In light of a global interest in field recording and listening that has grown dramatically in recent years, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle have released two publications which are undoubtedly timely and which serve to accommodate such interest from a wide variety of perspectives. While ostensibly unrelated, they share many common themes and will appeal to a similar audience.
A predominantly easy but engaging read, In the Field: The Art of Field Recording brings together a series of independent interviews with prominent contemporary field recording practitioners. While these practitioners come from a variety of backgrounds – musicians, scientists, archivists and activists – the use of the word ‘art’ in the title is entirely apt in relation to these subjects: this covers both the craft and creativity of field recording. The interviews follow a series of similar lines of questioning, and are designed to interrogate the artists’ motivations for engaging in field recording practice, the origin, evolution and current state of that practice, their influences and how they use their recordings. But the direction of each discussion is dependent upon, and follows the idiosyncrasies of, each individual's approach, through which a rich diversity of perspectives and insight, as well as instructive commonalities, is revealed.
This is not a manual: the techniques of the craft and equipment (mics and recording gear preferences) are discussed but not at length. The advocation of high-quality recording is balanced by pragmatism. Portability is best; high-quality equipment becomes cumbersome and interferes with the act of collecting, while also being high visibility, which (depending on the subject of recording) can cause its own complications when recording in public. It all depends upon the nature of the recording and the requirements of it.
The artists range from the long-term professional to the determinedly amateur, and perspectives range, as might be expected, from those who focus on the sound as principal concern to those who use field recording as a methodology for exploring more serious issues – environmental, ethnographic and political. For some, field recording offers the opportunity to focus or zoom in, to reveal the hidden, inaudible and often unexpected (e.g. Jana Winderen); for others, the goal is to capture the essence of a circumstance (Hiroki Sasajima).
An issue which seems to have been of a particular concern to the interviewers is the degree to which the artists themselves are ‘present’ in the recordings made. Approaches here range from purist documentarians who strive to be as good as transparent in their recordings to those who intervene readily in the process or product of recording. Peter Cusack discusses the presence of the recordist as an important sonic contextualisation device, revealing much about the space through distance and acoustic cues (e.g. reflected footsteps). Others (e.g. Manuela Barile) talk about the importance of the voice, which can be used to emulate, ‘follow’ and provide contextualisation via description of the conditions in which the recording takes place. Intervention in the recorded document might be through editing or exaggeration of particular sonic characteristics through processing (e.g. Hildegard Westerkamp), in either case with a view to the application of the artist's own creative signature.
Several interviewees identify the time-extensive nature of field recording. Some adopt a record-everything approach (leaving the recorder running for hours, e.g. Francisco López, which yields oceans of materials requiring subsequent archiving or careful editing); other interviewees invest considerable time in the careful research of a particular sounding environment with a view to capturing only ‘five minutes’ of sound (e.g. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Sasajima). Whether auditioning pre- or post-recording, however, critical and careful listening is in any event heavily involved during the entire process for all contributors.
Indeed, field recording as a catalyst (or lens) for listening is another common theme between practitioners. Lasse-Marc Riek describes catastrophic equipment failure in the (remote) field, prompting him to fall back on entirely listening-dependent ‘field’ activity in the absence of any means of gathering and preserving sound – an experience leading subsequently to a project involving the vocal description of field recordings followed by their deliberate destruction. Less dramatically, other artists simply see the activity of pointing a microphone at something as a listening aid. Hiroki Sasajima, for example, observes that the act of field recording focuses the attention of the ear and that listening to sounds through headphones yields a very different experience than simply listening closely. The issue of returning to recordings several months or years after recording them often prompts changes in listening focus, revealing interest within recordings that appeared uninteresting, and vice versa. It prompts vivid multisensory memory, too, transporting the recordist back to the moment of recording and thus revealing the body as recorder (Tidone, p. 76).
Thus through this ethnomusicological snapshot, we get to know these artists, exploring their backgrounds, motivations, predelictions, idiosyncracies and ultimately their output. The artists universally demonstrate a strong integrity, capturing soundscapes honestly and responsibly irrespective of approach. This is a deeply personal pursuit: ‘I record, listen, create as a person … . It's personal rather than a question of creating to a project brief’ (Jez Riley French, p. 167). One thing that clearly emerges is the diversity of approaches accommodated within field recording practice. In fact, I was left wondering slightly what the limits of field recording might be. Cusack says intriguingly (referring to Toshiya Tsunoda): ‘you wouldn't be able to hear some of the resonances he gets from materials such as small glass jars without it being a field recording essentially’ (p. 196), suggesting that field recording is more than simply a recording outside the recording studio, but that it is a philosophical approach to the materials. In any event, field recording, through this book, is revealed to be a deeply multidisciplinary activity; the route into other areas of enquiry. ‘It's the space between fields – the in-betweens – that are my favourite’ (Westerkamp, p. 121).
On Listening also brings together perspectives from a variety of thinkers and practitioners, this time presenting a series of essays the collective aim of which is to encourage reflection on, and perhaps re-evaluation of, what it means to listen. A starting point for the book is that the subject matter ‘exceeds the boundaries of academic institutions to take its place in a number of everyday settings’, aiming ‘to connect the scholarly and the experiential’ (p. 9). Thus, as with the previous text, the aim is to celebrate and encourage the breadth and accessibility of this subject. The authors come from a range of disciplines, from artists to scientists to activists, and this is reflected in the essays, both in terms of subject matter and stylistically, delivery ranging from the poetic to the rigorously descriptive, the emotive and politically charged to the playful.
The book is highly eclectic in scope. And the sheer diversity of subject matter explored must have presented something of a challenge in structuring the essays. As it is the book is categorised into four sections which might be said, very broadly, to deal respectively with the motivations for listening (Listening Perspectives), listening environments – contents and contexts (Listening Spaces), listening strategies and tools (Listening Devices) and social, cultural, political and spiritual listening (Listening to Self and Others). But while such categorisation serves to divide the book neatly into four predominantly equal chunks, the categories themselves seem slightly (if necessarily) arbitrary since there are commonalities between subject matter and concerns across the entire collection.
The more commonly understood issues of listening mode – neatly encapsulated by Jessica Cawley as ‘purposive, attentive, distracted, unconscious, and passive listening’, for example (p. 143) – will be familiar to those well versed in relevant categorisation and analytical systems (Pierre Schaeffer and more recent). These crop up in various guises throughout the book, applied in various ways from the more everyday listening experiences – listening to the radio (Salome Voeglin), to recordings of Irish Traditional Music (Cawley), and within cinema (Michael Chanan) – as well as the more unusual. The latter extend to alternative perceptive strategies such as listening through touch (Penny McCall Howard), through listening glasses (Peter Szendy), artificial listening devices (Volkmar Klein) and sonification of physical data (John Eacott).
There is, inevitably, a common concern with issues pertaining to acoustic and more generally environmental ecologies, and how broader issues of context inform listening rationales, approaches and understanding (e.g. listening in dangerous places (Peter Cusack)). Beyond its predominantly absorbative function, authors also address the idea of listening as an agentive phenomenon – Michael Gallagher, for example, describing it as a ‘technology of power’ (p. 43), a tool both for self-empowerment/discovery (listening to the self), and as an instrument of the state (surveillance). More benignly, it also constitutes a force for reconciliation and forgiveness: Nicola Triscott writes movingly of reconciliation workshops between aggressors and their victims in post-genocide Rwanda, for example.
Many of the authors attempt to distil what we are actually experiencing when listening: Rupert Cox observes a Zen ideal of immediate (spontaneous) as against mediated (interpreted) listening (which perhaps has resonances in Schaefferian écoute réduite); Francisco López looks at our understanding of the listening materials themselves: the same melody played over different media (over a sound system vs. over the radio) may be the same melody, but ‘we are listening to different things’ (p. 49); Andrew Whitehouse considers what value there may be in revisiting an ancestral understanding of listening – for example, the classification of birds by what they sound like rather than by official taxonomy; using sound to define a bird's role in its environment. Blesser and Salter propose the ‘eventscape’ in preference to the soundscape – since sound is invariably caused by mechanical ‘event’ – and identify the impact of environment (acoustic and social) upon our listening, while Jean-Paul Thibault considers what can be learned by attending to the characteristics of the voice which conveys non-semantic meaning in a public setting – how it is modulated by physical activity, for example, and how we respond to changing social and environmental conditions.
What a lot there is to listen for! Some of the perspectives offered here will be of direct relevance to issues of interest to the Organised Sound readership; others are more far-reaching. Nevertheless, there is a great deal here that can be brought to bear upon – supplementing and extending – listening and analytical models familiar to the electroacoustic musician and researcher. I found it a fascinating, thought-provoking and wide-ranging overview of listening and listening-related practice, which I shall definitely be revisiting.
