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"Soundwalk Editions features artists and composers who use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work. By recording sounds outside of the conventional studio you are in the act field recording, audibly engaged with ears that gradually refine a sonic experience, like the eye looking through a camera lens. Field recording is often synonymous with phonography, in which sound takes the place of image in documenting a location, physical act, or a natural occurrence. Drawing attention to the quality and experiential nature that can exist in the soundscapes of our environment, these works allow the viewer to have an intimate experience with the various compositional approaches practiced by each individual artist. Through listening to these recordings we have the opportunity to become aware of the various dialects that can exist in the language of field recording compositions."

"Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind's eye - projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listeners' mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the 60s and 70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from my own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that I have collected over the past twenty years."

"The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."

"Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted."

"First Sounds strives to make humanity's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time. Humanity's earliest sound recordings constitute a rich sonic heritage of inestimable value to historians of technology, media, and expressive culture. They are among the rarest and least accessible recordings in our audio legacy. When held by institutions for which they are not the primary focus, many go unrecognized by their curators as sound recordings. And even when correctly catalogued, they commonly remain unpreserved and inaccessible due to a lack of funding or expertise."

"Dr. William W.H. 'Bill' Gunn (1913-1984) was a field recordist, conservationist and early populariser of nature sounds, recording landscapes in the Galapagos Islands, East Africa, Sri Lanka and locations across Canada including its Far North. A key technique in his practice and teaching was sound microscopy-slowing down the playback of his recordings to reveal details unable to be perceived at full speed. This presentation considers Gunn's slowing in relation to a range of contemporaneous practices of slowing (in speech therapy, music composition, etc.) as well as the context of his field and the 'slow violence' of ecological devastation. As listeners, we meditate on the wonder elicited from Gunn's human audience but also the absences, extractions and exclusions entwined with Gunn's exploration of musical microcosms."

"Sonic Terrain is dedicated to field recording: Audio and sound recording not inside the studio environment, but in the outside world around us. We encourage not just hearing the world around you, but to listening to it, and recording it, for reflection, relaxation, art, science, or entertainment."

"Historical overview of experiments with record players / records - or Scratches from Second-Hand Technology"

Bu Kim Cascone "With the advent of cheap digital recording gear, many have taken to recording their environments and presenting it as sound art. Without considering how technology leaches the soul of an environment, much of today's field recording based sound art will ultimately fail to capture the holistic nuance and subtleties found in nature. What this essay calls for is a resurrection and development of the post-digital aesthetic in the form of "Transcendigitalism.""

Centuries of Sound is an attempt to produce a set of mixes for every year of recorded sound. Starting in 1860, a mix will be posted every month until we catch up with the present day. So far we are still in the very early days, where a very limited selection of recordings are available, but as we get into the 20th century I hope to include the widest possible spread, both in terms of geography and genre. This will mean that experts will be required. If you are interested in putting yourself forwards as an expert on Rembetika, early microtonal recordings, French political speeches, Tagore songs or anything else, then please do drop me a line at centuriesofsoundmail at gmail.

"The world of "field recordings" is cinéma vérité for the ear: the sounds of natural phenomenon, occasionally from far-flung places, documenting the unreachable, the unexpected and the heretofore inaudible. Listening to these recordings of chattering animals, bustling ecosystems and roaring weather systems can be an experience that blurs the boundaries of music and chance, documentary and art, new age and noise, the real and the imaginary."

"Intro from Jeff Towne: A common dilemma for independent producers is how to record professional-sounding narration outside of a studio. Building a sound booth means major construction: It's expensive, takes up space, and can be impractical for renters and those in a small homes. Are there affordable alternatives? Independent producer Yowei Shaw has tried a few options, and she's found a good solution for recording her voice tracks at home."

"Ultrafield, Fieldwork for the 16 channel Ambisonic instalation, MOMA. August 2013 Recordings for the project Ultrafield has been done in several locations, like Kaliningrad in Russia, the Göta river near Gøteborg, in Madeira, Portugal, Oslo, Ranvika by Larvik, in the Molde fjord, Istanbul, London and New York both under water, in air and of ultrasound made by bats. Additional recordings specifically for the piece, recorded at sites near Oslo:"

"Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented sound recording 20 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Sound had been invisible and transient since the beginning of time. Scott's phonautograph recorded it and made it both visible and perm­anent. It was a technological breakthrough, ahead of its time. He did not intend for his phon­autograms to be played back; that concept was another 20 years away."

"Some of the most challenging, rewarding, and fun sounds to record are those within the vast spectrum of fluids. Wet, sticky, viscous, mushy; the tactful use of fluid sounds can reinforce the realism and impact of a scene, or just be the punchline of a joke. In order to effectively communicate an idea to an audience, there are a few challenges in recording fluids to consider before dipping your toes in. While most of these considerations are technical in application, they all serve to realize an idea and bolster the narrative. For live-action projects, capturing the complexity of fluid sounds on location can often range from impractical to impossible, which is where foley steps in."

"CAMPBIENT is an annual sound art residency that brings together 22 people for 44 hours to conceptualize, produce, and record two sound art compositions in a natural setting. Participants are randomly split into two groups, each responsible for one side of the record, with the only caveat being that a contiguous field recording base track is audible throughout the piece. "

The Highline is an elevated park, extending, at the time of this recording, from 13th Street to around 30th Street on the west side of Manhattan. I had chosen the Highline for recording because of the multi-dimensional sonic perspective it provides, with sound coming at you from below, from front and back, and above. My plan was to use the sounds in a composition called 'Elevated City', set to premiere as part of a World Listening Day event at New York University, July 18th.

"framework began broadcasting in june, 2002 on the newly reformed resonance 104.4fm in london. the show now airs on 5 radio stations around the world, with more to follow soon, and streams and podcasts here on it's own website. framework is consecrated to field-recording and it's use in composition, and began broadcasting at a time when a new community of sound artists with a special interest in found sound was developing, a community spread across the world that, thanks to the internet, was no longer limited to a specific geography. framework sees itself as an outlet for this ever-growing and developing community, a folk-tool in a new folk movement, a community driven exchange point for creators and listeners alike. framework's goal is to present not only the extremely diverse sound environments of our world, but also the extremely diverse work that is being produced by the artists who choose to use these environments as their sonic sources. we hope to ask this question: is 'field-recording' a style, or a genre, or is it in fact as uncontrollable and undefinable an instrument or tool as any, that may be interpreted, manipulated, and appropriated by anyone with a microphone and an idea? these works are its definition, and not vice versa."

Great article about field recording and the ways that it can go wrong (and right!)