What is field recordings?

What is field recordings? 

Basically field recordings is a term. A term for an audio recording produced outside a recording studio. But as you might have guessed, it's so much more than that. It can be divided in two categories: Phonography and ethnomusicology. 

Phonography is the art of recording the sounds of nature. The reason it's called phonography is to show the similarities to the photography. It's a sound photography of nature. It was originally developed a research tool in the field and foley work for film. Since then technology has developed and recording equipment became more easy to carry around and the sound was of a better quality. More people now had the chance of recording in the field and they did. Since then phonography has been an artform in itself. 

In the 1970's both processed and natural phonographic records became popular with the Enviroments series as a breakthrough.  

Ethnomusicology is defined as the study of social and cultural aspects of music and dance in local and global context. It is often considered as anthropological or sociological because it studies all music as human social and cultural phenomenon. 

In this picture ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore is recording Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief for the Bureau of American Ethnology (1916). This use of ethnomusicology is often used in field recordings. 

However, field recordings consist of many other things than phonography and ethnomusicology. It also refers to simple monarual or stereo recordings taken of musicians in familiar and casual surroundings. And maybe the most important: the combination of all of this. 

If we continue looking at field recordings as a research tool we have to take a look at bioacoustics. 

Bioacoustics is a science that combines biology and acoustics. It started in the 1920's as a research tool for recording insects. Later used for recording plants, birds and life underwater. Especially the bird recording is very present in field recordings these days. Better know as biomusicology. 

Biomusicology is the study of music from a biological point of view. This term is first used much later than bioacoustics - in the 1990's. It believes that music is an aspect of the behavior of the human and possibly other species.

Listen to bioacoustic recording of the Tennessee Warbler here.

The mix of these terms gives us a lot of beautiful field recordings with animal sounds.

The use of field recordings

Field recordings is used in avant-garde, musique concrète, experimental, and more recently ambient. Artists like Chris Watson, Geir Jessen and Jacob Kirkegaard are great field recording artists. Even NASA has released some great Voyager-recordings. 

The use of field recordings is also quite common in radio documentaries. Often used as background sounds and as a non-fiction effect. 

Please, explore the word of field recordings. When you get it - it's amazing. If you use Spotify there's a great playlist here.