Field recordings are going to be central to my piece. My encroachment sonics concept means I will be looking to record in private spaces, unencumbered by the public, shared sonosphere. I want to be able to record guttural, bodily sounds that occur in little nooks and crannies of nature. I’m looking at using contact mics or hydrophones to delve into these kinds of spaces. I watched a talk by eminent field recordist Jez Riley-French, Audible Silence, where he details some of his work and the nature of contemporary listening as a practice. He presents a four-day recording of the inside of a beehive, and explains that his methodology for undertaking this work was to listen solely to this for the entire duration. He described the four-day experience as “empowering”, because he began to appreciate the naturally symphonic qualities of the beehive, and treated the sound as a natural composition in itself. This is a valuable tool for me going forward. When choosing sound sources to record, I don’t want to select things merely based on one particularly exciting or stimulating timbre, or one moment within the recording that sounds good. I want to choose sound sources that have a prolonged, sonically holistic quality. I will endeavour to understand my field recordings as compositions within themselves, not spoils of salvage anthropology to mindlessly manipulate and process. Riley-French notes that for years now, sound sources in music have been so compressed for palatability that the human ear has adapted to never hearing the full, rich, dynamic range of the sound. He argues that humans have almost developed an aural laziness, or are sonically out-of-shape. In this vein, I will carefully evaluate what processing to do on my sound sources. I want to compress sounds for certain aesthetic reasons, to achieve a fuller, warmer and fatter sound, but Riley-French has taught me to be careful not to remove huge and important parts of the naturally occurring dynamic range within sound sources.
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