field recording
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Running Music
(Listening on headphones recommended.) Continue reading
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How Many Words Is A Sound Recording Worth?
“Seeing is believing, but hearing is hearsay” — Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies (2011) Like a lot of people, I’m a fan of Instamatic, a smartphone photo app, because it makes me feel like a skilled photographer. The app is essentially photo editing software that allows you to quickly–really quickly, with the tap of a virtual Continue reading
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On Damon Albarn’s DRC Music Collaboration
It wasn’t all that long ago that indigenous, folk, popular, and art musics from Africa, Asia, South America, the South Pacific, the Caribbean–heck from most anywhere outside of North America and Western Europe–were hard to come by, relegated to the “international” or “world music” bins at your local record store. Then, in the late 1980s, Continue reading
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On Making Music Tangible
“How physical is music?” asks Clive Bell at the outset of a recent article in Wire magazine on the English musician Richard Skelton. Part of what makes Skelton unique is his approach to trying to make music making a more physical thing than its evanescent sounds might suggest. Thus, the composer-musician embraces a unique recording process: he Continue reading
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On Music From Saharan Cellphones
I recently came across some interesting field recordings assembled by Christopher Kirkley, a music blogger who writes at sahelsounds.com. Kirkley’s blog is about sound and music and his research interests include making recordings in the Sahel region of Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal. The recordings in question are compiled on two releases, Music From Saharan Cellphones, Continue reading
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Digging4Gold: Record Collecting or Pilfered Music?
Imagine for a moment that you are an explorer traveling to West Africa in search of new soundworlds to capture and bring with you back home. You’ve come equipped with a recording device and a mind open to cultural difference; in fact, you’re open to being changed by your encounters abroad “in the field”, as an anthropologist would call Continue reading
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Sounds Want To Be Free: Freesound
Freesound (www.freesound.org) is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Sampling Plus-licensed sounds. At freesound, anyone can upload or download sounds. What kinds of sounds are here? You name it: environmental sound field recordings (wind, rain, ice cracking), industrial and mechanical sounds, human voices, sound effects, digitally processed sounds, drones . . . All of the Continue reading
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