No input mixing. Very cool!
Luciah spoke about this piece by Jacob Kirkegaard recorded in a swimming pool in Chernobyl.
The politics of background music/noise
Whilst thinking about ‘What is background music’ – which is the working title for my audio paper. I began asking myself questions related to commerce, thinking most notably about my experience in customer service. I have worked most of my twenties in customer service roles which were usually quite busy and I often have this thought that my experience working within a busy music venue really shaped how I listen to music. I found it quite exhausting to have music on constantly when I wasn’t aware of the artist or song. Stuck in this space through my contract to society. There is pressure from your colleagues to put ‘upbeat’ music on. I also ran a DJ night which plays old experimental pop and private press these choices are catered to what a large group of people partying would possibly want to hear. My tastes gravitated towards music from the 70s and 80s, mostly featuring synthesizers, mostly kitsch and playful but with interesting sounds. A lot of Japanese New-Wave and experimental jazz-funk from Europe. A lot of this music had no vocals, if it did they were mostly not speaking English. I wonder how much my job and that environment shaped the choices I made musically. When I would work, I would crave these upbeat sounds and when I was finishing work, exhausted, I would listen to more ambient or avant-garde music to help me think or re-sync with my general mood. With Stimulus Progression, it was proved in Muzak that you could use music to encourage workers to work harder subconsciously, now the controls belong to the employee and a lot of us chose to engage with this use of music as a means to power through a bad work experience. In a sense, when we got portable headphones, we in affect gained control parameters to our environments. We can cover the sound of loud people having fun in our workspaces with music we like and use that music to transport us to a happier place, but also, we can forget we are on a train with an iPod, or forget we are waiting in a quiet, awkward space. We can drown out the unwanted sounds of our urban spaces. – accept if you are working in one, and happen to not be in charge of your own soundtrack I don’t know what is worse, being allowed to have a soundtrack and your own taste being absorbed by the brand you represent or being subjected to whatever music your manager or boss deems appropriate, either way music for the worker is forced to become an engagement tool or a kind of subliminal dialect.
“Hearing immerses the subject, vision offers a perspective” – Jonathan Sterne
With headphones, we can interject our own space into the locality. This blog post does a good job of describing this nuance of a headphone listen.
https://8sided.blog/tag/william-gibson/
In this blog post by Michael Donaldsom, he talks about how headphones have affected our listening – this discussion inspired by a quote by the science fiction writer William Gibson who said about the Sony Walkman;
“The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t remember any technological experience since that was quite so wonderful at being able to take music and move it through landscapes and architecture”
William Gibson, 1993 Interview
Donaldson goes on to ponder how the portable sound recorder changed our perception of space. As we walk through these landscapes with our own soundtrack, we are freed from unwanted interaction or interference, we are left only with our chosen space. It’s actually impossible to talk about any kind of situational listening habits of the 21st century without speaking about iPods or Walkmans. If I were to talk about playlist culture, automated playlists and ‘beats to study to’ – it’s hard to ignore that music on the go is a tool to shut off from unwanted distraction or walk through a street undisturbed and as this post concludes, most listeners aren’t ‘sitting in a dark room with their headphones plugged into a record player’ anymore most of my more intent listening experiences usually happen on walks personally.
Stockhausen ‘tuning cities into being more harmonious’
Some quotes from the book ‘Shopping’ from the LCC library that stood out;
“If Mall’s are virtual cities constructed in the nostalgic image of a clean, safe, legible town centre, multiplex cinemas have become virtual malls, retailing a commodified real. The shopping mall remains what Michel Foucault has called a heterotopia – a heterogeneous social space in which ‘all other real sites that can be found within the culutre are simultaneously repsented, contested, and inverted”
Anne Friedberg, The Shopper’s Gaze, Shopping
“Jean Baudrillard’s theoretical hyperreal is a descriptive diagnosis of our cultural dyslexia, the casual grounding of which came first is lost in a chain of signage, the cultural consdequence of the predominant visual forms of the twentieth century – the cinematic and televisual – has been to produce an ingrained virtuality of the senses where our experience of space and time and the real are removed to the plane of representation”
“… today it is not production but consumption that is considered to be the citizen’s primary duty. In times of crisis and war, modern politicans no longer demand that one should be thrifty and tighten one’s belt still further, but, on the contrary, that one should buy more, so that the economy can keep running.” – Boris Groys, The Artist As Consumer, Shopping
Was wondering whether my audio paper could take a dive into consumerist cultural theory territory. With every quote I find I fear I pick up more sources to explore…
In the book ‘Elevator Music’ by Joseph Lanza.
“As the industrial revolution introduced the internal combustion engines roar and the drone of generators, ventilation systems, riveting pistons, and low-frequency electrical lighting, silence became an unwelcome anomaly when it existed at all. There erupted a whole new genus of criminal activty and factory-related illnessses connected with these noisy incursions, such as “boiler maker’s disease” produced by metal scrapting. Music was not mere entertainment but an “audioanalgesia” to kill the pain of urban din”
Joseph Lanza
When thinking of the effect Muzak and background music has had on people today, I was looking at this from the perspective of the internet – but researching a little bit, I feel this change is far more nuanced – the initial causality of sound theory seems routed in the industrial revolution – when suddenly the soundscape changed very noticeably. Then the commercialisation of recorded music was a massive cultural shift (including cinema) and later the portable sound system; The Boombox, almost like a portable sound installation. The Walkman, an excursion from the space, our environment becomes distanced, our space is piped with our own Muzak. Finally, Information Age and it’s continued development; playlist culture, streaming software, podcasts, social media – all of which have an effect on our listening. Our ‘echo-chambers’ or ‘bubbles’ perhaps not limited to a set of political content we are more likely to engage with, but also what media…
“Karlheinz Stockhausen later suggested using computer-programmed “sound swallowers to neutralize every unwated noise in a public place with it’s opposite vibration” – a prophetic statement in light of the noise cancelling headphone technology we have today.
Background Music/Sound
Looking into possible avenues around background music.
Looking into sources that could speak negatively about the commodification or commercialisation of background music but finding more far out stuff criticising ambient artworks in modern times, as ambience being seen as ‘nice’ – and this therefore being a problem for curation in our modern times. Asking the question whether we need a more abrasive and conceptual form of art. In ‘Against Ambience’. They speak about Seth Seigelaub dying, a famous conceptual artist and curator.
Against Ambience by Seth Kim-Cohen, isn’t particularly concerned with background music, but ambient sound and it’s limits in contemporary art. Critiquing galleries and museums for focussing on sensory art like the works of Ryoji Ikeda, LaMonte Young & Mariah Zazeela’s Dream House and Turrell & Irwin. Stating that the art world needed to embrace sound art that was more conceptual and less concerned with light and sound as ambience. I guess the crux of the criticism could quite primitively be stated as only concerned with spatiality, immersion and sensory affect. A very interesting quote from the opening chapter in this book.
hearing is spherical; vision is directional
hearing immerses its subject; vision offers a perspective
sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object
hearing is concerned with interiors; vision is concerned with surfaces
hearing involves physical contact with the outside world; vision requires distance from it
hearing places you inside an event; seeing gives you a perspective on the event
hearing tends toward subjectivity; vision tends toward objectivity
hearing brings us into the living world; sight moves us toward atrophy and death
hearing is about affect; vision is about intellect
hearing is a primarily temporal sense; vision is a primarily spatial sense
hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, while vision removes us from it.
The Audible Past: Cultural Studies of Sound Reproduction – Jonathan Sterne (As quoted in ‘Against Ambience’ – Seth Kim-Cohen
Will look into reading some more from Jonathan Sterne. His book
Listening to this BBC Documentary on Background Music, talking about Muzak and Furniture Music amongst other things. There is an interview with Brian Eno where he talks about how no composer was addressing the fact nobody was listening intently to the records and they served more as things you put on whilst you are ‘doing other things’
‘Audio Architecture’ – feels like a very loaded phrase. ‘Mood Music’ the new name for Muzak in 2021. It’s a glorified playlist generator with automated brand messages that can be fed through their playlists. Muzak is no longer Muzak, Popular Music is Muzak and which Mood Music, they have various playlist samples on their website including; ‘Classic Rock, Ambrosia (soft rock) and quite notably ‘Revolution’ channel playing 60s rock. ‘Tap into Emotion’ seems like quite a manipulative phrase.
In a blog from 2007, I found a few quotes from the 2007 Muzak site;
The “power” of audio architecture, Muzak‘s website continues, “lies in its subtlety.” These subtle sounds, played incessantly in the background, can “bypass the resistance of the mind and target the receptiveness of the heart.” It is thus almost literally subliminal. “When people are made to feel good in, say, a store, they feel good about that store. They like it,” Muzak claims. “Audio architecture builds a bridge to loyalty. And loyalty is what keeps brands alive.”
Pipedown Campaign – against background music in cafes and bars, run by Julian Lloyd-Webber.
Webber said that background music destroys the power of music. His concern mainly seems to be with classical music being used in these areas, which feels quite elitist to me and this podcast does well to point out that lots of these pieces were written initially for waltz’ and balls for the richest in historic times. What power in that case is lost? The power of music that was meant initially for the rich? One thing it makes me wonder is what then is the power of live music. I am not interested in this preservation of music as a sacred entity but rather our listening habits and whether they have changed with the development of recorded music. One thing is for certain so many different types of music become available to a class of people of whom they were never available before, whether it’s from far reaches of the world or the upper classes. People of importance having quartets play at functions to mostly be ignored as a symbol of cultural standing. If anything does that mean we listen more intently to musicians playing live now? In modern popular music we have lyrics, the artist has more of a voice. It’s interesting how Eno wants to create ambient music, but actually is more in line with the historic listening habits of the upper class – but it raises another question. What is better, to embrace your art as a commercial product that serves as decorative to an environment. Or, to express yourself supposedly free from this and eventually be wound up in this commercialisation. Political music of the past that was meant to lash out at the systemic oppression; punk, reggae, blues et al. All this music can be consumed by the background and commodified in certain environments, like classical music, yacht rock, easy listening that were never set on contesting the status quo. Julian Lloyd-Webber seems mostly concerned with the consecration of elite music that was never anti-capitalist – what I find stranger is this neo-liberal embrace of counter culture as a means to be invulnerable from it.
‘So much of the listening what we do is about having something on in the background’ – the one of the passing thoughts by the presenter in this podcast. ‘Life intervenes in all the glorious ways that life will’.
The ironic thing about Furniture Music, you are more likely to hear most pieces of classical music today in the spaces this music was composed for. Perhaps background music has always existed for those able to live in excess and with the freedom of information that technology and the internet has brought, we have begun to experience this. Also I think another avenue I need to think about bringing in is film and the soundtrack and how are awareness of the soundtrack as a feature in television and radio turns music into something that can centre us in a story. Music never existed in these ‘dead spaces’ until Muzak – but also until film, when a soundtrack might accompany someone in such a space.
Visiting Practitioner Rebecca Lennon
BIO
“An artist based in London, Rebecca Lennon works across media including video, text, performance, sound and music to think about and play with the non-linear shapes and rhythms of the voice, memory and the speaking body. Exhibiting internationally, across contemporary art and experimental music platforms, radio and recently, publishing, Rebecca graduated from the Slade School of Art London MFA in 2010, and is a regular visiting lecturer at universities such as Arts University Bournemouth and Royal College of Art. Recent / upcoming group exhibitions and performances include: Kaunas Film Festival, Lithuania, 2020, Kunstraum, London 2019, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 2021, Cafe Oto, London, 2022, Galeria Duhttps://soundcloud.com/rebecca-lennon-476054999/dumb-2019arte Sequiera, Braga, Portugal, 2021 with solo shows at Southwark Park Galleries, London 2021, Primary, Nottingham, 2020, Almanac, Turin, Italy, 2019 and Matts Gallery, London, 2018. Rebecca featured in ‘On Care, an anthology of artists writing published by MA Bibliotheque in 2020, BBC Late Junction 2019/2020 and on a collection of artist interpretations of scores by writer and artist Salomé Voegelin released on vinyl in 2022.”
The piece Dumb was performed live in 2019 with vocal performers surrounding the audience. The performers where in all black whilst the lights in the room changed. Vocal elements are layered on top of each other as abstract observations or thought, layered and organised through rhythmic editing, creating an non-linear narrative. With her video works, the sounds and images are often bound together. So certain abstract phrases of sound accompany abstract imagery. Which are repeated. Connotations form in the participants mind. Use of coughs and sounds from the mouth used rhythmically also. Clearing of throat etc. These rhythmic interruptions she refers to as ways in which the mind organises or orders our speech. Rebecca is very interested in as she described it invisible violence, talking about Landlordism as this power dynamic where you are basically trapped but there are these friendly overtones. I’m interested in the concept of ’emotional labour’ and situations where for work we effectively have to handle behaviour that on some base human level have an issue with for the sake of continued security. Some friends I know experience this on a personal level but I have mostly experienced this in customer service and think it’s had a very negative effect on how I view myself, I believe I am a conduit of service industry and cannot unlearn this self-effacing. This negation of the self purely a sacrifice for a roof over my head or a steady stream of income. Therefore I find a lot of imagery in Lennon’s work quite powerful. She spoke about how a fisherman will take a photo smiling with a fish they have pulled away from their world. This is a really powerful image as I believe more than half the fish caught and set free die from infection due to the wounds in their mouths. That is a perfect metaphor for the lack of kindness in neo-liberal attitudes. This imagery is used in LIQUIDi
Featuring Annea Lockwood, who we spoke to last year. This vocal sounds remind me of artists like Robert Wyatt and Bjork to some extent as well as vastly different uses of ‘da’ in music. Such as George Kranz and the german band Trio. Even though their context is a lot less narrative driven. There are musical aspects to the work which Lennon claims are not something she is well versed in, stating her artistic beginnings in Film and the editing process. That editing process is very clear in these interesting constructions of thought. The repetitive structure was something she is interested by, and when answering a question related to The Fall she stated the ‘whatever sticks’ type prolificism of Mark E Smith as an influence. Mark E Smith sometimes has a very disjointed vocal delivery, as for his lyrics, they are very esoteric. I can sense a slight influence here. Lennon’s editing style and delivery kind of remind me of Scottish band Life Without Buildings to some degree and their singer, poet Sue Tompkins who repeats phrases over and over again, using that repetition to engage the listening with the phrase or the word. I found a recording but with absolutely no room and thought it was a jarring listen, but this performance adds movement and a space in which Tompkins interacts with, these factors contribute to the power of the performance.
There is more of a narrative to LIQUIDi, but this video is a great demonstration of Rebecca’s use of visual editing almost connected to the sound. So certain sounds have certain visual connotations. Passages of prose connected together through these more rhythmic repetitions expanding on lines from the main narrative.
Radio Research
Researching companies I might try and apply for if I am successful with DPS. I found Reduced Listening, thus this particular show created for BBC4. ‘The End Of The World Has Already Happened”.
Great piece by Anna Peaker featured on the soundtrack.
I really like this particular type of radio production, conversations with clear environments in the background. Most probably recorded on a portable field recorder. The main overdub script is centre of the mix, but with the interview sections having more life in them with the interviewee and interviewer panned slightly to differentiate the sound from the overdub. This subtle spatial change tells people the scene has changed. Sound elements are added in to sort of accentuate parts of dialogue and music and field recording dispersed and curated to sort of aid your engagement with the words.
Another production by Reduced Listening, I am also a fan of Infant Tree productions who do a series for BBC3 Radio called ‘Between The Ears’
Here is a special one from Field Recordist and guest lecturer from last year Jana Winderen
Solaris Clip 1#
The scene I was thinking of using from Solaris is the ‘Levitation Scene’.
I think that the whole 6 minutes clip might be a lot of work considering the detail I would like to put in. So I am thinking that I will choose either the first 3 minutes of the clip or the last 3 minutes. I did initially want to do the sounds of the surface of the planet, which is the latter segment of the clip, but I also wanted to capture the footsteps through the spaceship and entrance into the room. The first 3 minutes has more scope for spatialisation, as the sounds from the ship could be in the back up for the room as he enters the familiar area only for the sounds of the pictures to slowly dominate. I could put placeholder sounds in the dialogue section and I think the sound would be very plain after the chandelier is moved by the candle. I could at that point, bring in the slow alien sounds of the planet only in the build up to it’s reveal at the end of the clip. Also in contention is the landing from space, I think with the water sounds I captured, this could be quite a good one to do as it has scenes of the planet. But also has some kind of extraction fan sounds and wind sounds a minor amount of acheivable foley.
Field Recording: Room Tone
On Tuesday, I took a bunch of recordings around the Sound Arts rooms before close. I took close recodings by getting close up to humming elements in the room with my TASCAM DR 40X. This included; a computer, two radiators and and the water dispensor in the hall. I also took a sound recording of the fire exit which had a great natural reverb and a siren style noise, I thought pitched down that would work well potentially as a spaceship ambience. In the first clip, I have played around with some transitions and I feel like potentially with foot steps under it, this could sound a bit like someone walking through a soundscape. In order it’s a Pitched down radiator, into pitched down fire escape into pitched down radiator + water dispenser. I put high and low pass filters on these which accounted for some of the hiss and changed the points of these filters for each sound to see if it helped sell it as a new space better.
Here are a few more isolated room tones I was messing around with. I would like to keep doing this with animate objects and trying to build up a sound library. I think with the hydrophone recordings I probably have enough to start trying to piece together environment sounds for the ship on Solaris.
Listening back to these, I don’t know if I like the stereo image for atmos and i’m thinking I will experiment with A-B TASCAM DR 40X. Lavaliers might work better or perhaps even the H3 for the spatiality. It’s quite hard to consider what kind of frequency range needs to be captured when I am yet to mix in Surround.
Field Recording: Lewes
I initially planned to go outside of Lewes to Southease, away from towns by the river that runs through Lewes. Unfortunately I had some other things to do in the morning last sunday and a few trains were cancelled, so in fear of recording in the dark I didn’t stray too far down a countryside walk to Southease from Lewes and recorded quite close to the quiant and slightly-unnerving-in-its-posh-ness town. I really should have gone on a weekday in the morning, as I was contending with a lot of family walking traffic. Which often ruined potentially good recording spots and made this recording session slightly more stressful than it needed to be.
For this session I used some AKG DPA’s lent to me by Michael & Rory and a hydrophone.
I was impressed by the versatility of the DPAs, the initial set up was complicated, but I found I was way less likely to ruin a take with the coathanger technique and will probably always use them in this way from now on. Sound Devices interface would’ve made the sounds I captured even better and look forward to trying that in the future. Due to the time I picked, it was hard for me to get anything that I could possibly use in relation to the pond scenes in Solaris so again, when that was of the cards, I concentrated more on capturing specific sound sources, which rendered the DPA’s less useable than the inbuilt DR 40x mics and the hydrophone, also, due to the preamps not being great for input mics, I find the DR-40xs sound usually better in terms of clarity. I think for capturing atmos for a pond scene, which is going to be very quite, I should be using a better pre amp.
Here is a test recording with the lav mics, its not quite useable with the kids playing in the background for Solaris. There are kids in the scene however so maybe I could get away with it. It’s quite noisy, I tried to turn up the gain even higher in the next recording which is very noisy.
I got very close to this stream and hung the lavaliers close by, the gain was too high so the preamps are noisy, whereas in the last recording, the sound was more natural and close to a human ear, I don’t think lavalier’s are as useful in this setting. In future I would use a cardioid microphone on the stream, with potentially multichannel with some lavaliers picking up more of the surround area. My TASCAM does have this multitrack function so might try that in the future.
The best recordings I got from the afternoon were from drainage from the river Ouse.
This Hydrophone recording is very complex and interesting to me. I think this could be useful in sound design as it’s not necessarily a natural running water sound. I have messed around with recording this stream in different formats, including a cardioid right next to it and also tried pitching down and distorting the Hydrophone recording.
I was very happy with the complexity of this multi-channel recording with X-Y TASCAM DR 40X + Mono hydrophone signal and will definitely be playing around with multichannel capture in future.
Pre-warning this last one is louder… Found a very small mechanical water level
This sound would have been MUCH more preferable with the TASCAM DR-40X as it’s a very directional sound – so lesson learnt there. I am drawn to this drone-like mechanical sounds resounding in a ‘nature’. Like the drain pipe I found in my last recording session in Glynde. I think when in doubt. With the multichannel recordings. I can just capture both and thats what I need to start doing. I probably should invest in some sort of stand for my field recorder so I am not holding things constantly during a recording session. I also would like to try these lav mics with a sound devices interface and hear how sensitive they can get – somewhere way more remote and potentially paired with some kind of shotgun microphone for a focal point. I was thinking about EQ in reference to stereo and how it’s best to have less bass in hard panned things for ear-fatigue. In that sense. Perhaps some kind of mono-shotgun picking up the low end of a particular scene might help centre the stereo image.
Experimenting with the coathanger lav microphones. I should have tried a multi-channel recording here also. But it wouldn’t have mattered as at this point in the day lots of families were going for walks and just generally there was no way to avoid kids screaming every 30 seconds. Something to consider for my next session – avoid the weekends as families, not just field recordists like to go on walks too.
Field Recording Trip to Glynde
I forgot to take pictures of my expedition to Gylde aside from this strange church. I ran into a few problems on this particular trip. I discovered on location that the Roland Binaurals were not compatible with my TASCAM DR-40x and that I needed to book out a zoom to use those. I also was not aware of the difference between M-S Stereo and Stereo, so had issues getting the Sennheiser MKH 418 to work. I was really hoping to see how a stereo shotgun would feel in the field, as it would most probably negate a bit of the wind due to it’s narrow hypercardioid pattern. I would like to rent this equipment out and try again soon. This meant I was stuck with the inbuilt microphones on my TASCAM DR-40X, I had also messed up the settings so play back was distorting my signal. Luckily my field recorder is fine and equipment hadn’t broken in my care…. but unfortunately, when I had noticed my TASCAM wasn’t sounding correct, I had purposefully tried to find sounds that worked within that distorted sound, gravel scuffs, car noises and general layered sounds that could be effected in ways that might not make it obvious what the source is. At this point I had a bit of a realisation that these kinds of sounds of nature might be able to work with Solaris, and it made a lot of sense in the meanings in that film, that the sounds of the planet would be, like every other experience of it, a foray into ones own subconscious. This has made me decide on picking a later scene in the film with the alien planet, so I can concentrate mainly on atmos, as that seems to have become my priority with my interest in field recording taking a prominent part of this assignment.
I did a sound walk with my (seemingly broken) TASCAM and put my TASCAM to the end of a funnel drain half way down a path up a hill. This sound had a very interesting resonance, the plastic tubing picking up these running water sounds from underground.
I started playing around with this effect, thinking about whether it could be a sound from Solaris’ alien planet, or maybe from the spaceship itself.
Next I played around with pitching down the sound. The deeper sounds didn’t work so well with the effects so I removed them and just tried to heavily compress in order to bring out some bass and swell to the sound.
and finally, I tried it even lower.
I’m not sure if I will end up using these for anything but the last one feels like it could be almost meditative if I had a longer recording. In future recording sessions and I am going to make sure if there is a sound like this I like I capture it immediately for as long as I can before I am interrupted by an external source. As usually, some movement will happen, like a plane overhead, or a siren or obnoxious sports car to interrupt. Shortly after I recorded this, the drain had stopped making sound. A shotgun might have worked better for this, by the DR 40x still has a lot of directionality and I personally find that maybe these field recorders most useful skill is getting right up close to a sound source or drone, as with my other recordings I got today, there is interference from me holding it with a stick adaptor I bought online (which in no way acts as a shock mount). The Sennheiser 418 Shotgun might’ve got better recordings but I have been finding my inputs a little noisy and am thinking of bringing a proper Sound Devices one in tandem with the 418 the next time I take it out for a spin.
Birds at Glynde Station, the gain was very low on this recording as with most in built recordings. It might still be salvageable, the bird song is very nice before it was interrupted by a passing train and a siren shortly before this clip.
Here is some sound for effect I recorded, thinking about the distinct sound the scuffs could make, which with my slightly buggy field recorder at the time sounded very out of phase and sort of 70s sci-fi. I might collage with some kind of anti-phase effect and see if I can make it sound slightly unhuman but still traceable to the audience.
A ticket booth machine at Glynde which I closely mic’d as a potential room tone. Will experiment with pitch to see if it could be remotely sci-fi.
Milo was talking about Jurassic Park sounds and the use of reverse on top of the original sound. I had a very one way panned traffic recording and tried out what this sounded reversed. Traffic not having an instantaneous attack or cut off doesn’t really lend itself to reversing, but balancing out the pan is slightly interesting. Not sure its of use though. Wondering if Reversing could be used subtly as a textural tool.
Not the most profitable in terms of sound capture but have learnt a few crucial things. I need to find a way to put my TASCAM DR 40X down as to not pick up the sounds of my hands twitching whilst still being able to listen in and not produce any noise. (I found at one point the sounds of my shoes straining from me squatting ruined a take by a pond….) So valuable insights for my next session. Also just generally picking the right time of day. Early and not the weekend is the best time for avoiding activity and giving yourself longer amounts audio to edit with.
Aural Cultures: Podcast Research.
I listened to Sounding Out, Sound Matters and Crucial Listening, each podcast was very different in style and approach. Sounding Out had quite an academic tone and structured essay layout. Sound Matters was a personally led documentary about someone’s attachment to the sound of a lake. Crucial Listening casual interview style.
Here is the bio for the Sound Matter’s Podcast I listened to called ‘The Sound Of The River’.
"This is the story of a river. Not just any river, but a very special river. One that has been given the same legal status as a living, breathing human being. In this episode of Bang & Olufsen’s Sound Matters podcast we meet the documentary film and audio maker, Rikke Hout, and travel down the Whanganui River in New Zealand. The Whanganui is one of the longest rivers in the country, and in 2017 was given the same legal identity as a person due to its importance to the region’s indigenous Māori people. Sit back, immerse yourself in sound, and float downstream into nature come alive."
In reference to Nichol’s Documentary modes, this one was sort of participatory and expository, a personal relationship to the history of a river and it’s connection to the presenter and their roots.
Sounding Out seems like a very diverse platform, showcasing quite surreal academic pieces mixed between field recordings and sounds to Live soundwalks around NYC. Their blog is a great reference point to lots of Podcasts which I will try to take a look at more.
Crucial Listening seems like a useful place to find artists to write about for University, the one I listened to talking about Annea Lockwood who we had the privileged to have as a visiting lecturer last year.