The Sound Collector

We're back. It's only been a couple of years. More articles, sounds and video are coming soon.

Why slience is important

Silence. A thing most people don't notice. But a thing that is essential in most of art - if not all art.

The piece Contours of Silence by Hildegaard Westerkamp tells a story between speech, noise and silence. In the moments of silence I listen even more carefully. My mind shows me the story in moments of silence. When noise appears my mind focuses on the noise and thereby the noise shows the way. Noise removes the sonic subjectivity which appears in moments of silence.
   Sonic subjectivity or the silent 'I' exists in silence. It brings me or the 'I' in the middle of the picture because now my own sounds is part of the piece and that's what makes silence important.

If you want to listen to Contours of Silence then go here: http://www.fondosonm.com/index.php?option=com_muscol&view=song&id=2973&Itemid=219&lang=en (You might have to register - but it's worth it)

The Last Quiet Places

Gordon Hempton says that silence is an endangered species. He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise. The Earth, as he knows it, is a "solar-powered jukebox." Quiet is a "think tank of the soul." We take in the world through his ears.

This new podcast contains recordings of some amazing places around the world.  Personally I really enjoy the recording of Rialto Beach. They call it the world's largest violin.

Dig into this series of podcasts right here: http://www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/4557

The Primer: Field Recordings

An occasional series in which we offer a beginner’s guide to the must-have recordings of some of our favourite musicians (and music). This month, Richard Henderson enters the preternatural realm of field recordings.

Read it here: http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/1053/

Sound of India

The website Free Music Archive shares a lot of great music. The music is licensed under a Creative Commons license which means that it can be shared between people. There's a lot of different genres on the site, but recently they made a mix of Indian field recordings available.


The field recordings are made by Bruce Miller and he says:

The music here was recorded by myself between mid-Aug./mid-Oct. 2008 with a mini-disc player and a Sony multi-directional stereo mic. The areas covered are: Assame (mostly Guwahati) in the country's overlooked NE, Darjeeling, Varanassi and 4 places in Rajasthan (Udaipur, Jodphur, Pushkar and most importantly, Jaisalmer, in the region's western desert). 

I'm not an ethno-musicologist, but have been fanatical about folk music from all over the world since I first heard a recording of Burundian drummers when I was about 17 ( I then got to see such a troup perform while living in Morocco in the late 90's). I've tried to snag a few examples of local music in many places I've traveled, but India was almost overwhelming, and performers were absolutely comfortable with an obvious tourist/foreigner waving a microphone, even when I was running down the street chasing after a parade band, as I did on tracks 21 (Pushkar) & parts of the collage I made on track 24 (Varanassi). It was always some god or other's birthday, or there was some other reason to celebrate, which meant music flowed through the streets. In Jaisalmer, there was a duo who sang and beat drums every morning at sunrise as they strolled the town. In Pushkar, horn and drum bands wandered through the less tourist-soaked sections and played songs for new-born babies (5, 28, 36). Temple bells and sanskrit chanting permeated Varanassi's ghats at dawn and again well after dark. Track 1 is a collage I made of sounds that happen every single morning at the Assi Ghat.Track 24 has some more examples of this as well.

In Darjeeling, Nepalese musicians played when it wasn't raining (it was still the tale end of Monsoon season when my girlfriend, Liz, and I were there), and there are a few examples here (2, 11, 43).  But to push things into any sort of perspective, it was a recording I snagged from a youtube video (48) that kicked this off. The clip showed two men, one on a hand drum and one on a dotora (a small, banjo-like instrument played by Prasanta Chandary on 5 tracks with his sister, whose name I've forgotten), and it was dropping this on an ipod and then playing it for an Engineering Professor/Assamese traditional music enthusiast at Guwahati's IIT, Arup Sarna, that led me to such sounds. He initially called together a Professional Assamese folk ensemble (heard on tracks 47, 49-53) to play a private concert for Liz and myself. I have video of them as well. Since Prasanta was in this band, the event naturally led to us visiting his home where the tunes with his sister were recorded. These are, as far as I know, incredibly old Assamese folk tunes, and they are easily the highlight of this entire set of recordings. Track 46 is from a cultural program put on at the IIT (other examples of this type of folk song have been recorded in the field by Rolf Killius, an ethnomusicologist who has documented lots of ethnic minority music all over India, including the remote North East regions, of which Assame is one. http://sounds.bl.uk/Browse.aspx?category=World-and-traditional-music&collection=Music-from-India&browseby=Browse+by+location&choice=Mizoram is a link to his collection)

Western Rajasthan proved to be the hotbed of easy to find street performance. But before Liz and I made it to Jaisalmer, we traveled all the way south to Udaipur. On the train I recorded the women on track 40, who had been traveling all the way from Calcutta to see their guru. In Udaipur we met street musician, busker and hustler Kishna, of the bhopa caste. He and his brother played ravannatah's, homemade bowed stringed instruments. Anyone who has ever been a western tourist in Rajasthan has no doubt been accosted by these folks, sawing away and aggressively attempting to sell off an instrument or jewelry. They're especially intense at the entrance to the Jaisalmer fort. Yet, when Liz and I met Kishna, we knew none of that. Here was the best ravannatah player we would ever hear (track 17, though I have several more examples of him). I spent a week hanging out with him, learning, and of course buying a Ravannatah.  As it turned out, his sister Santos and her husband, Hari worked the Jaisalmer fort, so we managed to avoid the tourist hustle and get invited to dinner at their place in Jaisalmer, where I recorded tracks 3, 27 and 35. Santos was a 35 year old grandmother and Hari had a giant trunk full of instruments he'd made for sale; these were uneducated victims of India's immense, impoverished lower caste system, so one can hardly blame them for hustling tourists. What would you do?

The fort Kamaycha player, whose picture is on this page, was another story altogether. He wanted nothing from us and let me know I could do whatever I wanted with his recordings. I've heard 5 kamaycha players and seen two (the player by Jaisalmer's lake was the other) but I think this guy, whose name is Dappu Ji Mirasi, rules. I recorded about an hour of him and have included a few tracks of his ancient, trance-inducing musical generosity here.

There are other gems: street drummers in Varanassi (track 44, which has a few seconds of a group of men laying bricks in Agra tacked onto the end of the track), the tabla & sitar duo recorded in a Varanassi music shop, the professional band heard on track 41 in a remote village outside of Udaipur as part of an all-night celebration, the locust near the border with Bangladesh heard on track 4 after Prasanta's 4-string banjo improv, various temples alll over the country, the Morchang (jaw harp) player in Jaisalmer who also worked as a puppeteer ( I have a few recordings of them also), etc. 

Anyone with a recording device could have done much of what I did here; India gets pounded by tourists constantly and no doubt there is an ever-increasing amount of youtube footage of the very things I documented. I rarely bothered with names, which no good field researcher would ever do, but I had no plan other than to see what I could hear, and let that lead myself and Liz, who was awfully nice to go along with any whim my ears allowed, wherever it might. India is a spectacular, confounding, overwhelming, constantly morphing place. I suspect I'll go back and do this all over again.

- Bruce Miller 

Grouper - Violet Replacement

Some weeks ago I was at a Grouper concert. She was playing her Violet Replacement tour which was quite different than her usual shows. Here's what the tour description was:

Grouper unveils a haunting new performance entitled 'Violet Replacement' comprised of tape loops, field recordings and submerged atmospherics presented in a set of naturally resonant and specially customised locations.

Grouper's live shows are rare occurrences and are always in tune with the architecture and acoustics of a space. For this tour she performs a new collection of tape collages derived from a commission for New York's Issue Project Room. Field recordings, Wurlitzer loops and vocal tracks from her archives are mixed, spliced and processed live from an array of dictaphones and tape players.

We were all sitting right in front of her. Looking at her. Listening to the tape loops over and over again. 

She made a limited CD for this tour. Violet Replacement part 1 & 2 and I was able to get part 1. It consist of just about 30 minutes of field recordings with the purpose of making you sleep. 

Listen to part 1 here.
Listen to part 2 here.

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.