Since going on my last field recording trip, I’ve been thinking how best to narrate my aural paper. I quite like the idea of situating myself within the soundscape as I read my script, bringing an element of embodied experience to the process of dissemination. This has been inspired by a few different practitioners, whose work I’ve listened to lately. Antoine Bertin, in one episode from his aural series ‘The Edge Of The Forest’, in which he weaves together field recordings and sonifications of data collected around the world, walks through the Maquis of the Corsican mountains while describing his surroundings to us. This immediate transportation of our senses feels somehow shared and more intimate… It feels as if he is addressing me directly… And at times it feels that we are somehow eavesdropping on a personal moment of reflection/ experience. Sharing the soundscape with Antoine’s past self, I don’t feel alone and the interaction feels more honest as opposed to the controlled aspect of recording voiceovers in post. This approach to narration is also seen in ‘The Sounds Of Life’ Podcast that I blogged about previously, where we are connected to the speaker through the sound of his footsteps in the snow and his following description of the environment.
Exploring this methodology of field recording further I’ve now read some of Hildegard Westerkamp’s work. Her experimentation with radio as an artistic medium led to her radio show ‘Soundwalking’. For one hour each Sunday afternoon during the years 1978-79, she broadcasted soundscapes of Vancouver into people’s homes. She called it “radio that listens”. A radio with a phenomenological approach to broadcasting, reminiscent of Pierre Schaefers suggestions in his article Radical Radio. “What I am urging is a phenomenological approach to broadcasting to replace the humanistic. …Let the phenomena of the world speak for themselves, in their own voice, in their own time (p. 142).” Her aim here was to evoke new meanings of real life soundscapes through environmental listening on radio. She would speak live from the location of each recording, directly to the listeners, her voice collaborating with the acoustic quality of her immediate environment to reveal their combined unique sonic character.
Thinking back to the article ‘Idiosyncrasy as Method’, this, to me, seems a prime example of one’s expanded sensibilities and idiosyncrasies leading their methodologies. Her mode of broadcasting encourages us to “listen through it to the world” as opposed to silencing us. It is anti-hegemonic by nature and gives both listener and creator a newfound autonomy and awareness. By embracing her very own “epistemic continuum of practices, senses, substances, concepts” she challenged an implicitly underlying hierarchy of the senses.
The contextual basis from which she designated her “microphone ears” at any given point serves as inspiration for my next field recording trip. The “moving microphone” seems most relevant to this blog, although I will continue to explore my environment using the “stationary” and “searching microphone.”
Bibliography
“Hildegard Westerkamp.” Hildegard Westerkamp, 2015, www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/writings/?post_id=74&title=the-microphone-ear:-field-recording-the-soundscape. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
“Idiosyncrasy as Method.” SEISMOGRAF.ORG, 2016, seismograf.org/fokus/fluid-sounds/idiosyncracy-as-method. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
_Schafer, R. Murray. “Radical Radio” in Voices of Tyranny, Temples of Silence, Arcana Editions, 1993.