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.