Sounds of the Wild

Summary

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Uinta Triangle – "Sounds of the Wild" (Bonus Episode)

Podcast: Uinta Triangle
Host: Lemonada Media
Episode Date: May 20, 2026
Episode Summary By: [Your Name]

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Overview

This bonus episode of Uinta Triangle takes listeners behind the scenes into the immersive sound design of the podcast, which recounts the mysterious disappearance of Australian trekker Eric Robinson. Host Dave Cawley and producer Jenny Ament discuss the art, technique, and emotional resonance of field recording in wild and remote locations—from the high Uinta Mountains to Australia and New Zealand. Together, they unpack how sound builds an atmosphere, transports listeners, and creates an authentic connection to the story’s wild settings.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Field Recording in the Wild – Tools & Techniques

• Adaptation for the Wild:

  • Dave explains moving from standard interviews to more complex audio setups for immersive field recording:
    • "I came across somebody who had built a little stereo microphone...and so I started, like, buying parts and ended up making this. You call it like a stereo bar, but it’s basically two microphones on a horizontal piece of carbon fiber, and then that's attached to a handle." (Dave, 01:10)
    • Microphones mimic human ear spacing to create a realistic stereo image, fostering the feeling of presence for the listener.
    • Different environments like Australia, New Zealand, Yosemite, and Utah present unique sound challenges.

• The Transporting Power of Audio:

  • Dave describes the immersive effect:
    • "If you can hear it and sense it, like, I can hopefully transport you to these places." (Dave, 02:33)

2. Capturing Difficult & Unusual Sounds

• Contact Microphones and Environmental Detail:
  • Unlike conventional mics, contact microphones pick up low-frequency vibrations:
    • "It’s recording vibration, especially, like, low vibration...I literally stick it to the side of the helicopter, and then when we put that sound into the show, you may not recognize it, but...your brain is going to, like, pick up on that low frequency." (Dave, 03:49)
  • He recounts unique examples:
    • Sticking a contact mic into a log and burning it to capture the "popping and the sizzling of the sap inside the wood." (Dave, 05:19)
  • Relays the logistical and technical challenges of recording elements like wind from a moving car, requiring creative microphone placement and mixing tricks.

3. Conveying Space, Movement, and Weather

• Recording Challenges:
  • Capturing dynamic events (like storms or wind above treeline) involves more than just visualizing; it requires attentive listening and creative thinking:
    • "How do I convey to you as a listener a storm moving across a landscape with just a microphone or a pair of microphones?" (Dave, 07:31)
  • Field work demands Dave "hikes with his ears," noticing the subtleties of the environment.

4. Human Interactions and the Recording Process

• Unusual Sight on the Trail:
  • Dave's recording rig often draws curious stares and questions from fellow hikers unused to seeing audio gear:
    • "[...] I've got my audio recorder strapped to my chest. I’ve got a microphone on, like, one strap. I’ve got a stereo mic hanging off my bag, and it’s got this, like, fur on it..." (Dave, 08:27)

5. Long-Form, Unattended Recordings

• Capturing Natural Ambiances:
  • Long stretches of environmental sound, like the dawn chorus of birds, require leaving microphones set up overnight:
    • "There’s a time in the morning that birders call the dawn chorus...if I'm, like, standing at the bottom of the tree holding my microphone pointed up at the branch, they're going to go quiet. [...] I would go out and I would stick my microphones in a place...start it recording, then I'm going to walk away, and I’ll come back in the morning..." (Dave, 10:08)

6. The Emotional and Experiential Impact of Sound

• Giving Listeners a Unique Perspective:
  • Jenny points out that listeners get an experience "that no one on Earth would ever be able to hear," referring to the absence of human presence in these captured ambiences. (Jenny, 11:43)
  • Dave reflects on the specialness of moments where human absence heightens the audio landscape:
    • "There are so few places, I think, where most of us day to day have that feeling anymore." (Dave, 11:54)

7. Changing the Way One Engages with Nature

• A Shift from Visual to Auditory Awareness:
  • Recording for the series made Dave notice sound more deeply:
    • "For me, the way it changed the experience was I was hiking with my ears rather than my eyes in a lot of cases." (Dave, 12:25)
  • Particularly memorable: recording wind above the timberline, which sounds different without trees to sway.

8. Technical Insights: Binaural Recording

• How Human Hearing Shapes Audio Design:
  • Dave nerds out over the details:
    • "There’s also something they call the head transfer function...the resonance inside your skull..."
    • He explains the design of a stereo microphone with a foam baffle to mimic human ear separation, approximating binaural effects. (Dave, 14:37)

9. Most Memorable Sound from the Series

• The Boreal Chorus Frogs:
  • Dave’s favorite sound is the frogs singing at dusk—a moment of personal and narrative resonance:
    • "My favorite sound was frogs...boreal chorus frogs...I was able to find a group of these...just at the moment that I was kind of emotionally in the spot to, like, really be affected by it." (Dave, 16:38)
  • The sound features as the outro in the credits and will have further narrative weight in the series.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The thrill of immersive audio:

  • "If I'm listening to a really great audio series, I'll think that something's actually behind me." (Jenny, 02:20)
  • "I was hiking with my ears rather than my eyes." (Dave, 12:25)

• On capturing the uncapturable:

  • "[...] It’s very. Like, tree falls in the forest if no one's there to hear." (Dave, 11:43)
  • "There's a level difference...there’s also something they call the head transfer function..." (Dave, 14:37)

• On creating a new kind of Instagram:

  • "Where’s the Instagram for sound recordings, right? We don’t have that." (Dave, 14:31)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:10] — Dave describes building his field recording stereo mic for realism
• [03:36] — Challenges of translating visual phenomena (fire, helicopter vibration) into audio
• [05:19] — Using contact mics to record the inside of a burning log
• [09:36] — Longest continuous recording for the series explained
• [10:08] — Discussion of the dawn chorus and unattended, overnight recordings
• [12:25] — Dave's shift from visual to auditory hiking
• [14:37] — "Binaural" audio setup and mimicking human hearing
• [16:38] — Dave's favorite recorded sound: the boreal chorus frogs

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Conclusion

"Sounds of the Wild" is a deep dive into the art and impact of immersive sound on storytelling, demonstrating how sound can both ground a true story in a tangible reality and lift listeners to places and experiences beyond their reach. For fans of nature, audio craft, or narrative journalism, this episode unpacks how each meticulous detail of field recording enriches both the Uinta Triangle series and the emotional landscape of its haunting tale.

For more, visit uintatriangle.com.

Transcript

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[Dave]

It was a really interesting, I think, process for me because I come from, like, one microphone. Stick it in front of the person, interview them. That's your tape?

[Jenny Ament]

Yeah.

[Dave]

And this was kind of a different, like, different approach.

[Jenny Ament]

Hey, I'm Jenny Ament, and this is a bonus episode of Uinta Triangle. Hi, Dave.

[Dave]

Hey, Jenny.

[Jenny Ament]

Tell me what you did to get this sound. Like you went somewhere and had to carry something. Tell me about that.

[Dave]

So, field recording, for people who don't know what that is, it's basically what it sounds like, taking microphones out into the field and just recording whatever you find. And I came across somebody who had built a little stereo microphone that would be light enough and, like, compact enough to carry on a backpack over days and days. And so I started, like, buying parts and ended up making this. You call it like a stereo bar, but it's basically two microphones on a horizontal piece of carbon fiber, and then that's attached to a handle.

[Jenny Ament]

And.

[Dave]

And so, like, whatever you point this thing at is replicating your human ears. The microphones are about as far apart as your ears, and that distance between the microphones gives you that stereo image. Right. So you can hopefully take a person who's listening to that recording and plant them in that space and give them the experience of listening to whatever it was in the environment.

[Jenny Ament]

If I'm listening to a really great audio series, I'll think that something's actually behind me.

[Dave]

Oh, for sure.

[Jenny Ament]

When I hear the sound design. And I think that's really cool because it does place you in nature, in the places.

[Dave]

Yeah, in the places that we travel. So I was able to carry this rig and an audio recorder to Australia, to New Zealand, to Yosemite national park, up into the high Uinta Mountains in Utah. And all of these places have different soundscapes, Right. Different animals, different insects. The weather is different. All these things affect the way the sounds come across. To your point, I can think of a few different instances where I had set the microphone and I'm standing like six feet away from it, and I've got My headphones on, and a little bug would fly past the microphone, and I would start swatting at my ear, thinking it's right there. Because, yeah, your brain, it doesn't know the difference. It hears those signals coming in. And you know, what I was hoping is that as we're telling this story and we're visiting these places, you can't see it with your eyes because this is a podcast. But if you can hear it and sense it, like, I can hopefully transport you to these places,

[Jenny Ament]

What's one of the hardest things to translate into sound? Like, what's something that you try to record and then listening back to it doesn't sound like the thing that you want to convey.

[Dave]

So I experimented with contact microphones in this project a little bit. And so what a contact microphone is is rather than being like, a microphone, you picture, like, a news person holding a microphone up to somebody. It's actually stuck to an object, and it's recording vibration, especially, like, low vibration. I was able to go up in a helicopter, and it was like, how do you record the sound of a helicopter inside the helicopter? There's a couple different ways, right? I could patch into, like, the intercom, so you get the back and forth between, like, myself and the pilot. You could record from outside the helicopter, so you hear, like, the engine wind up and the spinning blades. But there's this, like, feeling of sitting in a helicopter that is just, like, the oscillation traveling through your body. And there's no way to really do that with most microphones that we use for, like, video capture. So this contact microphone, I literally stick it to the side of the helicopter, and then when we put that sound into the show, you may not recognize it, but, like, subtly, your brain is going to, like, pick up on that low frequency. If I didn't tell you that, and if we didn't build the story around that and I just gave you this sound, you would be absolutely, like, lost as to trying to figure out what it was.

[Jenny Ament]

What else did you put a contact microphone on for this series?

[Dave]

Okay, I'll give you another example. There are a few different places in this story where I reference Campfire. So one of the things that I tried was I built a fire, and then I want to hear what it sounds like to be in the middle of that fire. I can record it from the outside by standing at a distance like a person would with my stereo microphone, but I want to hear what it sounds like to be, like, right down in the fire. So I got a log, and this contact Microphone has an attachment that's like a spike. And so I drove the spike into a piece of wood, and then I put that wood in the fire. And as the wood is burning, like, little by little, and that flame is moving closer and closer to the contact microphone, you can hear the popping and the sizzling of the SAP inside the wood. It allows us to reinterpret a sound that I think is deeply familiar to humans in a way that we don't often get to hear. I tried at one point in time to capture what does it sound like when you're driving up a mountain highway and you got the windows down? It seems like a very literal experiment. You hold a microphone out the window. You know what happens when you hold a microphone out the window? Yes, it just turns into nothing. Right. It just gets overwhelmed.

[Jenny Ament]

It's just distortion.

[Dave]

Yeah. The mic can't handle it, so. So it was like, okay, well, how do you record that sound without doing the actual thing that you think is going to make that sound? So in some cases that's. Yes, you do the window open, but maybe you actually stick the microphone, like, way back in the back of the car. When you take that sound into the story, you use equalization and other tricks to try to, like, shape it, sculpt it in a way that does the job.

[Jenny Ament]

A lot of what you're saying makes me think that. About the difficulty, I guess, of recording movement in space. You know, like getting that. The hum of a helicopter or the wind coming through the window. Stuff that people probably wouldn't think of if, say, they were taking a photo of that.

[Dave]

Yeah. Think about, like, a storm weather. Right. You take a photo of a storm cloud or, you know, if you're really fancy with a camera, you can capture a lightning bolt. But how do I convey to you as a listener a storm moving across a landscape with just a microphone or a pair of microphones. And then I also need to think about when I'm in the field, like how as I'm moving through that space, are the sounds changing around me? It's always just this jumble of creativity, of trying to not let my eyes overwhelm and dictate how we tell the story. But thinking through that, like, audible.

[Jenny Ament]

Speaking of walking around with all that gear, you must have looked ridiculous to some people.

[Dave]

It's kind of you to say,

[Jenny Ament]

what kind of interactions did you get when other people saw you?

[Dave]

Yeah, it was super funny. I think most people are used to seeing folks with cameras or even, you know, you're taking a picture with Your phone. Everybody knows there is no symbol like that for. I'm recording sound. Shh. Be quote, quiet. Out on. On trail hiking, you know, you're out in the mountains. So I'm wearing my backpack. I've got my audio recorder strapped to my chest. I've got a microphone on, like, one strap. I've got a stereo mic hanging off my bag, and it's got this, like, fur on it to try to keep the wind noise from overwhelming the recordings. And that's not something I think most hikers are used to seeing.

[Jenny Ament]

That looks interesting. Yeah.

[Dave]

A little different, huh? What are you gonna do? Recording sounds of the creek and the birds and all that kind of stuff. So.

[Jenny Ament]

And then what are you gonna do with it? Make a movie?

[Dave]

Well, podcast. Oh, yeah.

[Jenny Ament]

So what was the longest piece of tape that you gathered for this series? Like, what was the longest continuous recording that you made?

[Dave]

Okay, you might be surprised. There were several instances where I recorded for, I would say, nine or 10 hours continuously. And the reason for that would be, say, I'm out in the wilderness. I'm in a space where I know that at a certain time there's going to be a sound, and I want to capture that sound. But if I'm present in that landscape, that sound is either not going to exist or it's going to be different.

[Jenny Ament]

What do you mean? Like, so what's an example?

[Dave]

Yeah, there's a time in the morning that birders call the dawn chorus. And the dawn chorus is when all these little birds, before the sun comes up, wake up and they start cheep, cheep, cheeping. And oftentimes it's. It's the most, like, vibrant bird song all day. But, you know, those little birds are shy. And so if I'm, like, standing at the bottom of the tree holding my microphone pointed up at the branch, they're going to go quiet. So what I did in some of these instances was the night before, I would go out and I would stick my microphones in a place kind of strategically thinking about, you know, here's a clump of trees, maybe here's like, a little stream, you know, that kind of gives you that environmental sound. I'm going to set it here. I'm going to start it recording, then I'm going to walk away, I'm going to leave, and I'll come back in the morning after the sun comes up and pull that recorder out. I would do these long recordings and not know, until you got home, really, and reviewed the recording. Whether or not you actually captured Anything into it.

[Jenny Ament]

Mm. So wait, you're giving people the experience of going on a hike through sound, but you're also giving them an experience that no one on Earth would ever be able to hear? Do you know what I mean?

[Dave]

Like, it's very. Like, tree falls in the forest if no one's there to hear. Right?

[Jenny Ament]

Right.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Jenny Ament]

Like, the absence of humans in nature, the. That's really cool. That's a special experience.

[Dave]

It is special. And there are so few places, I think, where most of us day to day have that feeling anymore.

[Jenny Ament]

You like hiking?

[Dave]

I do.

[Jenny Ament]

You like this stuff. But probably in your big, long hikes before you did this series, you didn't record every single part of your journey. How did it change the way that you think? Think about this thing that you love by trying to build it into an audio landscape?

[Dave]

Good question. For me, the way it changed the experience was I was hiking with my ears rather than my eyes in a lot of cases. And there was a particular moment in one of the hikes that I was doing where I was up above tree line. So you're in this moonscape where the only thing that grows is maybe grass that's ankle high and very few animals you can see forever and ever. And the wind is blowing, and I'm sitting here thinking to myself, how do I capture the sound of this wind when it's not hitting trees and things? Right. We're so attuned to this idea of swaying branches and leaves and things. And that's not what the sound of wind is when you are up above timberline. So I. I was just. I was kind of in this, like, thought process, and I started a recording and was just narrating to myself this idea. And I say something about, you know, it's the sound of the. The low whomp of, like, the air against the back of my ears. And, like, right at the moment I said that, it just happened that a burst of wind hit the microphone in a way that, like, caused it to give that whomp. So forced me to think about these spaces that I was moving through in a way that I don't typically, because I think, like most people, I'm usually so into the visual and not the auditory.

[Jenny Ament]

Yeah, I didn't think about it like that, but I think, of course, people like to be in nature because of the sounds of nature, but I think what people think of first and foremost is what they're gonna see. Maybe you appreciate what you're hearing more after you've done this project. When you go on your Next hike or something like that.

[Dave]

I mean, where's the Instagram for sound recordings, right? We don't have that.

[Jenny Ament]

Yeah, I know.

[Dave]

For people who spend a lot of time hiking, I hope there's something for them here in that, you know, it will feel like a familiar place to them. For somebody who doesn't like hiking, I hope it feels like it transports them to a place that they may never go. You know, we as humans, we have ears on either side of our head. If I can get, like, super nerdy. The way we as humans interpret sound, and especially spatial sound, is a few different things affect it. The distance between our ears and then there's the time of arrival. So something that hits my right ear slightly before it hits my left ear is going to tell my brain, hey, that's to the right. There's a level difference there as well. There's also something they call the head transfer function. I think I got that term right. And basically what that is is the resonance inside your skull. If you've ever recorded yourself and listened to your own voice on playback and you go, well, that doesn't sound like me. It's because you, as a speaker, are used to hearing the resonance inside your head in a way different than a microphone outside your head hears it. And like, when I built this stereo microphone, you know, it's pretty simple to take two microphones and just set them apart from each other and say, good enough. That's going to give me a stereo sound. But there's actually a foam baffle that's blocking each microphone. And the reason I built it that way is I want to isolate this microphone from that microphone in a way similar to the way your ears are isolated by your head in between. So it's not a perfect. They call that binaural recording. It's not a perfect binaural setup, but it's good enough to do the job.

[Jenny Ament]

Of all the recording that you did for the Uinta Triangle series, Dave, what is your favorite sound you recorded?

[Dave]

I think my favorite sound, and it won't be clear to anyone why at this point, but my favorite sound was frogs. Very tiny little frogs. And they're called boreal chorus frogs. They have a very short life cycle because of where they live. They can only, you know, reproduce and mature during a short window of time when the snow is off in the mountains and they don't sing all day. Typically, it's like at dusk. And I was able to find a group of these boreal chorus frogs that were singing just at the moment that I was kind of emotionally in the spot to, like, really be affected by it. And so that's a sound that anyone who's listened to, you know, through to the end of an episode, you will hear that sound come up as we begin our credits. And eventually, if you stick with the story, later on, I will tell you kind of where I was and what I was thinking as that recording was taking place and why that became my favorite. Thank you for the conversation. Like, it's so fun to nerd out with. By the way, our boss, Cheryl, I'll just say you can cut this out if you want. She was afraid that we would just be, like, nerding out here about this. And I said, that's great, because I think it's interesting and I think people should be curious about what it takes to hopefully transport a listener from wherever they are in the world to this spot as we're listening to the story.

[Jenny Ament]

Well, I think you did an excellent job of that.

[Dave]

It was very kind of music.

[Jenny Ament]

This bonus episode was produced by me, Jenny Ahmet. Our executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Whittles Wax for Lemonada Media and Cheryl Worsley for for KSL Podcasts. For more on the story of Uinta Triangle, Visit our website, uintatriangle.com that's uinta u I n t a triangle dot com. Thanks for listening.