The field recordist specialises in capturing nature's quietest moments in some of the world's most remote locations, from Patagonia, Iceland, Greenland, and, most recently, the California Redwoods, using LEWITT.
Thomas Rex Beverly has built a career recording sounds most people will never hear. Over the past decade, he has assembled a catalogue of 140 sound libraries from wild natural spaces. Beverly’s recordings have been used in major film, television, and video game productions by Oscar, Emmy, and Golden Globe winners worldwide.
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For his latest project, Capturing the Unheard, Beverly ventured into California’s old-growth redwood forests – one of the earth’s most delicate acoustic environments. The three-year expedition focused on documenting sounds that exist beneath the threshold of human hearing, from creaking bark to falling needles and air movement hundreds of feet above ground. Only about 5% of the original old-growth redwood forests remain, with most protected in national parks where recording access is nearly impossible.
With such a unique mission, Beverly faces some challenges. “It’s a lot of figuring out my own techniques that work in extreme environments. How can I power eight LCT 540 S mics to run for 24 hours? How do I keep everything dry in a thunderstorm? How do I protect my mics from wild winds? How do I keep rodents from chewing through my cables? How do I get all the gear to the remote location? How do I get mics up into the canopy of a 260ft Redwood? There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve had to figure out, and it’s been a lot of fun to build my recording skills as well as expertise in expedition planning and logistics.”
Beverly deployed five separate recording rigs at different heights within a single giant tree – from the base up to 225 feet in the canopy – capturing distinct micro-ecosystems and their unique acoustic signatures. This vertical approach revealed how these massive trees contain entirely different sound worlds at various elevations.
Beverly relied on a custom-built array of LEWITT LCT 540 S microphones to capture every subtle detail. He built an IRT Cross Cube using eight LCT 540 S microphones arranged in a 25 cm cube configuration, creating what he calls a “sound telescope” for immersive 3D audio capture. The condenser mic’s ultra-low self-noise of just 4 dB(A) – exceptionally quiet even by professional standards – and dynamic range of 132 dB(A) made it essential for revealing the forest’s imperceptible sonic environment.
The LCT 540 S features a 1-inch gold-sputtered Mylar diaphragm and cardioid polar pattern, delivering transparent, natural sound with exceptional depth and resolution across 20 Hz to 20 kHz. With a maximum SPL of 136 dB, the microphone handles both the faintest ambience and loud transients with equal precision.
Among his discoveries was “needle rain” – the sound of thousands of redwood needles falling with wind gusts, a phenomenon nearly imperceptible to human ears that Beverly initially mistook for precipitation. He captured something else unexpected: a giant redwood falling in the distance during a quiet night, reverberating through the valley “like a giant bomb.”
Beverly’s expedition resulted in a remarkable multi-layered soundscape of the redwood forest from floor to canopy, catching details never previously captured – a demonstration of what precision engineering can unlock in the right hands.
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