2. Field recordings 1

The installation has co-evolved with an ongoing field recording practice which, instead of seeking out specific subjects to record, has made recordings relatively randomly, intermittently and repeatedly in the environments where I have happened to be. This has encouraged a sort of technological ‘negative capability’: an open or receptive inertia which produces its own quasi-subjects in indirect or unexpected ways.

The practice has sometimes focused on the everyday random and mundane background noises of the rural village where I live. Alongside the natural, environmental sounds – of weather, plant and animal organisms – these have inevitably included the pervasive and repetitive sounds of both public and private technologies. Outside, traffic, aircraft and agricultural machines sound alongside garden machinery and close-up, interior domestic noises: electrical, plumbing and electronic systems, and, not least, the sound of my own and others’ recordings and live amplified sounds.

Whilst the same sorts of outdoor sounds occur repeatedly and predictably – birds, wind, cars and so on – many of these are low-level and intermittent and happen gradually, diurnally and seasonally rather than being more constantly present. Sometimes – at night or on a Sunday – it is very quiet, with no obvious traffic or other technological noises at all. Volume levels, often already low, change marginally and imperceptibly over long periods of time. In spring and early summer, when the installation is to take place, both indoor and outdoor sounds start to be heard more distinctly, conditioned by a range of parameters – meteorological, biological, social, cultural – relating to the seasonal, environmental changes. Both biotic and non-biotic sounds occur in different intensities: of weather, of plants and leaves, of animal organisms and activities, and – closer to home – degrees of cover and enclosure (open windows, fewer clothes).

3. Field recordings 2

Field recordings and amplified sounds, following technologies and tropes of surveillance,Footnote 2 have been largely understood as an invigorating extension of reach into both the micro- and macro-cosmic, only further objectifying, aestheticising and territoralising sounds as ‘things’. But, rather than using these, for example, to preserve, evoke or aestheticise the everyday sounds and environments described above, recordings here have been conceived of as contingent, liminal and transductive forms which are able to traverse and diffuse across different milieux of sounds (e.g. recorded and ‘real’ ones); and relate these affectively together. Describing transduction as a ‘resonance and coupling between diverse realities’ (Mackenzie Reference Mackenzie2002: 13), Mackenzie uses the microphone as a paradigm for other transductive processes. In order for these to occur, he writes:

At the same time these rural, sometimes quiet, environments themselves are also conceived of here as liminal sites where the different sorts of ubiquitous sounds described above might be contingently articulated together and so critically connect to a diverse range of sound and field recording practices. For example, to an ornithological or to a ‘purist’ practice – where every manmade and technological sound is excluded – or conversely to the documentation of environmental noise or to its aetheticisation. All of these approaches become more or less suggested and realisable here – and without any significant editing or post-production of the field recordings – as the recording and environmental contingencies allow.

Whereas in a more densely lived and technological habitat different milieux of sounds might become experienced as a part of – whether submerged within or covered up by – a larger sound (Schafer Reference Schafer1973: 32), in such environments both natural and technological sounds – however ubiquitous and ordinary – can potentially be distinctly heard to happen. It is both sparsely populated and – sometimes – quiet enough to be conceived of in a recording – however briefly – as bucolic or as a wilderness.Footnote 3 In the same way as animal behaviours, for example, can be observed to happen here, so many human and technological sounds become potentially easily hearable or predominant (e.g. equipment ‘hiss’ in a quiet interior or a very-low level field recording).

4. Ambient

In spite of this, because many of these sounds are globally widespread, pervasive or low-level background noises, they are easily experienced as predictable and redundant and so routinely ignored or ‘tuned out’. Here both natural and technological sounds – increasingly including the sound of recordings themselves (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp1988: 47) – are heard obliquely, if at all. In respect of the field recordings described here, it is this lack of distinguishing content – in relation to other ‘real’, happening or recorded sounds – that has become of interest. Many of these recordings are difficult to listen to in any straightforward or sustained way: whether because they are diffident or marginal and therefore difficult to hear as such – ‘has it started yet?’ – or because they seem boring, banal or unoriginal. Yet others are ‘real’ sounding, for example in relation to a playback situation, and so not registered as recorded or already sound like a recording because they are naturally acousmatic (Norman Reference Norman2004: 38).

An inattention to happening sounds – both natural and mediated – has been linked to anti-survival and anti-social behaviours, whereby environmental change and degradation happens unremarked or where – used to advantage in background musics, for example – individuals become withdrawn into synthetic, surrogate environments. Lanza – pre-iPod – anticipates a seamless journey through interiors (home–car–work–mall–home) accompanied by a background music which ‘will seem more natural than tittering birds or rush hour traffic’. (Lanza Reference Lanza1991: 51). Recorded sounds are doubly implicated here by both producing the conditions for conceiving of a sound as an autonomous ‘thing’ in the first place (Adorno and Levin Reference Adorno and Levin1990: 58) and by proliferating these into the environment.

But, rather than thinking of the pervasive spread of recorded sound as only immersive or polluting, others have found something more constructive in this proliferation. Gould, calling the effect the ‘greatest achievement of the record industry’, connects both the increasing presence of Muzak™ and the individual listener's ‘dial-twiddling’ – however limited – to the becoming-environmental of music: transforming the recorded ‘work … and his relation to it, from an artistic to an environmental experience’ (Gould Reference Gould1966: 347). Recordings here are no longer framed in biographical or representational terms: the original source, name, date, place become irrelevant (1966: 352) as they proliferate on- and off-planet. At the same time categories and hierarchies of sounds (the original, the recording, the ‘real’ and so on) become disturbed and conflated (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard1994: 3; Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 9).

Instead of developing here a return to or recovery of more concentrated and expert forms of audition, other constructions and modes of listening – ambient, distracted, affective, ‘ubiquitous’ (Kassabian Reference Kassabian2001) – have seemed more adapted and responsive to the sorts of acoustic and recorded sounds described above. In ambient and background musics these ambiguities – different genres of recording, for example, or samples of locally ubiquitous sounds – have been used to disrupt and blur any more ‘total’ experience of recording. The more average and usual the sound – in relation to a playback context – the more successful the take:

5. Installation

Many of the field recordings, coming from the random practice described above, are already either or both minimally eventful and ambient in terms of their content – in themselves or in relation to a playback environment – and in respect of any overtly original formal approach. Low and usual interior and exterior ambient sounds are ‘straight’ field recorded amongst other recordings which sample or re-use existing recordings or forms of field recording (e.g. rerecordings of my own and others’ recordings; ‘Horspielstreifen’Footnote 4). The same mundane, background sounds of wind, birds and technologies – because they are often produced, monitored and rerecorded in the same or closely similar environments – are coextensive across the field recordings, the rerecordings and the acoustic sounds of the studio.

In an installation these different complexes of recordings – initially developed discretely as individual field recordings – are both produced and played back site- and time-specifically over its duration, making further recordings as necessary. The background recordings try to avoid any close-up, personal or exceptional noises so that they might be experienced in the installation – where heard at all – as diffuse or contentless. Volumes, dynamic levels and fades are used to blend different recordings together or to blend recordings with acoustic sounds. Similar recordings – either closely consecutive recordings or rerecordings – are played back in loops or crossfaded together. Field recordings are synchronised with rerecorded or other versions of the same, or played back site-specifically with live amplifications.

‘For the Birds’ proposes a new version of this complex of ambient, background noises and recordings together with close-up, live birdsong which emerged contingently, through an open studio window, over the spring and early summer of 2008 (‘Blackbird II’; Sound example 1). A blackbird, apparently attracted by the rerecording playbacks (which had started in a recursive loop to include the blackbird itself), sang increasingly predictably and compellingly whenever the recordings were played; becoming louder and more persistent as the season and the recordings progressed. The blackbird sounds changed – audibly and conceptually – from being an incidental or intrusive background noise in relation to the more diffident, ambient rerecordings to becoming an increasingly anticipated and sought-after, exclusive foreground sound. The version proposed here will attempt again to produce a focused foreground recording of an isolated, individual bird from within the installation space.

6. Bird Recordings

Alongside the quieter background sounds – of equipment ‘hiss’ and so on – the ‘environmental acousmatic’ (Lopez Reference Lopez1998: 5) of the blackbird song articulates an ambient, like the Orb's above, which pierces through different milieux and ‘flashes’ rather than blends or merges these together (Taussig Reference Taussig1993: 39–40). This is a two-way effect where, as the recording has the potential to be listened to ‘as if it is real’ – because it can accurately reproduce the narrow, acousmatic spatial signature of the birdsong – so the ‘real’ blackbird song can be listened to ‘as if it is a recording’ – mimicking the focus, realism and redundancy of recorded sound. Although however foreground the recordings or the ‘real’ bird may sound, in terms of their intensity or volume, both still have the potential – through conditioning and normalisation – to become part of the wider background of unwanted noise (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp1988: 47).

Close-up recordings of solitary birds have been made throughout the history of phonography, connecting to its emergent technologies and expressionsFootnote 5 and forming a widely experienced – both ornithological and popular – genre and canon of recording. At the same time, as ubiquitous forms, bird recordings may be experienced as doubly redundant: as recorded sound (as such and as an unoriginal, much repeated form) and as reproductions of an already uninteresting and mundane garden sound. As recordings of animals they connect effortlessly to discourses of realism and representation and – through metaphors of ‘sound hunting’, capture, stockpiling and so on – to the wider, modernist project which conceives of recordings as circumscribed and proprietary ‘things’ (Attali Reference Attali1985: 32; Adorno and Levin Reference Adorno and Levin1990; Lopez Reference Lopez1998: 3).

Nevertheless, whether conceived of registering ‘acoustic events as such’ or as environmental noises themselves, recorded sounds may also be implicitly linked – through an apparent lack of ‘representational handling’ and diffuse, shared background noises – to their acoustic environments (Kittler Reference Kittler1999: 23, 37; Wollscheid Reference Wollscheid1999: 7). This encourages a fragmentation and drifting of attention which moves through the recordings themselves into these further contexts. Whilst parts of a recording might still be picked out – birdsong or a tune – and categorised as such, the rest – exceeding any individual perceptual or cognitive capacity to grasp it in any completer, more contemplative way – dissipates as noise into noise (Kittler Reference Kittler1999: 23). Instead of understanding this as regressive or ultimately chaotic (Adorno Reference Adorno1991: 29–60; Schaeffer in Nattiez Reference Nattiez1990: 98), the situation of reception moves away from a stable, structuralist communication paradigm – where transmission and reception coincide – to a more open, environmental mode.

It is not difficult to relate this shift in attention to ‘straight’ field recordings which are already – as recordings as such (see Gould above) and in terms of their content – doubly environmental. Because they are finally susceptible to their playback context, they are difficult to categorise definitively or to recognise as the made work of a specific individual. Using birdsong as an example, Mizutani describes field recordings as ‘freely’ functioning forms which remain open to a complex of disciplinary and aesthetic fields and range of perceptions (natural, social, environmental, ‘folkloric’, ‘metaphysical’ and so on). He includes the bird's own perception in the mix: ‘bird sings also recognizing our existence’ (Reference MizutaniMizutani n.d.).