Welcome to a blog about field recordings. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be blogging here with my thoughts and activities on making and using field recordings in sound art contexts.

In days gone by, field recordings were the domain of the –ologists. The term still conjures up images of entrepreneurial wisdom-seekers, schlepping unwieldy recording equipment through jungles and swamps, in search of knowledge about exotic peoples, species and habitats. Ornithologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists.

But today, more and more musicians and sound artists are accumulating their own personal sound-banks of field recordings.

Christof Migone has generated a whole CD album - Quieting - out of a 20-second field recording of a cannon that is fired every day at noon from the citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Francisco López’ whole practice has developed from field recordings made in his parallel working life as botanist. Yannis Kyriakides has written an opera based on field recordings made in the UN buffer zone in Cyprus.

A lot of the current activity extends less from a desire to capture exotica than a wish to make sonic abstractions of the everyday. Hence the rise of the urban field recording, full of the sounds of train stations, platform announcements, ticket machines, and cars cars cars. The shuffle of the mass heard through the ears of the flaneur. At Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin there’s even a café where you can buy binaural microphones at the bar.

I’ll be expanding on lots of the above as I blog along in the coming weeks. Here’s a track from my own field-recording library, for starters: church bells ringing in Christmas, in an English village. More to come.

Dette indlæg blev skrevet torsdag, den 3. maj 2007 kl. 14:11 og er gemt i Ikke kategoriseret. Du kan følge kommentarerne til indlægget via følgende feed RSS 2.0. Du kan efterlade en kommentar, eller sende trackback fra din egen side.