings that would engage your attention, such as seagull calls.

I understand that that approach has brought about some tinnitus reduction for some people (i.e., in the short term) — but when I tried it myself for my own increasing tinnitus issue, it quickly became clear to me that that whole approach is a serious distortion of what we really need to do in order to resolve a tinnitus issue or indeed avoid tinnitus in the first place. Indeed, it would be a blight on anyone's life to be condemned for evermore to having to be surrounded by dull, uninteresting sound that's always standing between you and your actual surroundings and indeed cutting you off from the latter and thus ungrounding your awareness.

As I found out from my own personal experimentation, the real way forward is to retrain oneself to listen more awarely to the sounds in one's surroundings, and to notice even very small details within those sounds, including the nature and characteristics of each sound itself. When you do that you're grounding your auditory awareness and progressively weakening the tendency for tinnitus feedback loops to establish themselves.

Also, this approach is essential if you seriously mean to maintain your hearing into and through old age, with minimum high frequency (or other) hearing loss. I'm not claiming that this regime would necessarily enable people to retain 100% hearing ability right through their lives, but rather, that by awarely applying it they would at least be less prone than otherwise to hearing loss, all other things being equal. Also it would make life altogether more interesting and enjoyable.

The sort of recordings that I'm producing are just the right sort of thing to assist you for this purpose, where the sounds of your immediate surroundings are not enough or are inharmonious in some way. These recordings provide you with plenty of engaging detail and variety — and they are ALL authentic natural soundscapes, whether with or without wind chimes, with no studio recording nor looping nor over-dubbing; you hear just what was to be heard out there in the wild during the recording sessions — that is, of course, minus various inevitable disturbances that have been edited out.

I differ from many 'specialist' sources, in that I caution against long-term very extended listening to recorded sounds — even as 'healthy' as the natural soundscape recordings that I offer. The healthy way forward is to listen to such recordings reasonably sparingly and thus to have plenty of time in which you are fully in touch with the sounds of your actual surroundings (i.e., minus interferences such as TVs, radios and so on), and are noticing the plethora of detail in those sounds — such as bird sounds (and get identifying the birds making them, too!).

That's all an essential aspect of getting your auditory awareness properly grounded so that you have minimal or indeed no further tendency for tinnitus feedback loops to develop, as well as generally minimizing hearing loss.

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