Organised Sound 27(1)A Sound Artist’s Breakdown of Field Recording overHistory
MARIA CHAVEZ, AUTHORKRISTINA WARREN, WRITING AND CONCEPTUAL CONSULTANT

The avant-garde sound artist, turntablist, and curator Maria Chavez muses aboutstoring and accessing sounds. Building on Ursula Le Guin’s concept of the carrier bag,she describes four eras of sound recording and containment.

Ursula Le Guin once wrote a paper on the bucket as one of the first forms of technology tohelp advance humanity. In that essay, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, she remarkablynotes:
If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you. … If it is a human thing to do toput something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit ofrolled bark or leaf … and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch orbag, a container for people … if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a humanbeing after all. (Le Guin 1996: 151)

Humans’ storage is an essential part of culture, and our vessels for containing have been
an evolutionary, vital part of humans’ interest in the self. Translating Le Guin’s storage
perspective to sound, my works in sound installation practice understand field recording via
three historical eras: 1) before the advent of recording technology, when ‘field recording’consisted of mimicry, either through specially designed foley sound tools or through extended
playing techniques on conventional musical instruments; 2) recording technology now exists
but is not accessible to the general public – the evolution of field recordings into sampling, if
seen in tandem with the advancement of technological convenience, moves us into era 3; 3)bringing into question the ownership of sounds as we can now record anything on oursmartphones and other easily accessible playback devices that provide storage.
Prior to audio recording technology, attempts at field recordings started as speciallydesigned foley sound objects to mimic what humans heard in their surroundings. One canlook to the Whistling Vases of the Incan civilization1 and the Mexican Death Whistle2 as1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4fsnl-SBWU.

2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9QuO09z-SI.
!1

examples of this early attempt. If described in current audio technology terms, these objects
were an ancient version of foley equipment for sound design, not meant for music but rather
as sonic accompaniment to imagery in ceremonies and storytelling.
As instruments were codified in Europe, humans’ audio ‘capturing’ evolved into
composition incorporating acoustic extended techniques. For instance, in 1626, Baroquecomposer Carlo Farina created Capriccio stravagante, a composed field recording (Walden
2012: 1). Shocking in its contemporary Baroque context and still considered one of the mostavant-garde works in early compositional music history, the piece forced string
instrumentalists to create new techniques to mimic the sounds of a bustling city. Not only did
the piece call for ‘new effects’ (for the 1600s) on the violin, that is, glissando, pizzicato, sul
ponticello (bowing close to the bridge), col legno (playing with the wood of the bow),tremolo – some of these ‘experiments’ for string instruments were used for the first time when
it was performed live. In 2015 I was asked to make a piece in response to this vital work andupon my initial listening found Farina’s Capriccio to be quite funny. The instruments imitate
the clucking of a hen, the crowing of a rooster, the meowing and fighting of cats, the barkingof a dog, and a closing section that ends in no particular key but simply slows down, gets
softer, and fades away. That moment stuck with me the most. Farina composed the ‘fade out’,
which is now regularly used in all popularised recordings and sound design. Farina’s work
could almost be seen as a form of early ‘field recording’. Yet since society had not createdrecording technology, like the Incas and other ancient civilizations before them, Farina was at
the mercy of mimicry in order to ‘hold’ everyday sound. In a way, the sonic emission was thevessel for sound.
While it is still being disputed, the earliest, truly recorded non-anthropic sound camefrom Ludwig Koch, who recorded the common sharma, a bird, with his father’s wax cylinder
recorder in 1889 (Bruyninckx 2019: S193). Suddenly, mimicry was no longer needed;humanity could finally hold sound in its hands. Thus, eras 2 and 3 (recording technology
extant and common, respectively) more fully fulfill Le Guin’s theory of humans’ need forcontainment.
The early and partial dissemination of recording technology was accompanied by astaking out of the territory for sound design. Era 2’s recording technology also further defined
the roles of field recording and sampling. While the technology was still relatively!2inaccessible to the general public, those with access were able to make field recordings ofsonic environments that were then stored in sound libraries and archives for institutions
throughout the United States. These archives were then used for sound design purposes forTV and film, further introducing a sonic environment to the masses.
It is during this era that pop culture demonstrated the insertion of field recording into
commercially successful music as sound design. Legend has it that the bayside audio thatbegins Otis Redding’s ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’ is a field recording (Miller 2017).
Though it almost escapes conscious attention, this 10 second introductory field recording
importantly conveys the physical setting of the song: ‘[Steve] Cropper went to a local jingle
company and recorded an extended loop of seagulls and ocean waves on separate tracks. Hethen used trial-and-error to figure out where to bring the sounds up in the song.’ ‘I got tothinking about Otis clowning around on some of the outtakes. He was trying to make seagull
sounds but he sounded like a dying crow.’ Booth now tells a story that does not jibe with thefacts, writing in an email, ‘The day after the song was recorded, I went in the control room,
where it was being played back. All of a sudden there were seagulls on it! “Steve,” I said,“Where’d you get them birds?” He gave me a blank look. “Sound effects,” he said’ (Miller2017). So whether the field recording was recorded for the actual song or was derived from asound archive is still under debate. Yet the act of using a recorded environment to further
depict the imagery of a story was quietly impactful. This iconic song is one of many thatutilizes field recording as sound design and further characterizes characterizes era 2 as having
a more refined recording technology than era 1 while continuing era 1’s practice of using fieldrecording to depict imagery or convey story.
Era 3’s portable, more broadly accessible recording technology enables more people tocapture sound themselves on our smartphones and other playback technology with storage.
This accessibility further defines field recording practice through individual ownership oftechnology and of resultant audio. The distinction of field recording and sampling gained
growing relevance due to this accessibility. Anyone can freely move between writing popular
music, sound design, intermedia art and electroacoustic music, and sometimes making DJ
mixes for radio with the self audio archiving now being independent of institutions and theirsound libraries.

!3

The separation of field recordings and samples becomes more defined when a fieldrecording is recorded for a particular project. A sample becomes more defined as it is drawing
from a previous recording that was not related to the project it is now being used for.
A particularly interesting example straddling the field recording/sample distinction isMasters at Work, famous house music DJs from the 1990s, who made a field recording ofrings jingling on the singer India’s fingers. The jingling was an accidental sound bleed issue
with India’s vocal recording as she kept shaking her hands as she sang. Kenny ‘Dope’Gonzalez and ‘Little’ Louie Vega decided they actually liked the sound of her rings and usedit as a ‘tambourine’ sample for the song. Afterwards, they realized they could use therecording as a sample for other songs, recontextualizing the field recording into a sample.3
More recently, Billie Eilish’s hit Bad Guy famously used an iPhone recording of apedestrian crossing signal from Brisbane, Australia as sound design. Whether she recorded thepedestrian cross herself is unknown; it is clear that it was recorded by someone in her teamwhile they were visiting the area. Which makes its usage in her song Bad Guy a fieldrecording and not a sample.
As we move into era 4 of field recording, I wonder how the regularity of accessibility
will change how it is being presented in social media. The format of creating short videos is
the most individualized container of all. It is our container alone, as we decide what we want
to record for our own stored memory, which in this case can be described as the ‘cloud’.
As suggested by Le Guin, storage is a basic human impulse, and recorded sound is noexception. Having evolved from unique instrument design and playing techniques, the adventand proliferation of audio technologies make the basic task of sound containment accessible
to a great many people today. In parallel, this has led to innovative approaches that now havethe potential to blur the lines between pop and experimental musical practices.

REFERENCES
Bruyninckx, J. 2019. For Science, Broadcasting, and Conservation: Wildlife Recording, theBBC, and the Consolidation of a British Library of Wildlife Sounds. Technology andCulture 60(2): S188–S215.

3 www.kingbritt.com/blacktronika-afrofuturism-in-electronic-music.

!4

Le Guin, U. K. 1996. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In The Ecocriticism Reader:Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 149–54.
Miller, S. 2017 Inside Otis Redding’s Final Masterpiece ‘(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay’.
Rolling Stone Magazine,10 December. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/
inside-otis-reddings-final-masterpiece-sittin-on-the-dock-of-the-bay-122170/
Walden, D. 2012. Ut pictura musica: Carlo Farina’s Capriccio stravagante and Kunstkammer
Paintings. Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology 5(1).

!5