Leo Marchand

Leo records rain for a living — on tents, on tin roofs, on the windshield of a parked car in Brittany. He writes about natural soundscapes and why the ear trusts them: rain, surf, wind in pines, the specific hush of snow. His pieces tell you what to listen for, not just what to press play on. Fifteen years of field work gave him a collector's patience and a taxonomist's ear: he can tell you why rain on canvas soothes and rain on metal excites, why a recording with too little low end feels fake even to people who can't say why, and why the best sleep recordings keep a little imperfection in — a distant car, a shifting gust — because the ear distrusts a loop that never breathes. His entries pair that craft knowledge with the research on natural sound and recovery, held lightly and cited properly. He still does everything the slow way: real weather, long takes, no synthesis, edits measured in hours of listening. The microphones do outnumber the shoes, and the count is growing. His recurring theme is attention — that learning to hear a soundscape properly is itself a settling practice, and that most people, given one paragraph of guidance, can hear their familiar rain recording as if for the first time.

Writes about: field recording, nature soundscapes, sleep sounds.

Elsewhere: leomarchand.substack.com