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.