This is the first post towards my practical element explaining where I currently stand with this second section. I initially and still am doing research towards my essay which I have written 2000 words. I have established after a tutorial that perhaps it’s a vague essay speaking about a lot of field recording practices. I should instead focus on the two practices that really talk to me.
There has been a lot of research on my practical element which I wish to discuss here. Initially when being told about the two-part hand in I decided that field recordings were a practice I was into a lot, the aural cultures hand in my audio paper spoke around field recordings and sound designing cities and the possibilities that lay within this. I thought it would be interesting to research field recording practice and then let the essay dictate the practical element. I am now finding myself at a crossroads where I feel they should grow together instead of one dictating the other.
My initial ideas came from reading In The Field The Art of Field Recording and reading about all the varied practices amongst these practitioners. One that stood out the most was Annea Lockwood and the interview curated by Cathy Lane. She speaks on her project A Sound Map Of the Hudson River where she travelled along this river recording the river and all its beauty. I then listened to her work on youtube and I was fascinated by the differences in the river and the context explained by her. I was also interested in her use of equipment, something I hadn’t really thought about. I have been using Sound Devices Mix Pre 10 recorder and high tech microphones such as the Sennheiser 416 from the university for my own recordings.
I typically use more vintage or analogue equipment for my own practice in music outside of university and when Annea spoke about her using an Uher tape machine and wishing for a Nagra tape machine, which I’d used in the composition lab and heard many others using it for the first field recordings in films. I was curious about the use of whether analogue equipment or obsolete equipment is still relevant in this day and age. Annea spoke on using a Nakamichi Cassette deck and a Sony TCD5M. So I wanted to carry on my research into obsolete/vintage field recorders and what they offered.