These are gentle ocean ripples landing ashore at Crane Beach, Ipswich, MA. For this recording, I buried a pair of hydrophones in 3″ of sand, about 6″ apart, where the water was about a foot deep. (With the mics buried, we can better hear the waves themselves, rather than the sand washing and scraping back and forth.)

What is it about the sound of moving water that is so deeply consoling?