I've been reading the revised edition of Bernie Krause’s excellent book, Wild Soundscapes (Yale University Press) which, as the title suggests, is concerned with finding, recording, and archiving the sounds of nature. Krause started life as a session guitarist and a singer with The Weavers and later with Paul Beaver, a proponent of early synthesizers, particularly in pop music and in film soundtracks. I first came across his name on an album I found in a theatre’s music library in the early 1970s, called The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music, which contained mostly examples of the basic functions of an analogy synth but also a couple of interesting compositional pieces, which came in useful from time to time. Then, in the mid-1980s, I discovered his soundscape collections for The Nature Company and North Sound: pristine recordings of birds and animals, sea and water sounds, jungles, and rain forests, among many others, and well worth listening to and acquiring as exemplars of field recording practice.
Toward the end of the book, there are some suggestions as to where one might explore with a view to making recordings, mostly remote locations in forests, mountains, and seashores which, in the USA, are rather more readily found than in the small, crowded island in which I live. It’s an informative and interesting section, apart from the fact that it made me profoundly jealous, depressed, and dissatisfied with where I’d managed to get to with my field recording. I vowed to be more adventurous in the future, but it also got me thinking about how I approach my soundscape recordings, not just sounds of the natural world, but of all aspects of urban life as well. Anyone who’s ever watched a TV police procedural show knows that, in order to get the murderer, you need to consider three things: means, motive, and opportunity. In his book, Krause touches on each of these, although not using my MMO reference, so here’s my take on how it works for me.
Means
Well, that’s relatively easy these days: You can buy a decent handheld recorder with built-in microphones that will give you a pretty good start for a few hundred dollars. Some, like the Zoom H1, are even under $100 and, with care, can produce usable recordings. At the other end of the price spectrum are the multichannel recorders made for film, television, and classical music recordists, that can cost multiple thousands of dollars, with the top end currently being represented by the Aaton Cantar X3 at the princely sum of $16,500.
My main kit comes somewhere in the middle of the price range, with my Sound Devices 788T coming in at around $6,000 when new. I picked mine up for around $4,000, and I don’t regret a penny of it. It’s built like a tank, allows recording to two or three mediums at the same time, with some restrictions, will record four channels at 196kHz, if I want to, and has all the bells and whistles that I need and many that I one day might. Okay, I admit it’s not my only recorder; I have a Sound Devices 744T for backup and a Sound Devices 702 for the two DPA 4061 mics that sit outside the window in our apartment. I also have a Zoom H2n, which does pocket-sized surround recording duty for when I don’t have the main kit on me and is no slouch at that.
Microphones: I have to acknowledge that I’ve become a bit of a slut where microphones are concerned, and yes, I now have probably more than I need, from a couple of $20 Chinese electret omnis to a $6,000 Soundfield ST450, and quite a few others in between.
Headphones: Only a couple of these (alright, three, but who’s counting?), and they’re all basically Sony MDR-7506s, although one is the rather heavily modified Remote Audio HN-7506, basically 7506 drivers shoe-horned into a pair of ear-defenders. They come in handy when I’m next to 12 cylinders of un-silenced Rolls-Royce Merlin, and even though I’m getting on a bit, I still value what’s left of my hearing.
Motive
Why do I do what I do? Mostly, the answer is simple: I’ve found a need for a sound that I don’t have in my collection, and I’ve located somewhere that I can go and try to record it. This motivation has taken me up church clock-towers, jammed into old cars, hanging on to the kit in old wooden rollercoasters, cursing aircraft when I’m trying to record birdsong, and cursing birdsong when I’m trying to record aircraft. The little bastards can sing really loudly when they live under the flight path of a major commercial airport.
But there’s something else, as well. Although I started out recording effects because I was sick of using the same old BBC, Audio Fidelity, and Elektra vinyl offerings, I found that listening back to location recordings was rather like looking at photographs in that I could, and still can, in most cases, recall exactly where I was when I made them. So it’s become more than a way of collecting interesting or obscure sounds and has started to turn into a sort of audio archive of 40 years of location recording. There’s the boatyard sounds I recorded on a miserable holiday back in the 1970s where that must have been the only day that it didn’t rain endlessly; the barely suppressed groans during a rollercoaster ride at Disneyland in the late 1980s; the time in the early 1980s when I tried to record a WW2 Sherman tank at an army museum, and the language of the diminutive Scottish sergeant who couldn’t get it to start; the long wait in San Francisco drizzle for an elusive fog horn; an old clock that, unbeknownst to me had had the real bells replaced with electronic chimes; and the impatient demands from an Amsterdam lady of pleasure that I get out of the way of her display window, the blinds of which she had just opened to find me standing in front of while recording a carillon. So in my own way, I’m also archiving acoustic ecology, just not in a very organized way.
Opportunity
I envy my fellow full-time effects recordists who live in remote mountain locations or within easy reach of wilderness or deserted coastlines. In the UK, it’s almost impossible to find anywhere that is genuinely remote, far enough away from road or air traffic, farm vehicles, or ramblers. The one place in the UK that is considered to be genuinely quiet has been written about so much that it’s now full of trainee sound recordists shushing each other and tripping over their microphone cables. I have found a couple of really quiet locations in the past when I have all my kit with me, only to find, after setting up to record the wind in the trees or the lark in the sky, that it’s today’s route for a cross-country run by the local athletic club or, on at least one occasion, a favorite spot for a lover’s tryst, resulting in a rather awkward confrontation with an enraged gentleman who assumed I was a private detective.
Opportunities don’t often present themselves these days, so it’s necessary to create them, and even meticulous advanced planning can result in disappointment when the unexpected occurs. Weather, stray animals and humans, and the incorrigible compulsion of passers-by to shout “hallo” into the microphone at the crucial moment when a never-to-be repeated event happens can all throw a massive wrench into the most meticulously planned works and ruin weeks, sometimes months of planning.
I have been working on a tour of various sites in Europe for some time now, which will take in church bells, a monorail, and vintage aircraft, among other things, which I should have been able to coordinate quite easily, but for reasons of time and money, I can only realistically contemplate in one trip. When the time comes that I’m free, something further down the chain goes pear-shaped, and I have to postpone the trip for another year. I’m really hoping that this will be the year that the means, motive, and opportunity all fall into place, and I can make that trip. But I’m willing to bet that the church-bell ringers will go on strike, the monorail will be taken out of service, or the day I get to the aerodrome there will be the worst fog of the entire summer, and no flying will be possible. I shall, as I have so often in the past, grit my teeth, smile sweetly, and go to see if there’s a nice bar that I can sit in, and maybe the background music will cease long enough for me to grab a little background atmosphere. Wish me luck.
John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for more than 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. His sound effects libraries are available online at www.asoundeffect.com.
For more, read the February 2017 issue of Live Design as an interactive PDF.