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.