What is this thing called 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 and complex compositions of sounds in the world around me. In a short time, I have realized how I have begun to hear and experience the world in new ways and in being present with these sounds my sense of self and being has transformed. While I am new to the conversations in and about field recording, sound art, and sound composition, I also have appreciated how this practice unexpectedly treads intellectual terrain that I once spent quite a lot of time thinking and writing about, namely the limits of the ontology of representation. 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 creation—created, produced 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). I take these creations to be ontologically equivalent to their “originally” source, object, or location. Even within the world representation, they are partial, contestable representations of the sounds of the spaces, things, and places recorded. I have argued the same regarding the domain of academic and scientific research. In the end, we really can only proceed and know in limited, constrained manner.

But this formulation of field recording as recordings outside a studio/lab setting is itself obviously limited and somewhat replicates the issue I think needs to be overcome. It hitches a field recording’s distictiveness to location and, perhaps, an intention or object. Intuitively, say, we know that 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.

So, trying to answer the question “what is field recording?” is, admittedly, a somewhat 19th century problematic. But trying to do so nevertheless helps to situate us historically and discursively within the many communities that use, transform, 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 localized settings. 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 as political and social theorist and scholar of governance, and both inside and outside all the genres that Gallagher describes. My sound engineering program was largely a studio recording curriculum 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. 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, I admit, 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 and contextual sensitivities that attends to their work; a sensitivity and reflex that is also developed through and by the 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 an informed but not academic setting, yet one quite representational in its own right. Finally, the long-running podcasts framework and Sound Has Ears have encouraged me to disregard any real distinction between soundscapes, sound art, and field recording for the pursuit of phonology, “the art of sound hunting.” And in these settings, sounds become things unto themselves.

For now, and largely outside for the moment of any particular community or discourse, field recording has come to entail a particular form of personal transformation, 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 in different ways, 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.