Lovely video of a lovely area, in which I am lucky enough to live!
shameless plug: hereâs some droney vids I made of Inishowen in the North West of Ireland! 
and another:
âŚand enhanced by wonderful lovely music that truly evokes the mystery and majesty of the raw natural Irish coastline. If it was reproduced in a video game arcade.
I did a road trip all along the west coast when I was living in Dublin⌠It truly is a gorgeous place.
That would be âLight Years from Homeâ by Irish band God Is An Astronaut⌠Though theyâre from the east coast (County Wicklow), not the west, itâs at least suitable music as it is Irish music. Not all of their ads have to be âFiddle dee dee letâs do a jig with a leprechaunâ
Some of my family is from Wicklow funnily enough. I wasnât suggesting the music should be that cliched fiddles and pipes bullshit either. I would prefer just the actual sounds of the environment personally, but itâs all subjective anyway so who cares?
Bill Drummond made a very good point in his book 100 pointing out that every time a film uses an established piece of music to add to the mood of a scene, he walks out of the cinema. He suggested if music is used in movies that it should be created individually for the movie. Relevant, specific and custom-made.
People donât question the use of music and its relationship to the visual stimuli it is married with or why.
The internet has changed the way we receive stimuli and we have more opportunity to choose what we watch and listen to and it seems dated to me when something like this video has a music track glued to it when really there seems to be little or no relevance. But not in a surreal way, just in a lazy way, like an afterthought - âUh we have a video, letâs stick a soundtrack over it.â âYeah dude, whatever.â
Looking at coastline, if you choose to do so, means you are receiving stimuli that is not visually or aurally defined by the cultural preferences of an artist, but if music is added, whatever music that might be, it immediately limits the experience to a cultural bias.
I remember the day I tried to drive the Ring of Beara. So foggy you could barely see the edge of the road.
Uh. Forgot to say thanks for telling me about the band, and what the piece is. My comment was not necessarily a criticism of them. I donât know anything about them or their work, and I am sure they are great. I was just being fussy about what I think would be a relevant soundtrack. But I just realized, drones donât tend to have sound equipment. Do they?
Drones are sound equipment.
I donât know anything about drones. All the drone videos I have seen (I donât go looking for them, I just occasionally see them) seem not to have a native soundtrack, a soundtrack that is synchronized with the camera. That is how I came to assume that when people send these drones up to film, say, firework displays, the device doesnât have sound equipment, so it just films what it films silently. I have no interest in researching it so I will have to take your word for it that âdrones are sound equipmentâ.
The native soundtrack is a very loud buzz that drowns out everything else. Youâd have to add fake environment sounds, and syncing them to video is rather difficult (and theyâd feel âoffâ anyway).
(Possibly it could be doable with microphone arrays, and extracting directional sound from them, but the tech is all but simple.)
Silence is awkward, music is easy to add.
The end-user option is muting the sound on this video, and playing another sound in another browser tab.
What you have told me here about the sound being a loud buzz? That seems to contradict what some other person said about drones being sound equipment. A lot of people on this site seem to pretend to know stuff but really they donât know anything and use sock puppet profiles to pretend they know stuff. What a waste of time.
And yes, obviously the viewer has the choice to mute the sound and play their own soundtrack⌠inferred thusly:
I see what you mean that it might seem disingenuous (âoffâ) if a fake realistic soundscape was made, with waves crashing on rocks, birds whistling etc., etc., but if it was done well it could be amazing - and more completely generate a sense of flying over the terrain perhaps? I suppose that was at the core of my complaint. I wanted a closer facsimile to the experience of gliding silently over these beautiful places.
Silence is awkward?!
I think that raises a question about how people perceive visual stimuli and this circles back to my point about cultural bias. Why should silence be awkward?
Anyway, point taken about the difficulties presented regarding a natural soundtrack using drone technology, thanks.
The sound equipment was apparently an oblique reference to the drones making the loud buzzy sound.
Agreement here, but the amount of effort is likely being prohibitive for all but the most dedicated postprocessing people.
Adding silence is the easy part. 
Inferred from the somewhat low proportion of videos without a sound track added when the original is missing.
Interesting question that is likely to keep a couple of humanities departments busy (and out of our hair) for a while.
I think someone will fund a project which does employ that level of post production with drone footage being a prominent part of the filming, but with the necessary sound equipmemnt included in the process. Maybe itâs probably already happened? An Imax thing (I think itâs called Imax? A huge curving enveloping projection screen) with the full audio-visual works with the flying over astonishing terrain thing. Itâs surely going to happen.
Somebody, somewhere, very likely. However, the choice of such âperfectâ movies will be much smaller than the no-audio drone-only ones.
So the choice seems to be between a small handful of âperfectâ ones from a small set of locations, vs a larger amount of less-perfect footage of more places. Given that certain places can have subjective importance by the virtue of their locations (e.g. by a tie-in to personal memories), the latter seems to be a preferable approach for me.
Since weâre talking about Ireland, it was a reference to a drone on a bagpipe. Thatâs the reed that voices a constant pitch while the chanter plays a melody overtop.
Ahh, makes even more sense now.
Thought. We could use a drone as an actual musical instrument. Tie the copter down so it wonât fly away, and play the motors pitch like a sort-of theremin.
A cross between vuvuzela and theremin. Interesting. You could tie the copter down as a limitation, but I think youâd want a fairly long leash to control the range of volume as a theremin can. I donât imagine the droneâs amplitude is going to vary very much.
(Thinking of Cowboy Junkiesâ method of recording The Trinity Sessions with a single stereo mike, and placing performers at different positions in relation to it.)
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