What are sounds of nature called?
Sounds of nature are usually called nature sounds or natural soundscapes, and when they are recorded outdoors with a microphone they are called field recordings.
Summer Forest Bird Sounds for Sleeping • Black Screen • 12H
Researchers who study sound in the landscape split a natural soundscape into three layers: biophony (sounds made by living things, such as birdsong, crickets and frogs), geophony (non-living natural sound such as wind, rain, running water and thunder) and anthrophony (sounds made by people and machines). A nature sounds recording is mostly the first two.
In everyday searches people use other words for the same thing. "White noise" is often used for steady sounds like rain or a river, although real white noise is an artificial hiss. "Ambience" means the general sound of a place with no single dominant source, and "birdsong" or "dawn chorus" means birds specifically.
Field recording is the craft behind it: you go to a real place with a recorder and capture it as it sounded, without adding anything. All our recordings are field recordings in this sense, made outdoors in Poland and nearby regions in one continuous take, with no music and no AI. Below are three of them, so you can hear the difference between a bird layer, a water layer and a fire.
Quick questions
Is "nature sounds" the same as white noise?
No. White noise is an artificial signal with equal energy at all frequencies. Rain or a river is natural broadband sound that masks noise in a similar way, but it is not literally white noise.
What is a soundscape?
The whole mix of sounds in one place at one time: birds, wind, water, distant traffic and anything else that can be heard there.
