#316: Audio Recording Equipment
I grew up in a home where audio recording was the norm — possibly more common than video. My dad is a sound artist and engineer, and every time I see him he seems to have acquired yet more sound tech. In a turning of the tables, I have now acquired some of his.
Why? Lockdown. Like many people stuck at home, I am learning new skills, though this time it is not due to boredom or a need to find something new to do. Our church has gone ‘virtual’, and my husband and I now spend a significant amount of our time each week learning, recording, and editing worship music for the Sunday service. We started off by using our phones, relying on the everyday tech we had to hand; but now we’re seven weeks into lockdown with no realistic end date in sight. So the live-streamed services continue for the foreseeable future, and we have invested in some new toys — or tech, I should say.
Why not just use professionally recorded music for the service? It’s not because we’re better, that’s for sure — the recordings we make are nowhere near studio standard, and our musicianship is not well-practised due to the tight schedule we’re working on. But we are familiar faces, familiar voices, and church is about hearing and seeing those familiar people in a familiar community. This new tech will help us bring a little more of Church life into everyone’s isolated home life, and as we make plans to include the choir through video recordings, hopefully we’ll be adding more voices and faces to the virtual mix.
The arrival of our new audio-recording equipment got me thinking about how central our twenty-first century technology is becoming in our attempt to survive this pandemic. Sometimes I wonder what our situation would have been like before the age of the smartphone, the laptop, the internet. If I’m going to be grateful about anything in this pandemic, I’m grateful that my pandemic experience is in this century and not a previous one. The power of tech to record and transmit the audio-visuals of life is being appreciated more than ever before—even as we also feel its limitations even stronger.
Yet what intrigues me the most is not our reliance on the visual, but on the audio. And not the audio from a conversation, but the audio of a specific place at a specific time: a soundscape. I recently came across the Field Recordings podcast. As they say on their ‘about’ section, Field Recordings is:
“A podcast where audio-makers stand silently in fields (or things that could be broadly interpreted as fields).”
When they say their interpretation is broad, it is very broad — wonderfully so. The most recent recording (to date) comes from the CERN electronics pool, while previous recordings include a morning on Hampstead Heath, Girona Cathedral in Spain, and a pigeon coop in Brooklyn, NY. On discovering the wonders of this podcast, I can now, through the powers of audio recording, close my eyes, listen, and transport myself to a totally different space, time, and sound.
As I listen (I am in fact listening to Hampstead Heath as I write this), I am reminded of listening to a different recording, quite a few years ago now. As I said at the beginning of this post, my dad is a sound engineer, and maybe eight years or so ago he played me a recording he made while sitting on the front porch of my childhood home, when I was still a baby. As I stood in another house listening to that recording, I was listening out for the sounds of my parents’ voices, to the general atmosphere of that moment, when I heard the unexpected but very familiar sound of a car driving by our house. As soon as I heard that sound—one which is distinctive, creating a certain sound as the car travels around a particular bend in the road — I felt my whole body jolt, as though I was there right then, standing on that porch. With eyes closed and headphones on, I experienced the wonders of transportation through sound.
So, now I invite you to travel with me, or away from me, through sound. Go to Field Recordings, or go search online, and find yourself a new place to be. In this time of lockdown our imagination can be both our worst enemy and our best friend, as the world of make believe can take us somewhere else. With the aid of a pair of headphones and other people’s diverse recordings, the world is your oyster. Welcome to the world of the audio-fuelled imagination.
Katie writes regularly about random objects that she finds in her everyday life. If you’re interested in reading more, check out her blog Object, a collaboration with fellow Medium blogger Eleanor. You can also follow us on Twitter @ ObjectBlog.