Went on a field recording trip to Tide Mill with a friend. I used a hydrophone microphone with my digital pocket recorder, hoping to get some interesting fidelity. This worked really well! Without phantom power the results were still effective, and we recorded a section of the wreckage of tide mill that used to be a sluice. We also went toward Newhaven and recorded on a bank near Port Haven.

There was a tactility to this session. I was moving between three recorders with three different states of fidelity. A mirocassette recorder, the digital pocket recorder and a Tascam Field Recorder.

Two of these recorders cannot be monitored whilst recording. I find this completely changes the experience of recording/listening. The sounds become artifacts, and there is no blur between the time of which they are recorded and the playback, as the event is listened to and playback is then a distorted, or warped artifact of that reality that is not quite as tied by experience to that instance, but a neighboured reality.

I chose to treat the more advance Tascam similarly and not monitor the sounds before, but simply set a level that seemed to not clip and run with that, I had this recorder on whilst playing around with the other recorders, aware of ‘the margins’ and musings on recording by the likes of Angus Carlyle and Mark Peter Wright. I was also thinking about Yolande Harris’ Displaced Soundwalk, and as the tape recorder and digital recorder have quite loud playback built in, I decided to playback recordings I had captured in the space, back into that environment, and record it again. The results were quite interesting and I enjoyed the aspect of performance in where I placed these sounds within the environment. It made me consider whether microphone placement is a type of performance choice? Are we performing by pointing the recorder? This is definitely true when looking at Ka Baird’s Microphone Listening.

The hydrophone with a less high quality recorder, having the ability to immediately play back into the world was exciting. It felt like a natural discovery of an artefact, playing this sound within the space felt like illuminating a hidden reality.

These were quite hard to mix due to not monitoring as I went and were quite harsh initially. I ended up scooping a lot of high end out as the recorders were very shrill. I quite like the results. However compressing and editing the frequencies potentially ruined a charm they had. I described this as a recording of a recorder’s recordings. Thinking about my dissertation and how tinnitus is like listening to yourself listening.

I think there is some promise in this concept and I’m going to try it again next week. I’m also going to revisit the Pauline Oliveros inspired ‘Ears become feet’. The plan is now to record as many of these listening experiments as possible and compile them into listening exercises, have the sounds playable whilst reading the book.

I’ve been experimenting with field recording based of ideas of ‘assistive listening.’ I have an old digital voice note maker with a cheap clip microphone which is a great, cheap portable microphone that records very low quality. I have been thinking about putting limitations of field recordings as a means to kind of influence the user and I will write up a kind of template/score for how these microphone listening exercises will work.

Influenced by Ka Baird I swung the microphone around hoping for an interesting effect. Due to the low quality something interesting happens to the recorded sound. Much like Amacher talking about the hallucinatory effects of playing tones through buildings, I almost feel this in types of fidelities. These sound good played from the device, because I can’t get this mobility from swinging the mono microphone around, I am going to perform the recording into a separate recorder in order to get that effect.

I went recording without my headphones, thinking I always monitor what I’m hearing. I wanted to consider what thoughts entered my head if I wasn’t monitoring the sound. In this process I am aware that I’m being recorded and unable to hear myself. It felt like a self-imposed surveillance.

I went for a walk with a sound devices and LOM Usi’s tied to my shoes. Influenced by

Ear Piece – Adapted from Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening Excercise

1. Are you recording now?
2. Are you listening to what you are now recording?
3. Are you recording while you listen?
4. Are you listening while you are recording?
5. Do you remember the last sound you recorded before this question?
6. What will you record in the near future?
7. Can you hear now and also listen to a recording of an old sound?
8. What causes you to listen?
9. Do you record yourself in daily life?
10. Do you have healthy ears?
11. If you could record any sound what would it be?
12. Are you listening to sounds now or just recording them?
13. What sound is most meaningful to you?

Native – Adapted from Pauline Oliveros

Record at night, walk so silently your ears become feet.

Press record on a handheld recorder, place in an empty pocket, go for a walk.

Exercising with weights

Take out your recycling. Find somewhere to record. Keep your recorder and your recycling on you at all times.

Don’t bring headphones with you

Grapefruit

Record for a minimum of one hour, delete the recordings after

Thinking about Ka Baird’s Mobile Microphone practice and how listening with a microphone is a different thing to a Deep Listening exercise. A deep listening exercise is more experiential, multi-sensory, ephemeral and transient. A recording tends to be more pragmatic, patient, there is a set up period and there is awareness of your own sounds outside of those you hear through your biological sense. Often thought about as ‘fishing’. This metaphor as some kind of hunter is interesting… but odd to me. During our course, we have done and been encouraged to do many listening exercises, and whilst there is clear worth with these, I am considering doing something I can only really describe as an ‘assisted listening exercise’.

I often think of the ear as a microphone and like the fidelity of microphones, there is an inbuilt fidelity in our own biological equipment. Noise induced hearing loss is commonplace with old age and we often overlook the aural differences in these activities. There is a kit on Micbooster.com simply named ‘Hear birds again’ the idea of this kit is as it says, it is a cheap build of headphones and small diagram microphones for playback, not even recording in order for a hard of hearing person to engage with nature with assisted technology.

Field recording is a skill that takes practice. It is also a skill where most seek to remove themselves as much as possible from the environment, which is very different to a listening exercise. However, thinking about field recording as deep listening might give some creative onus to the experiencer. Thinking about present sounds, as opposed to seeking a sound, or hoping a sound passed will reoccur clearer. We also aren’t excepting of our own noise in the parameters of the field recording. A microphone can be another ear and what we record is reflected in reference to our own ears. The obsession with a ‘good’ recording becomes a financial conversation about gear. This obsession with clarity is at the expense of the experience because it seeks to mitigate and at times erase the self.

The anthropologist cannot always leave his shadow out of the picture he draws

Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

I was reading A Word for World is Forest recently and this quote struck me as quite fitting to a sound degree. Through Anthropology of the senses it’s easy to make some connections between this quote and field recording. This and the influence of Mark Peter Wright and the ‘noisy-nonself’ have made me interested in exploring more experimental forms of field recording as mostly listening exercises for idea generation.

Was looking at Benjamin Patterson’s ‘Variations for Double Bass’ whilst conducting research for my dissertation where at some point I speak about Paper Piece. I didn’t think at my level of playing I could properly do the piece justice, but I was interested in his use of ‘plastic and wooden clothes pegs’ and wanted to experiment with these textures.

I was interested in seeing what the post it notes would do if I placed them underneath the strings, they had almost an old school distortion effect. I really liked the slinky. I wrapped the strings in the slinky and got some pretty intense tones, especially with the bow, like the hairclips on guitar, it gave me an extra access point to generate sounds from the instrument. The unique thing about the double bass is it’s an incredibly large resonator, I think due to the size it can amplify these rogue sounds in quite a impactful way. The next stage of this kind of performance is thinking about how I will use this in collaboration, I’m hoping to collaborate this year with my friend as we put out an album in lockdown a few years ago. The next stage is thinking about a live set up and what would work in the live setting. I have some piezo microphones on the way so I can explore how to best amplify the double bass. Preferably less noise than the recording I did with the Geofone. Hopefully I can find a low noise solution that isn’t going to feed back.

There are definitely ways I can improve this kind of performance but tonally I think I am reaching some interesting places with it. Practising regularly to improve my bow grip would be useful. The more I play the more control I will have over this dynamics and be able to shift between them in a more reactive way.

Exploring free improvisations a little more, I found some hair clips around the house and wanted to see how they sounded on my electric 12 string. It sounded kind of interesting when I used a nearby screwdriver so I pressed record to see where things went.

Something about the metallic created some almost percussive textures, once the slide nullified the repetitive nature of a couple of the higher notes ringing out I was able to get some interesting textures. The input started going on my guitar, but it never cut out and I ended up trying to improvise with it which whilst is not reliable on any other occasion worked out for this recording. No effects apart from a little reverb on the amp which went a long way. I started flicking the hairclips towards the end which created some interesting rattling resonances.

We had a very informative lecture by Tom about field recording, he showed us his technique for capturing pondlife with hydrophones. This process has lead to lots of discovery in a overlooked field and Tom has gone from field recording into wildlife research, they discovered certain plants produce sounds underwater at different times of the day etc.

https://mappa.bandcamp.com/album/mardle-daily-rhythms-of-a-pond

Tom also mentioned that as a day job he records sounds on sets. It’s very impressive how naturally he has developed a community of researchers cataloguing pond wildlife, a day job working in a competitive industry and is producing albums of sound art from field recording. All these hobbies and work interlink and synergise, and inform the other.

Tom spoke about the compositional aspect of his pieces and how what we are hearing is organised by him because there is a lot of downtime between these sounds occurring and things captured at different times are overlaid and placed in a quadraphonic scene. We spoke about the ethics of this, and he said that he felt that it was an accessible way to bring these ecologies to mainstream attention as they are at risk of being lost. So his compositions are sort of like hyperreal scenes in order to aid the listener in understanding the diverse ecologies better.

Using a portable voice note recorder I picked up for cheap, I was experimenting with recording with no headphones. This experience I found a lot more fun than my prior excursion. There was a sense of mystery, it made my outing feel purposeful, I wasn’t tied down by equipment and I was imagining what was being recorded without being able to hear it.

I placed the recorder in my shopping bag and walked home. This recorded is mono and quite low fidelity, it has a speaker built in, so I decided to perform into my TASCAM DR-40x with it, as opposed to Ka Baird fleeting between sound sources with a shotgun microphone, I was moving the sound source around my stereo handheld.

Recording without headphones, on an old recorder in a unorthodox way is quite freeing. Thinking about ways I could incorporate this with the speaker into a live improvised performance or just more listening exercises with recorders. I think imposing restrictions on field recorders helps to get us out of a mindset of things needing to sound a certain way or be recorded a certain way.

https://fractalmeat.bandcamp.com/album/r-tape-fieldtrips-of-the-damned

Amy is an interested artist concerned with and sitting somewhere between the cross section of science, film and sound art/music. It was interesting hearing her talk about how scientific concepts tend to influence what her next art project will be about, so seeking knowledge guides her creative process.

She spoke about cool concepts like karaoke being almost like hacking someone’s voice. And her love or pathetic fallacies and by proxy Travis…

“[Black Holes}… are hiding movies of the universe in their glowing rings..”

Michael Johnson, Astromoner

For the installation ‘7 Ways of Exploiting A Black Hole’, we hear an excerpt of a song slowed down, I believe the effect is we are supposed to feel like we are being sucked into a black hole.

It was refreshing to have this sci-fi/science perspective to work.

Thinking about Native by Pauline Oliveros;

“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

Thinking about how impressionable I might be as this is one of the first things I remember from the course in 2020. I’ve referenced this piece in my dissertation because it’s very much so concerned with listening with the body, perhaps even multi-sensory. This appeals to me as someone with a complicated relationship with listening exploring aural diversities and the multi-sensory. Thinking about ways in which we can open up listening exercises more to others with complicated relationships to sound.

In a lecture at the beginning of the year, David was taking to us about creativity within writing talking about intentionally swapping sentences around as a idea generator I think this subconsciously influenced me to think about Native as an idea generator.

I clipped my microphones to my shoes and went for a walk. The issue with this kind of “assisted listening” (I’m not sure if this term works and will try to change it at some point) is that it’s not very discreet, if it isn’t very discreet, walking around at night you draw attention to yourself with expensive equipment in tow. Whilst I was recording, I wasn’t able to enter any kind of listening state. I was too aware of the expensive microphones on my feet, how far I could feasibly go, was I drawing attention to myself.

More thoughts about the logistics of the exercise and less thoughts about the states of hearing. This ruins any listening experience you are likely to have. So in order for this concept to work it might need to be stealth at times. The recording equipment probably should be cheaper and easy to source. E.g maybe just on a phone? Or portable recording device. This is about breaking down barriers of what it means to collect a good recording. So it should be affordable and accessible.

However I’m happy with this recording, it was an interesting experiment.

I was initially interested in this book because of it’s definitions of Listening as a contemporary counterpart or continuation of Oliveros’ Deep Listening. The book has a great outline of different types of listening which was useful for chapter 1 of my dissertation, the rest of the book is more concerned with flow states coupled with some listening exercises and I have ended up finding this book quite useful for what it has to say about creativity, how to harbour it and find ways for listening to encourage it.

“Listen to the sounds above you

Listen to the sounds beneath you

What are the sounds to your left and right”

The more you dwell on these locations, the more you are made to think about what makes you sure of which direction things are. Then you realise, a certain amount of what makes you aware of the situational sounds that surround you are experiences. The knowledge that there is a building over the road that has roofers at the moment. Knowing the humming sound is from the fan on the bathroom ceiling because of the experience of discovering it previously. We know that frequencies bounce off surfaces and resonate differently across the spectrum. Low end tends to be absorbed by walls and floors, high end tends not to transmit as much through surfaces and bounces around more making it harder to discern its location at times because it reverberates around the room more. So you might be more likely to hear low end below you and high end above you. But it’s hard to say how much of that I discern for myself and how much is from knowledge accumulation and learned experience.