So, field recording?

One of the most satisfying and unexpected things in my life over the last year has been developing a practice of field recording. It has integrated my love of being outdoors with sound recording and ignited in a new way my life-long fascination with the details and subtle soundscapes of everyday life. In a short time, I have realized how I have begun to hear and experience the world in new ways. While I am new to the conversations in and about field recording, I also have appreciated how this practice unexpectedly treads intellectual terrain that I once spent quite a lot of time thinking and writing about. In short, it has bought together a lot of disparate strands of my life. So, again with the caveat of being new to the discourse, a few thoughts.

What are “field recordings”? In a limited sense, field recordings are any audio artifacts generated outside the (relatively) controlled spaces of recording studios or laboratory settings. In saying this, I am making certain assumptions. Above all, that all audio recordings are artifacts of human invention—created and made, not collected or found. They reflect the particularities of the humans, non-humans, and places that enable (and constrain) their creation (locations, access, resources, equipment, placements, settings, processing, desires, identities, and so on). At best, they are partial, contestable representations of the sounds of the spaces and places recorded. I have argued the same regarding the domain of academic research.

But this formulation of field recording as recordings outside a studio/lab setting is obviously limited. It hitches a field recording’s distictiveness to location and, perhaps, an intention. Churches, houses, castles, and garages are re-purposed all the time as studios (often with little or no acoustic treatment) but would we say recordings made in them are field recordings? Maybe not. If someone were to make recordings of the recording of a record at those places, would that be a field recording? Maybe. Is the recording of an orchestra or folk ensemble in a home or theater a field recording? Maybe. Does field recording mean creating an aural archive of a particular space/place? Maybe or maybe not. (See Casey Anderson’s thoughtful discussion on this.) These are thorny theoretical issues.

In a thoughtful 2015 article Michael Gallagher approaches field recording this way: “the production, circulation and playback of audio recordings of the myriad soundings of the world: the sounds of animals, birds, cities, machines, forests, rivers, glaciers, public spaces, electricity, social institutions, architecture, weather – anything and everything that vibrates.” Later on, he continues, field recording “attends to worldly sounds, the vibrations of the multiplicity of beings, materials and forces that come together to form environments, in contrast with the narrower preoccupation in conventional audio production with music, human speech and defined sound effects.” “Anything and everything that vibrates” is a pretty big net. And here, again, field recording is itself sketched out by its subject matter and intentionality.

Trying to answer the question “what is field recording?” is, admittedly, a somewhat 19th century and, ultimately, a task that will resist completion. But trying to do so nevertheless helps to situate us historically and discursively within the many communities that use and contest the term. That is, it is to engage genealogically in the ways in which the term is put to work and to examine the kinds of work it does in particular discourses, contexts, communities of practice and so on. Field recording may strike a stance of opposition to a particular account of “music.” It might assume a defiant, preservationist attitude in the face of colonialist or ecological violence. The “field” may indeed be anywhere but the studio or sound stage. So, “intention” matters but those intentions, of course, are largely constituted and constrained by the discourses and assemblages we are participate in. In a related vein, Gallagher writes of four “styles” in field recording: the nature, soundscape, acousmatic, and sound art styles.

These days, I find myself on somewhat unfamiliar ground. While some of the “meta” theoretical dimensions of field recording are well known to me, I have come to the practice making recordings “in the field” later in life after an academic career, and both inside and outside all the styles that Gallagher describes. My sound engineering program was largely a studio recording curriculum (with a some gestures towards post-production and, to an even lesser degree, broadcast and game audio) so, for me, the “field” was imagined initially as outside the studio. But as I read and encountered the world of sound art, I began work that returned me to my home studio yet in a manner quite distinct from the labor of making music. Yet I continued to play jazz “in the field.” What conversation am I participating in? All and none, it often seems. This allows a kind of flexibility and disregard to boundaries—but also a kind of homelessness.

As my thinking and work has evolved, I have sometimes looked to the Field Recording Facebook group to help me think about equipment decisions and delighted in the generosity of some many field recordists who share their experiences and knowledge. (For example, George Vlad’s Mindful Audio, Ian Smith’s Technical Field Recording, and Christine Hass’s Wild Mountain Echoes.) These recordists come from quite varied backgrounds, but all convey the joy they experience in recording the worlds of the world and, moreover, the discernible environmental consciousness that attends to their work. The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology points to a context for positioning my academic work in political, social, and theory within an inquiry of study of the social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of decidedly sonic environments. And connecting with the Wildlife Sounds Recording Society has offer another venue to consider these matters in a deeply informed but not academic setting. Finally, the incredible, long-running podcast framework has encouraged me to disregard any real distinction between soundscape, sound art, and field recording for the pursuit of phonology, “the art of sound hunting.”

For now, and largely outside for the moment of any particular community or discourse, field recording has come to entail a particular form of practice and mode of engagement. It facilitates an encounter with the broad physical and “natural” worlds and experience of its accidents and contingencies; the grappling with a world’s manifold visible and invisible borders and actants. And while viewing field recordings as neutrally capturing pristine natural settings is problematic, it is impossible for me not to approach these matters except against the backdrop of climate change and environmental devastation—this anthropocene. As such, I am sympathetic to the deep ecology concern for listening as a practice of retuning and de-instrumentalizing our attention towards the socio-natural worlds we live in and around; and also to the efforts to deploy recording as way to document, defend, or at least archive threatened ecosystems, species, and worlds. (See, for example, Sounds of Life at the Australian Film + Sound Archive.) At the same time, the experience “in the field” has deepened my thinking about the kind of sonic and aural creativity that is possible and the kind of public pursuits it may open up.