Using field recordings

Time for another obvious statement: field recordings are recordings made in the field. What is this field? Basically any place outside of a recording studio. The field recorder can simply be your smartphone or any other portable audio recorder. As a popular maxim among field recordists goes: the best recorder in the world is always the one you have with you. Meaning that when you are out in the world and you hear something truly unique by all means record it with your phone if that is what you have at the moment, if the alternative is the sound being gone after you have made a round trip to pick up a fancier recording kit from your home or studio. Also with the abundance of affordable sound technology available to us there are fortunately quite some options to ‘clean up’ messy audio and make something usable.

Field recordings have both advantages and disadvantages when compared to studio recordings or designed soundscapes. Imagine something as seemingly simple as a busy city street. If you go there and listen closely to every single sound you will notice there is a lot going on at once: cars, bicycles, people walking, perhaps suitcases rolling, fragments of phone calls, a general rumble from the rest of the city, street vendors, chatter of children, a dog barking, construction works, et cetera, et cetera. To construct a believable soundscape with all these elements from scratch would be a huge amount of work and might still not be as good as when you simply go there and record the whole thing.

On the other side this whole is also the weak spot of a field recording: say you want to record a specific pigeon coo. You can take your field recorder and head to the fish & chips stand where there are always a lot of pigeons around. But in a setting like that you can’t ever record just this coo, you will also always record what else is going on. In the outside world that can be a lot and it’s hardly realistic to silence all traffic, all kitchen equipment in the fish and chips stand and all weather conditions for a moment so you can have this pigeon coo on command and get your perfect take.

Compare it to a photograph where you can take a close up if you are interested in a specific thing, but when photographing this pigeon in the wild you can’t possibly have only the pigeon in your frame and no background, unless you zoom in so far that you don’t have the whole bird anymore.

Of course you can edit field recordings to highlight the interesting parts or the parts that are most relevant to your story. And like with a photo there are digital tools that can help with this process. But field recording in general works best for recording an entire soundscape, or to get sounds whose source you simply can’t drag into a studio.

Field recordists might sometimes use very specific microphones to get the sounds they want. For example so called shotguns which are directional microphones, but optimised for much larger distances than you might ever need inside a recording studio. Their main field of use is film, where a specific shot might make it impossible for a microphone to get close to the action without being visible on camera. But this technology can also come in handy when recording in nature and trying to get the sound of for example an animal that might be scared away by the recordist getting too close.

Other specific microphone types might include contact microphones, hydrophones or geophones. As you most probably know, sound as us humans perceive it consists of vibrations of the air. The three types of microphones just mentioned can pick up vibrations that are not carried by air but by a solid material (contact microphones) or water (hydrophones). Geophones are contact microphones optimised for very low frequencies which you might pick up from the earth or other big solid entities, like a seismograph does but translating it into sound instead of a purely graphical representation.

There are also microphones which can record extremely high frequencies, well above our human hearing range. Of course a first intuitive question might be why to record something you couldn’t even hear when playing it back. But when you lower the pitch of these recordings to a range within the audible spectrum you suddenly get an idea of for example the noises with which bats communicate.

Another specific type of microphone used in field recording is the binaural microphone. Binaural literally means ‘two ears’ so it might not surprise you that it is a stereo microphone technique. But where a ‘normal’ stereo microphone is essentially two microphones, with a certain distance in between them and at a certain angle, the binaural microphone adds a separation between the two. The reasoning behind this is that our own human hearing is also very much coloured by the physical separation (our head) between our two microphones (our ears). The so-called Head Related Transfer Function is a mathematical description of the effect this has on the way we perceive soundfields. Binaural microphones roughly come in two versions: dummy heads (or at least dummy ears) with microphones mounted in them, or tiny microphones that the recordist is supposed to wear in their own ears. In both cases the results can be extremely realistic in terms of where we perceive sounds to emit from. The only catch being that the playback also needs to happen on headphones. A binaurally recorded sound played back on speakers will still make sense, but you lose the high quality of spatialisation that you get when playing back on headphones. Luckily for us soundwalks on the Echoes platform are almost always listened to with headphones. Which makes it a very interesting recording format to work in.

Field recording might feel like a very documentary process, and in a way it is. But using field recordings ‘as is’ is only a small part of what you can do with them. Audio processing like (extreme) time stretching, equalising, compression and things like reverb and creative delays can turn your recordings into something else entirely. Of course once you get to the more extreme forms of sound manipulation you might wonder how much it matters what the source recording was. On a sonic level you will find that real world recordings often contain so many organic details that there is still a big texture difference with completely synthesised sound. And even if on a sonic level the difference between recorded and synthesised becomes muddy it might be important to you as a creator that for example all your sounds were sourced from the area where your walk takes place.

Which brings us to another important aspect of using field recordings in a soundwalk: your soundwalk is also out in the field. When your walk for example takes the audience through a city park it’s of course possible to use a field recording of a park as the sonic background to that section. If people are using noise-cancelling headphones or have the sound level particularly high this might simply replace the existing, real world soundscape. If the audience is expected to have regular earphones there is a big chance your soundscape will blend with whatever comes in from the outside world. In that case you might consider not using the park soundscape but rather adding for example specific detailed sounds that blend in with the existing soundscape. Or both. Even if the location is a park but you want the soundscape to be something very different it’s important to consider the interaction between the sound in the outside world and the sound you use in your walk.

An important lesson to learn from field recording is that soundscapes tend to have different planes. To again use the photography analogy those could be called far, medium and close. Listening to field recordings, or listening to the world through your field recording microphones, might give you a good sense of how these function. When trying to replicate a soundscape from scratch you will notice that having a few isolated sounds as you might hear in a café are not enough to suggest a real world café situation, however you space them. Having a constant in the background, like the din of people chatting, might suddenly glue the whole thing together. When you refine it further you will most probably also find that foreground and background are simply not enough and that a middle ground is also needed for a coherent whole.

When looking further into field recording you will find that several people make a similar distinction in different terms. Acclaimed field recordist Chris Watson for example distinguishes atmosphere, habitat and species- which makes sense if you consider that a lot of what he records are animals and nature. R. Murray Schafer breaks the soundscape down into keynote sounds, signal sounds and sound marks. Which are not literally three levels of zooming in or out of a soundscape, but make a similar distinction between foreground and background. Even when your soundscape is not intended to be realistic you can use this awareness to create something that is layered and literally gives a sense of depth of field.