The Wind Transformed, Flagstaff, AZ, March 2012
They put up a wind turbine next to one of the buildings on campus a while back. One windy day I was walking through the area and noticed that the turbine was making the most fascinating and eerie wailing sound as the blades spun up and down in response to the gusts. I'm sure the kids driving past on campus thought I was some kind of a nut standing there with my ear pressed against the turbine's metal support tower. I decided that the next time the wind was blowing hard on a weekend morning I'd go back and try to record some audio of that wailing sound.
About three days later another strong storm passed to the north and I returned to the wind turbine with my digital audio recorder. I figured campus security would confront me about the strange little electronic device I was attaching to their fancy turbine, but no one said a thing (which was kind of disappointing).
Anyway, here are three minutes of what the wind sounds like when it's filtered and transformed through a fifty foot metal tower and a spinning electrical generator (3:20, 3.3MB mp3):
The Wind Transformed - Wind Turbine #1
And here is what it sounded like when the turbine abruptly cut off for some reason about ten minutes later. The wind had been really blowing so I suspect that some safety mechanism kicked in to prevent the generator from spinning its little innards out. Maybe it overheated or something. (1 minute, 1MB mp3)
The Wind Transformed - Wind Turbine #2
Kinda freaky sounding, huh?
One time last May I went up on Mt. Elden during a hellish windstorm and pressed my ear against one of the burned snags left over from the 1977 Radio Fire. The old tree extended up into the screaming jetstream overhead like a giant sonar array and for a second I thought I could hear the sound of waves breaking on some lonely beach all the way down in the Gulf of California. I rushed home and started drafting up a blog post about the experience but the words just wouldn't come together. Maybe one of these days I'll dust off that post and try again...