I’ve written a rough first draft introduction that will definitely change, i wanted to write this as when i stated a few posts earlier. I really want the essay to feed into my practical element and i find the more i reflect on it the more i can create ideas for my sound piece.
Historically our way of understanding our environment and the issues in our society have been largely through sight, facts and statistics. Some scholars have even gone on to say our society is ocular-centric. The Sound Arts field is constantly pushing the ideas that sound and listening is critical to understanding our environment from a different perspective. “Our ears don’t have eyelids” An idea spoken by “insert name here” that unlike sight we are constantly processing sound without at times being aware. Our ears are always waiting for cues to respond to. Field recording as a practice has also largely increased throughout the years, where as in the past recording outside of a studio context was bulky, heavy, and very inconvenient with equipment such as the Nagra tape reel to reel machine it wasn’t viable for the common person to afford such equipment as it was terribly expensive. This made the privilege of recording very high and people didn’t have a lot of access to them. Moving on towards the modern day, 2022. We now have phones that can record better than the past equipment could, longer battery life on our recorders, even new equipment such as Sound devices mix pre 6 and Zoom F8N that now record up to 32 bit 192khz means that there is huge accessibility for recordings. This has meant many sound artists now use this for capturing audio to understand our environment, for political messages, to understand the ecology of our environments and other aspects. This essay will begin by speaking on the idea of why field recordings are even important? How is listening different to other senses and why is worth using our ears to understand our environment separately and combined with other senses. Then it will lead into Sound walks / Sound mapping, speaking on how artists use field recordings as a way of situating themselves in their environments, how sound walks and mapping can help us understand and learn from environments when we are just able to listen to, what are the strengths and weaknesses? Further more an analysis of Red a political group who uses field recordings to expose political issues within our society facing discrimination, racism and sexism and how sound can expose that. Chapter four will focus on science and how we can use field recordings as a tool to learn, with equipment such as the hydrophone. Chapter five ecological sound arts and field recording uses in this field. And finally chapter six sonic journalism. Then this essay will conclude on why field recording practices are important for us to have a different perspective on our environment