Fields and Field Recording

Key parameters of the field

Field recording is recording the world as spacetime field, microphone as proxy for a roving, roaming ear. Field recordings might form an element of an audio walk, whether as site research or audio layer.

Many walks use sound captured from the exact environment they are composed to pass through, including the sound of footsteps, which has a simple quality of focalizing the walker’s parallel experience, moving in the same place as the maker, in a different moment. Footsteps also evoke the experience of walking, creating an alternate access for a non-walking listener that keeps the piece tethered to the experience of moving through space on foot. However the sound of recorded footsteps also puts the audio in the journalistic audio-verité mood, so depending on what you’re going for, this may or may not be useful.

Sound is spatial. Our hearing forms a huge portion of our ability to organize ourselves in space and anticipate what’s coming at us in an environment. Because field recording often involves capturing sound while in motion (or alternately in stillness within a moving field), the field of sound is not just grouped in categories of near or far, but also changes in those parameters: sounds approaching and sounds receding. Information in the field is often fragmentary, snippets of conversation might mark the presence of a couple on a bench; it doesn’t matter what’s being said or that we hear all of it; what matters is that in passing by them and capturing their sound, we have specified some part of the spatial field. Another aspect of the sound field is density.

Near/far, approach/recession, and spare/dense are volume parameters, but they’e also panning parameters — sounds taking specific place across the Right/Left spectrum. Many audio walks use audio that specifically capitalizes on the two hemispheres of sound. You’ll see walks telling you to use headphones for the “binaural” audio experience — this means this audio has separated right and left tracks to maximize the feeling of space in the listening.

Because field recording is an in-the-world sound capture, it’s also always liable to uncontrolled events and interruptions.

All these terms are ways to understand and manage field recording, but they’re also there as field-thinking that can be exported to other contexts. Deep Listening exercises are fantastic for tuning into the field of sound around you at any given time. When you’re trying to functionally navigate a place, you will tune out unnecessary or non-dominant sounds, but playback or the deep listening frame allow you to recuperate all these sounds otherwise lost to normal attention.

As you compose for audio, think of the field as the widest part of the sound — the bed, the atmosphere, the soil from which the thing emerges.

DIRECTION & SOME SAMPLE RECORDINGS

Every microphone has a directional range. Even without binaural recording equipment, a field recording setup is going to capture a wider swath of the incoming sound than other recording setups (like vocal mics, which will be covered in the post on voiceovers).

The built-in mic on the iPhone, for example, is omnidirectional, meaning it captures sound coming at it from any angle and doesn’t prioritize sound from any particular direction. This is good for an archive of everything said in a room, less useful for capturing the presence of a vocal performance.

Here’s a field recording of walking in the snow using my built-in mic on the iPhone, recording through the “Voice Memos” built in app. As you can hear, it’s extremely vulnerable to wind, which creates a distorted sound every time the air brushes over the surface of the mic.

Here’s a recording of a hockey stadium on the iPhone, where there aren’t wind problems. It’s a pretty soupy, loud place, and the iPhone doesn’t do it any favors — but it is adequate to pick up the basic sound signature of the arena.

You can also buy microphones that plug into your phone so that your phone becomes a more useful tool.

I use a Zoom H4N that I bought in 2012 for a couple hundred dollars when I was filming a very low budget documentary. In the sample below, I’m using the nearly omnidirectional setting (captures 240 of 360 degrees, so sound in back (like my talking) is muffled but the sound arriving to the mic from front and sides is clear). I also have a “dead cat” wind screen on it. (See pic.) It was also a less windy day than the day I recorded on the iPhone, but still.

Here’s a recording on a less windy but crunchier-snow day at the same place as the first iPhone recording above.

I keep a sample library, just collect interesting audio environments when I can. There are also a lot of creative commons sound resources you can use, as well as cheap recordings you can use.

Other Fields

When I was making a lot of sound for dances, I found myself thinking a lot about fields in a more abstract, rhythmic sense, trying to compose ambient fields of sound that had energy and a pulse (whether regular or not) that at the same time wasn’t so aggressive that it would overdetermine how to dance to it, or how to read the dance in relation to sound. I got a lot of mileage out of the way that loops can form a field of sound. A loop is made from a sample, a snippet of sound recapitulated so that it forms its own pattern.

I like to think of these fields as happening in a slightly farther-away space than the dance’s foreground. A rich substrate that still makes room for the figure in the near space. Like the patterned backgrounds of these images from the hunting book of G—

Loops are built through a lot of trial and error, taking little samples and listening to them. But a loop made from a field recording has the virtue of transforming the field sound away from verité while still staying rooted in the texture of the world, just this side of what you might think of as music.

Here are a few samples I made totally at random from the Zoom field recording above. In the screen shot below the file, you can see the repeating block of the loops, and the volume allowing now one, now the other, to take the lead.

*the yellow lines map the volume rising and lowering; the blocks behind are the repeating loops — the little grooves in the blue bar up top show where the loop repeats*

Loops are a particular mental space

I took a Pataphysics workshop once with Jeff Jones. I remember we did a Joe Frank practicum (look him up, you probably know his radio sound if you’re 40+). Joe Frank runs monologues over loops to create a singular mood. In Jeff’s workshop, we brought in the worst writing we could find — our 7th grade diaries if we still had them — and read them once without underscoring, and then again with Joe Frank style loops playing. The material was totally different. Was it a magic trick? Or did the loops crystallize and frame any material that floated over them, intensifying them somehow and allowing us to read them in the most interesting light? At the least, loops create mood and consistency, tying everything into the same orbit.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?