Wk 37 // small notes on sound and recording (tutorials and upskilling)
- annabensky
- Oct 22, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 25, 2023
Still loving recording around the Hauraki shoreline, but feeling very lost as to the what and why... While it's lovely recording moments in time, I'm starting to feel like I'm just collecting sounds rather than doing anything meaningful with them - really need to pin down a focus for EOY, and something from my side of things to contextualise it... The weather has also been temperamental over the past month, which has slowed down the outings, but on the up side it has given me some nice time to reflect, write and build my knowledge of how to record with the tools I have at hand.
EOY Thoughts
In continuing to record, I've been considering what format I'd like my EOY installation to be in. While I do like the idea of people having individual 1:1 experiences with the sound, I think that ultimately things will be more successful if the work features a combination of recordings in the space acting together - I feel that this aligns more with the idea of interconnection and Mesh, and the concatenation of things... I think ultimately having multiple speakers in the space, each playing either their own sound or working together to play stereo sound in tandem (i.e. left and right split across the room to take up audible space) may work well... Will play around in DEMO space and see what happens :)
Tutorial notes
Notes from field recording artist and sound engineers, Marcel & Libby from Free To Use Sounds:
"When I record sounds...I don't force the sound into the recorder...because what's happening here is instead of listening to a beautiful [sound] we are creating noise within the recording, and this is something we don't want. And this is the same with room tone...and I want to record a dark, quiet ambiance... I listen to my surroundings and then I use the headphones and I intentionally raise up the gain until I hear noise, and then what I do is I reduce the gain. And exactly at that moment that this noise disappears... is when I hit the record button."
"Choosing the right recording settings for field recordings is not black and white, it's all situational and all depends on equipment, environment, the sounds you want to record and what you want to use them for... Never underestimate your most important sound recording tool: your ears!"
Notes from interviews and tutorials by Oliver Payne, a British artist, sound designer and musician:
"As an artist more than an audiophile... field recording exists in three clear areas and many more less clear areas...it's scientific and research purposes as a form of data, it's use in composition and sound design... and its use to foster greater engagement with nature and the world around us..."
"The sounds of our environment are a profound, subtle and deeply influential context in our lives. Some of the areas of this influence include our sense of time and place, our memories, emotions, and physical bodies, the physical world, our personal, social and spiritual relationships, and our relationship with nature. Through active environmental listening, we can deepen our understanding of the extent to which the acoustic habitat shapes our lives. We can learn to respect all sound, no matter where it comes from, and to become more aware in the deepest possible sense of ourselves, our communities and our world." (from field recording artist Martin Scaife)
"Soundwalk" - term coined by composer and teacher Hildegard Westerkamp, which describes "any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment...exposing our ears to every sound around us, no matter where we are." They can be practice by anyone in any environment, in the present or as recordings; sometimes they are accompanied by narration or sound-based-accompaniment designed to enhance the experience or provide context for the walk.
"Deep listening" - Pauline Oliveros (have covered before); the practice of "radical attentiveness"; "slowing down, paying attention". There is a growing body of evidence in the field of psychology that practicing deep listening can help humans build better relationships (with each other and our environments), can improve concentration and memory, and improve wellbeing.
Something I haven't given much thought, which Payne talks about in his content, is the difference between analogue and digital recording methods. With the recordings I'm doing at present, which rely on sensitive microphones, digital makes the most sense for me, but the possibilities of analogue methods and the physicality of sound (fun idea!) are definitely things I'd like to explore in future when time allows.
Notes from "Field Recording Art", a lecture-workshop with experimental composer Yiorgis Sakelarious
Landscapes and soundscapes go hand in hand
You don't have to be a sound engineer to make sound works - yes there is a field of knowledge there, but as artists we work as artists and from an artist's perspective, and that is ok! (something I've been forgetting recently I think...)
Archiving, research, documentation, etc. intersect with field recording -"Sonic Journalism"
Pierre Schaeffer, a French composer, was the first in the field to propose that we can appreciate sounds for what they are, detached from the sound source - "Acousmatic listening"
Theorist Bernie Krause proposes that the sound scape is comprised of three elements: biophony (sounds produced by living organisms but not humans), geophony (nonbiological or abiotic sounds), and anthrophony (sounds produced by humans, including through the materials we create). Sound is always an orchestra, and we are a part of it. We are always listening in the soundscape; sound is around us, involves us, and blurs the inside-outside when studied.
Need a simple stereo/biaural recording set up? Clipping two microphones to a wire coat hanger is a very simple way to go about it! (can hang from trees, fences, etc., can embed it in the ground, works with contact or standard microphones)
"The experience in the field can never be recreated in the studio... The recording is not an object, it's not even a series of codified data. It is an event. And every time you play it back you unfold it in time once again."
"Recording is about connecting, it's about interacting, it is about shifting our perception of our environment, of ourselves, of the world around us, and leading us into spheres that I call beyond this world - the otherworldly... That's what sound is for me, this flux of energy..."
Brian Eno - IN A GARDEN
A friend recently told me about this work from last year. Eno's work centres around the notion of the sonic garden, in which layers of sounds recorded from the site come together to create a listenable landscape. The resulting work is both site specific and biographical, and at the same time fluid in its boundaries; it is not confined to the garden's physical location and disrupts temporality by blending its past and present happenings within the aural space.
Below is an excerpt from an accompanying written response by Turkish-British novalist Elif Shafak:
Time slows down. There is no specific beginning here, and therefore, no precise end. Instead, there are circles within circles... Reminiscent of a mystic’s drum, reminiscent of the beating of the human heart, the sonic garden reverberates with the pulse of birth, death and rebirth. Outside, time is supposed to be linear; the past and the present and the future arranged neatly one after another. But when you retreat into the sonic garden, time becomes cyclical. The past continues to breathe inside the present, and you hear not only the sounds of creatures that are alive in this moment, but also of those that are long forgotten or fading away, you hear the song of a mysterious starling or a vermillion flycatcher gone extinct. Eno’s sonic landscape not only honours the myriad sounds of nature, but also confronts the silences and ruptures set in motion by greed and willful ignorance, addressing the accelerating climate crisis. This is a planet that is being destroyed and depleted at a rapid rate. The extinction of species and the obliteration of biodiversity and entire ecosystems.
Miscellaneous media and reflections
My free-time media recently has been Mike Flanagan's American Gothic horror series Midnight Mass (2021). The series which centres on events taking place in the small, isolated community of Crockett Island after the mysterious arrival of a new priest. In the final episode of the series, a young school teacher and devout Catholic named Erin Greene reflects on a conversation with a late friend in which he asks her what she believes happens at the moment of death and after one dies. It's an emotional scene, and while I am not religious myself, her monologue has stuck with me:
“Speaking for myself? Myself. My self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing. That word: self. That’s not the word, that’s not right, that isn’t — that isn’t. How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons. Little lightning bolts, like fireworks inside, and I thought I’d despair or feel afraid, but I don’t feel any of that. None of it. Because I’m too busy. I’m too busy in this moment. Remembering. Of course. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body, is mostly just empty space after all, and solid matter?
It’s just energy vibrating very slowly and there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy. Not memory. Not self. My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain.
And I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the energy fighting the neurons. And I’m returning. Just by remembering, I’m returning home. It’s like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it’s always been a part. All things, a part. All of us, a part. You, me, and my little girl, and my mother, and my father, everyone who’s ever been. Every plant, every animal, every atom, every star, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach.
That’s what we’re talking about when we say God. The one. The cosmos, and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I’ll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It’s a wish. Made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything. I am all. I am that I am.”
Coming from a non-religious immediate family, with parents raised in very religious environments (Catholic and Jewish respectively) and having grown up in primarily Pagan communities, I've been lucky to be surrounded by a range of voices when it comes to this topic. I don't have any answers, or any certain feelings around the matter, but the idea of being made of star stuff and one day returning to that cycle is one that aligns the closest for me, and of course with my practice. As artists, I think there are always parts of ourselves that bleed into our work, for better or worse, and with End of Year on the horizon and a few recent health diagnoses in my periphery, I've been reflecting more and more on these cycles of interconnection, thingness and being.
Maybe that's the nature of being human in this world. We are here, for our little pocket of time, bubbling along with other peoples' in a kind of collective effervescence - bobbing in and bobbing out of each others times and spaces and lives and environments. And underneath it all is this current of, whatever you choose to call it really - existence, nature, happenstance, fate? Carrying us along the timeline... Perhaps that's some of the reason I am drawn to methods of recording; I gather little pockets of time and experience; seeds in my carrier bag.
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