C H R I S TO P H E R D E L A U R E N T I

Imperfect Sound Forever
A letter to a young phonographer
ABSTRACT What is phonography? In this essay, Christopher DeLaurenti, a phonographer with three

decades of experience, maps an axiomatic 13-lesson pedagogy through an abbreviated history of ﬁeld
recording, from Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 to Tony Schwartz in the early 1960s. This paper surveys
various meanings and uses of the term phonography from a text published in 1701 to the formation in2000 of the phonography listserv, an online community of makers of ﬁeld recordings. The author, himself
an early member of the phonography listserv, discusses three traits to deﬁne phonography as
a community in the early 2000s: inexpensive recording equipment; a community of knowledge; andthe “easy ﬁdelity” made possible by portable and lightweight Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and MiniDisc(MD) recorders. The author contrasts the traits of phonography with elements of soundscapecomposition as articulated by Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Andra McCartney. The paper
concludes by proposing possible elements of post-phonography, including remote control recording, thepossibility of voice print identiﬁcation, and the generation of unimagined data.

KEYWORDS ﬁeld

recording, phonography, microphone, soundscape composition, location recording, studio recording,sound studies

Dear L______,I am glad you enjoyed the course, but I am happier to hear that you want to continue.
We only spent two weeks making ﬁeld recordings; that’s too little time, I know. A
computer music course is indeed an unexpected venue to learn about chronicling or
capturing sound or making what Michael Pisaro erroneously deems “a reduction”1 ortelling what Rick Altman rightly calls “the story of a sound event.”2
You want to know what I could teach you if there was more time. Here is a long
missive that I send out every few years to students who ask about going further—
emended, extended, and customized to reﬂect our discussions. Grappling with big questions such as listening as a form of critical inquiry, the (non)materiality of sound, and themerit of R. Murray Schafer’s foundational term “soundscape” as well as what seems
comparatively trivial—locating a practical pedagogy of ﬁeld recording—requires crisscrossing eras through multiple disciplines including biology, ethnomusicology, ﬁlm production, philosophy, sound studies, and music.
There is another complication. Two kinds of invisibility permeate ﬁeld recording: Thetransparency of the technology and the concomitant absence of the person pressing theRecord button. How did I learn to be invisible? While learning how to make ﬁeld
recordings, I have had to stitch together bits and pieces from technicians, self-trained

Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Vol. 2, Number 2, pp. 125–167. Electronic ISSN: 2688-0113© 2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints
and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/
10.1525/res.2021.2.2.125125artists, and scholars from all of the aforementioned disciplines. To mangle an apothegm
prized by Luigi Nono: There are no paths, only pathﬁnding.
Some tips and tactics only become relevant in the ﬁeld. To learn, one must do, fromanticipating wind by watching blades of grass bend and treetop leaves drift to running an
additional recorder in parallel at a lower input volume level to record unexpectedly loudtransients without distortion. It is perhaps a cautionary tale that I have to relate to youthat someone such as myself, having worked in the ﬁeld for only a bit more than 25
years—and often failing at ﬁeld recording since the late 1980s—is wary of trying tosummarize everything.3
I am a phonographer, and you might be one too. When I tape small microphones tomy skull, or button up a stout vest with sewn-in mics, or strap a stereo pair to myhomemade mic boom, I hope my recordings become much more than what somescholars have summarized superﬁcially as “affective and carefully observed and heard”4
audio ﬁles or categorized as a “hyperreal synopsis of events.”5 Instead, I venture into theworld to ask, Who is heard? Who has? Who is here? and Why are we listening to thisright now? Listening and recording is a form of inquiry, an investigation or at times aninterrogation, of current crises and events. Much of my work originates in ad hoc,
improvised, or liminal spaces: Orchestra intermissions, tunnels, forensically ampliﬁed
digital audio, and political protests.6 Peter Cusack, a London-based sound artist,
researcher, and improvisor, identiﬁes one of my early pieces, N30: Live at the WTO
Protest, November 30, 1999,7 as an example of “sonic journalism” in which “attentive
listening on location can reveal sonic threads running through the narratives and issues
under examination.”8This missive is long. Your thumb (or ﬁnger) may tire from scrolling or swiping. Don’t
read it all at once. Jump from one heading to another. There’s no tl: dr. Along with the
PDFs I sent, you should continue drifting through the ocean of anthologies devoted toestablishing sound studies as an academic discipline: The Auditory Culture Reader;9Hearing History;10 The Sound Studies Reader;11 The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies;12
the mammoth four-volume Sound Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural
Studies;13 Music, Sound and Space;14 Keywords in Sound;15 The Routledge Companion
to Sounding Art;16 and The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies.17 In addition, nearcountless sound studies articles and landmark monographs such as The Tuning of theWorld by R. Murray Schafer,18 The Soundscape of Modernity by Emily Thompson,19 andJonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past20 entangle sound and the soundscape with othersensory, cultural, and material aspects of the world.
Yet after reading all of those pages, the voices of artists—especially those who makeﬁeld recordings—remain missing or barely aﬂoat in those oceanic texts. Spending time inthe ﬁeld, recording with microphones, and listening will help you become an astute,intuitive listener, a perpetual “sound student.”21 As suggested by Sterne,Sound students produce and transform knowledge about sound and in the process
reﬂexively attend to the (cultural, political, environmental, aesthetic . . . ) stakes of thatknowledge production.22

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Here are my stakes: In this letter I want to remind you why the microphone is not the ear.
I also want to propose a counter-history of the origins of ﬁeld recording; this pillar-topost chronicle serves mainly to present a series of lessons I have learned as a soundstudent—some grounded in theory, others resulting from training, reading dusty journals,
waiting for a leaf to move, or holding a microphone steady while staggering throughclouds of tear gas. Genre enfolds history, style, people, and possibility: I hope this missive
introduces the genre of phonography and what I provisionally call post-phonography.

THE MICROPHONE IS NOT THE EAR, BUT AN EAR

Rather than pore over microphone spec sheets, use your ears to remind yourself that the
microphone is much more than an extension of ourselves or what media theorist Marshall
McLuhan calls a “technological simulation of consciousness.”23 Do you remember the
exercise “Find a Binaural Soundscape” we did in class? This exercise will enable you to
bypass and perhaps understand what McLuhan identiﬁed as “the never-explained numbness that each extension”—in this case the microphone—“brings about in the individual
and society.”24 You will need headphones and a recorder with attached (“on-board”)
microphones or an external, cable-connected microphone (not your phone!):Wear your headphones in (or over) one ear in a quiet place.
If you have an external, cable-connected microphone, place it on a stand (or on a table
atop a towel so it doesn’t roll away).
Put the recorder in Record mode.
Set the Record volume at the nominal level, i.e. before the advent of noticeable hiss or
system noise in your headphones.
If you hear nothing, adjust your headphone level, which must remain unchanged during
this exercise.
Memorize the Record volume level (usually a number).
Turn the Record volume level all the way down to 0.
Begin recording.
Rub your hand against your shirt or other garment and listen.
Hold the recorder’s microphones close to your body (or stand or sit as close as possible
to the microphone, if connected to the recorder by a cable).
While rubbing your hand against your shirt or other garment gradually increase theRecord volume level, either gradually or incrementally.
Find a level where your ear-with-a headphone seems almost as loud as what your earwithout-a-headphone hears acoustically. Can you ﬁnd a balance between your two ears?
Keep rubbing; raise the Record volume level so your ear-with-a-headphone is a little bit
louder.

DeLaurenti | Imperfect Sound Forever127Verbally list or quietly memorize differences in timing, timbre, etc. Depending on theposition of the microphone, your ears will hear the same sound very differently. Youmay ﬁnd that no ear is identical to another.
Try this exercise with a voice, object, or soundscape.
To re-orient your ears, perform CALFRAST.25

Continually wearing headphones while recording is called monitoring. You mightremember me in class shouting, “Monitoring is not listening!” But for the ﬁrst few
months of making ﬁeld recordings, wear headphones. Once you can imagine how yourmicrophones portray sounds in the soundscape, you will acquire an intuitive knowledgeof what the ear-with-a-headphone sounds like. I seldom wear headphones when recording, except to brieﬂy check for the presence of a signal, adjust stereo balance (if desired),and set (then forget) the Record volume level.
Avoiding headphones makes me a better listener. Composer and theorist Cathy Lanedeclares, “Technology can help us to LISTEN it can also help us not to LISTEN.”26
Wearing headphones continually means that my ears not only monitor what my microphones are recording, but due to acoustic leakage—also called “bleed”27 by audio engineers—I also hear a sliver of the acoustic soundscape. Without headphones, I canremember and treasure what I hear, even if the recording fails. I seek to remember thesoundscape well enough so that I can EQ or otherwise process the recording to match mymemory of the soundscape, not my memory of the soundscape heard through headphones. Treat EQ and dynamic compression like Proust’s madeleine: a bright or mufﬂed
EQ to match the vivid presence or aloof periphery of what you recorded; and dynamic
compression (and maybe a minuscule amount of reverb) to imbue proximity or unfold
a sense of distance.
As an extension of the ears, microphones can be considered an apparatus, which,according to Giorgio Agamben, “must always imply a process of subjectiﬁcation, that is
to say, they must produce their subject.”28 Even though an apparatus such as the microphone may be a tool in which “one realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any
foundation in being,”29 the inanimate, being-less microphone only captures what masternature recordist Bernie Krause calls “the consequences of sound.”30 The implied—andillusory—dominance or control of recorded sound heard by your microphone need notnecessarily make you a “subject.” “Our ears have the capacity to discriminate; microphones don’t,”31 observes Krause. This difference originates in sensory adaptation—in
this case, the rapid subsuming of ambient sound to the periphery of our attention andmemory.32 In a contemporary indoor environment, for example, your ears will usuallyignore and soon forget HVAC drones, distant road noise, the hum of the refrigerator,
conversations of strangers, and other steady sounds that not only seem to recede into thebackground but mask smaller, delicate sounds.
Sensory adaptation is physiological, rooted in the brain, the resonance of the ear canal,
and the resulting maximal sensitivity of the ear between 2kHz and 5kHz. But this
immediate (or sometimes gradual) inattention is also cultural; Anne Carson writes inher classic essay, “The Gender of Sound”: “It is in large part, according to the sounds
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people make that we judge them. . . . These judgments happen fast and can be brutal.”33
As my grandfather said, “No one trusts a handsome, good-lookin’ fella who squawks likea donkey.” We unknowingly rely on our ears not only for the concomitant facts of time,
geography, and causation but also to conﬁrm, ignore, or reject identities of accent, age,class, ethnicity, race, gender, and nation.34
As an apparatus, the microphone is vulnerable. In his Memoirs the pioneering naturerecordist, broadcaster, and advocate Ludwig Koch (1881–1974) states that “the conditions needed by the microphone are quite different from those governing humanhearing.”35 Here is just one of many possible examples: Outdoors, you will hear how
very strong wind distorts the microphone’s diaphragm so completely that all sound ismasked and distorted like a sizzling frying pan; by contrast, the average ear’s much moresensitive auditory system can discern nondistorted sound amid surges of whooshing,smothering heavy wind.
By performing the foregoing exercise before you venture into the ﬁeld—and while
you are in the ﬁeld—as well as recording without headphones, trying the lessons in
the “Where’s the Manual?” section below, and devising other personal ear-cleaning
strategies, your microphones need not be a numbing extension or subsumed
apparatus.
Your ears will liberate you: When listening to his ﬁeld recordings made during a trip toSiberia, composer and theorist Tim Hodgkinson “began to realize that a recording always
gave you more than what you had asked for.”36 Instead of the “reduction” postulated by
Pisaro of an “immersive sensual experience of an environment,”37 Hodgkinson’s “more”
results from pointing the microphone. Field recording opens a path toward “an enactment of difference”38 and convergence among what you heard, what you recorded, andwhat you remember.
Reduction becomes revelation. To re-map Salome Voegelin’s astute reading of theagential realism of Karen Barad: Microphones become “at once the apparatus and material” of sound and listening due to where and how you position the microphone—in
tandem with the microphone’s polar pattern, frequency response, transducer type, selfnoise, and signal-to-noise ratio as well as its ineffable qualities (“vibe” or “character,” inthe argot of audio engineers). In turn, the convergence of your memory, microphones,
and recording “perform the reality of their meeting by opening different resonant spaces
in listening, in architecture and in music”39—and sound.

BATMAN’S BROTHER

Everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) I know who makes ﬁeld recordings wonders about
their forerunners. The mythic, inchoate origin stories of ﬁeld recording parallel theretconning and complete revision of superhero origin stories in comics and ﬁlms—yes,
Batman had a brother.40 This confusion has three aspects: The fetishization of dates asa tempting replacement for the still-foggy history of making audio recordings outside thestudio or parlor; the persisting confusion among ﬁeld, location, and studio recording; andthe decades-old discourse of (not) teaching ﬁeld recording.

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Media scholar Mitchell Akiyama pinpoints the ﬁrst appearance of “ﬁeld recording” ina 1933 issue of The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers.41 In class we
examined a 1927 article in Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers that
includes “ﬁeld recording.”42 The usage of the term reveals far more than a date: In those
two and other contemporaneous instances, “ﬁeld recording” appears like Athena, fully
formed with a clearly understood intent and purpose—and without explanation, as if nofurther discussion is needed.43
By contrast, American scholars who pioneered taking the wax cylinder phonographout in the ﬁeld to record various Indigenous and Native peoples in North America—Jesse
Walter Fewkes, Alice Fletcher, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Frances Densmore, et al.—wrote“ﬁeld notes” and discussed venturing into “the ﬁeld” to conduct “ﬁeld work” but did not
use the term “ﬁeld recording” in a frequent, signiﬁcant, or meaningful way in print.
I suspect “ﬁeld” and “recording” were both too broad to conjoin into a compound
word; “ﬁeld” permeates popular and “serious” music publications from the late 19th tothe mid-20th century (e.g., “publishing ﬁeld,” “entertainment ﬁeld,” “songwriting ﬁeld,”etc.). Similarly, “recording” connoted multiple shades of meaning, primarily referring to
the transferring of knowledge to the written word and standard Western music notation.
I believe “recording” was thus too broad to merely denote a speciﬁc practice with thephonograph. Trawling through thousands of pages in The Journal of American Folk-Lore(JAF) from 1889 to 1922, “the journal of choice for professional ethnographers publishing text-based research,”44 I discovered that sentences such as
As the ﬁeld for gathering material widens, or, rather, deepens, the greater the necessityof recording, where possible, all facts as to the source of the information.45

map the notion of “recording” to annotating, archiving, cataloguing, chronicling, describing, diagramming, phonetically parsing, transcribing, and otherwise inscribing information by standard hand writing, shorthand, or on a typewriter. Fragile, noisy, and requiring
skill to operate, the wax cylinder phonograph was far from a dominant or ordinary
method of “recording.” As H. M. Belden wrote in 1912, “all who can record the musicof our living song-ballads, whether by the ordinary notation or by phonograph, cancontribute.”46 Almost always found as a footnote in JAF, the phonograph was a minor
tool. A few JAF contributors were adamantly skeptical. John Comfort Fillmore observedin 1895:
I have found that the most satisfactory way, by far, of studying the songs of ouraborigines is to write them down from the singing of Indians, not from phonographic
records.
There are at least two reasons for this: one is that, assuming that the Indian sings hissong exactly as he intends to sing it, the phonograph must be manipulated with thegreatest care, or the record will still misrepresent him; for the slightest change in the rateof speed causes a corresponding variation in pitch.
At best the phonograph represents the song somewhat imperfectly; but records
unskilfully taken are apt to misrepresent it, sometimes to the point of caricature.47
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FIELD, LOCATION, STUDIO RECORDING

The second locus of confusion regarding the history of ﬁeld recording arises from the
conﬂation of ﬁeld, location, and studio recording. We commonly assume that studiorecording transpires in sheltered and otherwise controlled and controllable environments,from “nothing more than bare rooms with a partition between the man operating therecording machine” in the 1890s,48 to acoustically treated rooms teeming with vintage
instruments, to your bedroom studio (or wherever your laptop is). In the studio, it seldom
rains.
By contrast, location recording attempts to transport the control, stability, and potential of the studio to somewhere else.49 Put bluntly by location sound guru Michael Tierno,“The only thing you’re doing when you record location sound is gathering assets for theﬁnal sound mix.”50 Try applying Tierno’s formulation of location recording to many of
those pioneering ethnographers and folklorists: Swap out “ﬁnal sound mix” for“conference paper,” “journal article,” or “book” while replacing “assets” with “someone
else’s cultural property”51 or a more genteel kind of asset such as “knowledge.”
But the circumstances of those recordings could veer into a ﬁeld recording, which canbe deﬁned as recording in an unstable, ad hoc, and unpredictable context, often by unand self-trained scholars, scientists, artists, and explorers.52 Frances Densmore recounts
compromising and deviating from her usual laboratory-based location recording practices
when making, tantalizingly, something close to what we might consider today to be a ﬁeld
recording:Henry Thunder, a Winnebago, refused to sing unless he could record in a grove, where
he could see in all directions and be sure that no one would overhear him.53

Field recording compels the recordist to embrace multiple and signiﬁcant kinds of unpredictable factors—and extremely variable results. Luc Ferrari, composer of the pathbreaking proto-soundscape composition Presque Rien No. 1 (1967–70), observes: “An outdoor
sound is fugitive. One wonders, will it return?”54 Ferrari, an avid maker of ﬁeld recordings, elaborates:
Take, for example, a donkey that brays, and you miss making a recording of it because
you were not ready. You then have to seek out a place where a new bray could soundeven better than what you ﬁrst heard. But will it bray again? And at that moment, while
waiting for the donkey, you discover other things—the cicadas, the brushing of thewind against the grass—until three hours later the donkey decides to bray again. So
during this time a massive amount of things have taken place and given you theopportunity to creatively record them.55

Material circumstances or more broadly, affordances, augmented by a careful attention to
media history should stymie any easy tripartite division of ﬁeld, location, and studiorecording. Today, old studios would not be considered proper studios—sites where soundand listening could be controlled—but mere “locations.” “The earliest spaces used forrecording were inventors’ laboratories and machine shops, rooms in ofﬁce buildings,”
states audio production scholar Susan Schmidt Horning. 56 Early (and many

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contemporary) studios were far from soundproof. While recording classic sides for the
Gennett label in the 1920s, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and everyone else whorecorded in that “single-story shed nestled among factory buildings and railroad tracks”57
had their sessions interrupted by a passing train.58
What was recorded remained contingent on recording technology. Jonathan Sterne
observes that “recording did not simply capture reality as it was; it aimed to capturea reality suitable for reproduction.”59 Acoustic recording horns required close proximity;
drums and other percussion instruments were excluded from or modiﬁed for the recording process.60 Later, microphones used in tandem with electrically powered disk- and earlymagnetic recording were much more sensitive. The advent of electrical recording meant
close-up recordings could sound intimately if not viscerally present; loud panoramic
sounds such as an orchestra in a studio environment could be captured at a distancewith two or three microphones.61 In the 1960s sturdy microphones and portable, popularreel-to-reel (and later cassette) tape recorders62 enabled rapid (and possibly real-time)
movement while recording.
But from one artist holding the microphone to another, I want to propose a personal,
ahistorical deﬁnition of ﬁeld, location, and studio recording—a deﬁnition rooted in yourexperience of the soundscape, what you are hearing and feeling. The ﬁeld is wherever you
are holding (or placing) a microphone in a soundscape where you and your fate feels
unstable, ad hoc or unpredictable, perhaps rooted in an uncertain environment, a ﬂuctuating soundscape, while fumbling with (or without) equipment (bring extra batteries!),etc. Making a location recording requires a conﬁdence born of training and tested
expertise, often abetted by external material support. In studio recording, what is to bemade and heard remains somewhat in doubt, but almost nothing else is; you can rest
assured it won’t rain.

REMEMBER THE PROTEST YOU RECORDED?

You told me that as a young woman of color you were terriﬁed, fearful for enough reasons
to be read aloud forever. You were making a ﬁeld recording. (Thank you for remembering
my warning about mounting a microphone on a pistol-grip. Based on my experience
recording at protests, I have issued this warning to each class, in every workshop since
I started teaching.) That person next to you wielding a steady microphone boom andwearing huge headphones was making a location recording. Those guys from the networka few feet away, on the other hand, were making a studio recording without umbrellas;
they had a stoutly packed van ﬁlled with world-class equipment (and snacks and umbrellas), and security (OK, one beefy guy in a black polo shirt but “security” nevertheless),while enjoying a livable day-rate or an actual steady job. To warp the phrase from Rick
Altman that started this letter, a ﬁeld recording is your story of a sound event. The ﬁeld is
deﬁned by who you are, what you have, and where you are.
Whichever form it assumes, the uncertainty inherent in making a ﬁeld recording opens
a potential route to liberation, where the microphone is truly yours. Let’s return to theidea of the microphone as an apparatus. Giorgio Agamben writes, “Here lies the vanity of132

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the well-meaning discourse on technology, which asserts that the problem with apparatuses can be reduced to the question of their correct use.”63 Field recording can thwart the
peeling away of the self and contravene the standard, habituated use of an apparatus suchas the microphone. Agamben uses the adjective “larval”64 to explain that
“desubjectiﬁcation” produces a stunted, near-vegetative subject; consider Marshall McLuhan’s “never-explained numbness”65 an almost close cognate of this idea. Agamben warns:Those who make such claims seem to ignore a simple fact: If a certain process ofsubjectiﬁcation (or, in this case, desubjectiﬁcation) corresponds to every apparatus, thenit is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it “in the right way.” Those who
continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media
apparatus in which they are captured.66

You can desubjectify or perforate the numbness of ﬁeld recording by using the microphone as a means to focus your attention, hone your memory, and continually challenge
your assumptions of what to record. Pointing a microphone does not obligate you to press
Record. Let’s desubjectify ourselves a little bit:
Lesson 1: Venture into the ﬁeld, point the microphone, don’t press Record (dependingon the recorder you might need to be in Pause mode), and monitor throughheadphones. How does merely holding or being with the microphone transform what
you hear? Did pressing the Record button induce calm, anxiety, or anticipation?

What follows is my attempt to root a practical pedagogy of ﬁeld recording in a counterhistory of those who took recording equipment into (what they considered to be) theﬁeld.
WHERE’S THE MANUAL?

In the beginning, there was no manual. Helpful ﬁeld recording tutorials or ﬁrst-person
testimonies from those with experience taking recording devices into the ﬁeld were scarcein the ﬁrst century of ﬁeld recording in the United States. Here I survey, consolidate, andupdate useful advice offered by pioneering ethnologists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists,
anthropologists, and ornithologists, including Jesse Walter Fewkes, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Frances Densmore, Hugh Tracey, and Laura Boulton, along with two notable
ﬁgures outside of academia, Ludwig Koch and Tony Schwartz. This is not a canonicallist but a pillar-to-post counter-history leavened with helpful lessons for listening and ﬁeld
recording.
Tracing a lineage of taking recording equipment out of the studio is not easy; pioneering recordists were seldom helpful in print. In her landmark history, A Spiral Way: How
the Phonograph Changed Ethnography, Erika Brady discovered that amid all of the articles
in The Journal of American Folk-Lore from 1890 to 1935, only 12 substantially mention
the phonograph, despite the fact that “external evidence demonstrates that members of
the society were using it regularly.”67 Brady suggests that those ethnographers avoided“making conspicuous use of the machine and reporting on its use”68 because the phonograph “attracted attention to the inevitable artiﬁciality of the encounter.”69 Guidance, or

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mere hints, were few and far between, as if the process—akin to “ﬁeld recording” in the
motion picture industry trade journals—was self-evident, unworthy of discussion andcritique. I have found no evidence that researchers did not want to help rivals or possible
competitors, though this remains a possibility.
Morsels of advice were offered by Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850–1930), whose ﬁeld
recordings “represent the ﬁrst efforts to collect [recorded] music for scientiﬁc analysis.”70
In 1890, at the dawn of ﬁeld recording, Fewkes published71 what a subsequent pioneer,Frances Densmore, believed was the ﬁrst article on the use of the phonograph for
ethnological ﬁeld work.72 Fewkes’s pathbreaking efforts with wax cylinder recording—which was, according to Fewkes, “in a state of perfection”73—resulted in only one
suggestion, one that phonographers the world over unknowingly follow to this day, whichis to record a verbal slate:
These records were always accompanied by a statement on the cylinder of the subject,
time and place, name of the Indian giving the testimony and that of the observer. This
safeguard seemed necessary for future identiﬁcation, as their labels might be displaced orlost, and by that means their value be impaired.74
Lesson 2: Follow Fewkes’s advice and slate your recording, either before you point the
microphone or when you think the recording is over. Make sure to mention the
distance of the microphone from your desired source and the recording level; this will
help you intuit the range and depth of your microphones. Your slate will help you sort
through cryptic ﬁlenames generated by your recorder (each manufacturer has their own
ﬁle-naming nomenclature) such as 201107_01.WAV or STG-007.wav or
B14h52m19s13jun2009.wav.

Fewkes also noted “difﬁculties in the transportation of the phonograph from the railroad
to the Zuñi,” whom he planned to record,75 adding:
I found it convenient, however, to take with me the treadle machine, which is morepractical for this kind of work than that furnished with the storage battery. The former
is, moreover, more bulky, and on that account more difﬁcult to carry over roughroads.76
Lesson 3: Practice carrying your recording gear. Pack everything up (use my Field
Recording Workshop List) and walk around for a few hours. Make an inattentive
recording or two or heed Lesson 1. You will have a much better idea of what you reallyneed to bring next time.

The most thorough advice in the early years of ﬁeld recording was offered by thephilosopher and ethnologist Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852–1933) in his 1908 monographHopi Songs.77 In the ﬁrst part of the second chapter, “Phonographic Method,” Gilman
details his use of the phonograph by analyzing the variations in rotations of the wax
cylinder78 and intonation79 in tandem with tracking battery consumption and his progress in transcribing, notating, and understanding the songs he recorded.80 So detailed are
Gilman’s notes that nearly a century later ethnomusicologist Helen Myers showcased
Gilman as a still-relevant exemplar in her chapter “Field Technology”81 for the standard
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textbook Ethnomusicology: An Introduction.82 As a source of instruction and guidance,
Gilman was an outlier among those making recordings in the ﬁeld.
Lesson 4: Read the manual. Do you know your recorder and microphones as well as
Gilman knew his equipment? You should be able to identify and manipulate buttons,
dials, sliders, cables, and compartment doors in pitch darkness with your ﬁngers (totouch buttons and check connections) and your ears (to set or reset a Record level).

Another pioneering ﬁeld recordist, Frances Densmore (1867–1957), offered few hints
and guidance in her determined, precise, and voluminous texts. As a woman in a maledominated ﬁeld, Densmore had to compete and succeed decisively in order to receive
ongoing funding and other renewable institutional support.83 Musicologist Rachel Mundy reminds us that female scientists and song collectors such as Densmore “who collected
specimens were in a position of power in their relationships with plants, animals, andartifacts; but in their professional relationships, they were often on uncertain footing.”84
Lesson 5: Depending on your perceived identity, you might encounter bias, sexism,
and/or racism in the ﬁeld. If you are not a white man, others may assume that you lackcompetence or conﬁdence. You will certainly encounter class-based technological bias:
In my experience, those with the most (or most expensive-looking) equipment tend tobe perceived as more competent, though this is seldom the case.
Unlike Fewkes, who enjoyed a relatively charmed career and contributed comparatively
little, Densmore had to continually hustle for funds to support her expansive research.
Tell doubters, “I know what I’m doing,” and continue your work.
One great gift of ﬁeld recording is that you get to fail by yourself. No one else candiscern—or deﬁne—your success or failure.

At the end of her career, Densmore was more forthright and generous. Writing in 1940
to a university-employed anthropology professor planning to record members of the Gros
Ventres tribe, Densmore included a page-long appendix encapsulating her three decadesof recording experience.85 In “The Study of Indian Music,” Densmore also offers her
instructive recollections to ethnomusicologists planning to record Native Americans.86 In
addition, she details her visionary update of Fewkes’ suggestion of slating, which is torecord a tuning fork to imprint the Western standard concert pitch onto the phonographcylinder.87 Densmore’s suggestion to slate a test tone enabled the correlation of performer
pitch with the cylinder’s (initial) speed of rotation. Although she did not employ thetuning fork test tone consistently,88 Densmore foreshadowed the use of test tones formagnetic tape recording and playback. In 1948, audio engineers at Ampex recorded brief
tones at speciﬁc amplitudes on tape89 to calibrate the alignment and speed (and thus
retain consistently accurate pitch and tempo) of magnetic tape machines.90
Lesson 6: Help others when you can. Doing so compels you to summarize and solidify
your own knowledge, which will eventually ﬁnd nourishment from many artists andscholars in multiple disciplines.

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Guidance for making ﬁeld recordings also appeared sporadically in journals of anthropology and ornithology in the mid-20th century. The renowned ethnomusicologist
Bruno Nettl wrote a page and a half directed “to the anthropological ﬁeld worker forincreasing the value of his music recordings” tucked away in the “Technical Notes”
section of American Anthropologist.91 Nettl advises “holding the microphone close”92 but
offers no speciﬁc technical advice. By contrast, Alan P. Merriam in the comparatively
obscure, homemade The Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers93 details the types ofmagnetic tape as well as extra equipment to consider along with speciﬁc recommendations about tape speed, tape length, and electrical power.94
Ornithologists dreamed of taking the phonograph into the ﬁeld, too, though they weresimilarly circumspect. In 1897, the Reverend P. B. Peabody hoped that one day it would
be possible to “phonographically, retinize the songs of birds.”95 In 1929, after teaming up
with “a crew from a motion-picture corporation whose assignment was to record thesinging of wild birds synchronized with motion pictures” in Ithaca, New York, Arthur A.
Allen and Paul Kellogg began investigating techniques and equipment to record bird
song.96 The two Cornell professors found a patron and collaborator in Albert Brand,a retired stockbroker and fellow ornithologist.97 Together, by 1932 they developed
a quasi-portable recording apparatus “housed in a small closed Ford truck.”98 Brand does
caution, “there are a number of factors that enter into bird sound recording that make itmuch more complicated than the brief description just given would suggest.”99
Brand then continues to dispense general advice about the weather and intrusion of
nearby sounds,100 but as a scientist, he remains indirect, cautious, and prudently understated: “It would seem that a new ﬁeld for the student of bird life has presented itself.”101
Five years later, a lavishly illustrated 29-page article by Allen in a 1937 issue of The
National Geographic Magazine focuses mainly on milestones of the expedition’s crosscountry travelogue while noting the importance of camouﬂage and patience: “It is one
thing however to invite an opera singer to step before the microphone and quite anotherto order a wild bird to do the same thing.”102
Allen gives a few useful tips, including padding the sides of a microphone whendangling it from a tree103 and placing the microphone as close as possible, even if
precariously positioned.104 Astonishingly, Allen mentions but does not explain one of
the technological marvels of the expedition, the “sound reﬂector,”105 also called the“parabolic reﬂector,”106 which enables the pinpoint recording of sounds from more thana dozen feet away. Today, the account of daunting logistics mainly demonstrates that in
the 1930s transforming a ﬁeld into a location required a budget suited to wealthy men
such as Brand and institutions such as Cornell University.
Unfortunately, the great nature recordist, broadcaster, and advocate Ludwig Koch
(1881–1974) was and remains relatively unknown in the United States. As a child, Koch
recorded an Indian songbird, the common or white-rumped shama, in 1889;107 this ﬁeld
recording is considered to be the ﬁrst known nature recording to survive.108 Koch crisscrossed the UK on numerous expeditions to record birds and other wildlife.109 He had
the gift of communicating his work to a general audience on the radio and in print. Kochdispensed hard-won wisdom in his Memoirs and afﬁrmed the importance of the recording
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context, “that for call and song you must watch your bird in its natural surroundings.”110
Although Koch also made urban ﬁeld recordings in Cologne and Leipzig111 before exilinghimself from Nazi Germany, he remains primarily known in the UK as an avuncularnaturalist who “brought the sounds of wildlife to the masses through his work with the
BBC and became a household name to listeners in the 1940s and 50s.”112
Lesson 7: If given the opportunity and platform, advocate for listening to the world,but develop an ethical code. My own code is too lengthy, personal, and detailed toreproduce here but boils down to taking risks without endangering anyone else; helping
other people; and using what privilege I have for a greater good.

I try to exercise what I call “corporeal privilege.” After reading Paul Gorski’s analysis ofwhite privilege,113 discovering Catherine Hakim’s concept of erotic capital,114 and witnessing arrests of short and slender people at various Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011
and 2012, I realized that the very size of my body—then an aerobically ﬁt 6’4” andmuscular 210 pounds—granted me abilities, privileges, and potential priorities whenrecording in the ﬁeld.
My corporeal privilege115 means that I am a less-than-desirable target of American law
enforcement, whose preference for what police sociologist Luis A. Fernandez calls “hardline social control”116 includes swift and decisive arrest. Amid a crowd, I am less likely to
be arrested117 because I am larger than most police ofﬁcers and, based on what police
ofﬁcers have told me, my imposing frame would require more than one ofﬁcer to safely
subdue. And though I have always practiced nonviolence, police have no way to discern
my practice. Corporeal privilege also confers the ability to enter crowds and other situations that might give a smaller or weaker person pause; to see and hear over massive
crowds; to set or shove aside barriers in order to create avenues of escape; and to shieldothers.
By contrast. two famed researchers offered guidance that would be ethically controversial today: Hugh Tracey (1903–1977), an ethnomusicologist who collected songs
throughout Central and Southern Africa, is worth quoting at length. Disturbingly, Tracey
refers only to “Africans” in the article and never identiﬁes a speciﬁc language group,
nation, ethnicity, region, tribe, clan, village, band, family, or other identifying geographic
or social unit.
On the other hand sudden shouts, yodels and ululations can shake you with dismay, as
over-modulation on the tape is inevitable. African dancers have a mean habit ofproducing a tin whistle out of thin air like a conjuror and blasting all one’s hopes ofa good recording. Whistlers have a strange belief that full blown signals on their infernal
pipes are more than half the battle. They look like whipped spaniels when they are
asked to blow discreetly, and I always hate asking them. One day a recording machine
will be invented to cope with whistles at any distance, but that day has not yet arrived.
It is often worthwhile, I ﬁnd, to record the activity which normally goes witha particular song or tune. If it is a dance, then I like to hold aside some of the dancers to
do the singing while the others dance, in order to make sure the item does not ﬂag forlack of active movement.118

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Tracey not only adjusted the frame in making his ﬁeld recordings but also commanded
the proceedings, another example of Jonathan Sterne’s subsequent contention that“recording did not simply capture reality as it was; it aimed to capture a reality suitable
for reproduction.”119
Lesson 8: Let those making sound teach you. In “Some Do’s and Don’ts of Field
Recording,” Samuel B. Charters recommends “making an effort to get to know
something about the life, the attitudes, the politics, even the local politicians in thesurroundings.”120

Laura Boulton (1899–1980) was a buccaneering ornithologist and ethnomusicologist
who brashly trumpeted, “I created my career.”121 Her 503-page autobiography, The
Music Hunter (1969), catalogues “thirty-ﬁve years of determined and dedicated effort
to secure the tapes and records of the music of peoples on all ﬁve continents.”122
Hoping to ingratiate herself with unspeciﬁed “tribes” who “were at ﬁrst very distrustful of me and my recording machine,”123 Boulton describes recording and“performing a gay French folk song” and then playing it back. “Nothing I could
have done would have established me more ﬁrmly, more rapidly as a friend.”124
Although ostensibly speciﬁc, Boulton did not locate her technique geographicallyor chronologically. Such anecdotal imprecision was typical. Writing in 1999, Erika
Brady stated that “even in recent years when ethnographic conventions concerning
presentation of text have become more stringent, the actual process by which suchtexts are acquired often remains obscure.”125 By the late 1960s, a parallel condition
arose in anthropology:
The ethnomusicological literature had grown and its mastery left anthropology students
little time for technical training; the intellectual complexity of new theory—linguistics,
phenomenology, information theory, cybernetics and semiotics—undermined interestin recording techniques, now taken for granted.126
Lesson 9: Question your objectivity. You will inevitably record your own priorities.
You may try to emulate Steven Feld’s practice of dialogic editing, which “invokes
a concern with authoritative representation; the power to control which voices talkwhen, how much, in what order, in what language”127—nonetheless, an imbalance (orperhaps a mere difference) of ownership, technical skill, and perception will persist.
Only one person can click Save. I have experienced this disjunct difference evenbetween phonographers recording together at the same site just a few feet away. The
enactment of difference, of authorship, is unavoidable.

Fewkes, Fletcher, Densmore, Lomax, Boulton, and others practiced what is now classiﬁed
as “salvage anthropology.”128 For those ethnologists, ethnomusicologists, musicologists,and folklorists, ﬁeld recording was an act of preservation, a bulwark against the disappearance or disﬁgurement of traditional music. Temporarily forgetting her custom ofsinging “a gay French folk song” to Indigenous peoples, Boulton recalled her “horror” athearing “wandering Indonesian minstrels” in Jakarta run through “their favorite song,played over and over,” which was revealed to be a number one hit for Frank Sinatra in138

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1946, “Five Minutes More.”129 Tellingly, Boulton’s account repeats the lyrics of the song,
but neither names the song nor credits the artist.130
Today, we would not fault those minstrels for abandoning or betraying a tradition:“Ethnography as a practice is in fact an empty vessel that is shaped according to thepriorities of the author.”131 As the esteemed ethnomusicologist Anne K. Rasmussen once
instructed me, “Reception is the site for the creation of meaning in music.”132 By refusing
to receive, Boulton made it clear she was seeking a speciﬁc, perhaps Edenic, temporally
constrained past or, as Alan Lomax emphatically sought, a genealogically rich pocket ofthe present untouched by mass media. On his trip to Haiti in 1936, Lomax reported tohis father: “The drumming is amazing and the stuff is all pure folk, with absolutely noradio, movie or phonograph adulterants.”133 During the same trip, the alert-eared Lomax
jotted “ﬁve or six radios going very loud” in his ﬁeld notes,134 hinting at what must havebeen a delicious, disruptive cacophony. In Nettl’s Elephant, a valedictory history of
ethnomusicology, Bruno Nettl recalled:Long ago, we eschewed popular music and music that exhibited cultural mixes asinauthentic; now we’re mainly interested in how musics and musical cultures affect eachother.135

As seekers of songs, Boulton and Lomax understandably missed forerunners of what
David Novak has dubbed “World Music 2.0,” which maps “a world formed in themargins of global exchange” that “also records its mash-ups and overlaps, degraded sources
and untraceable short-circuits.”136
Lesson 10: Interstitial, ignorable, or unwanted sound such as the “ﬁve or six radios
going very loud” Lomax heard would today be a vital, perhaps compelling document.
Check your resistance and spend some time recording what you don’t want to hear.

Recordists outside of academia offered guidance for ﬁeld recording, albeit spottily. Inexpensive mass-market paperbacks such as Arvel Ahlers’s Family Fun in Tape Recording137
catered to the home recording hobbyist but had little to say about taking microphones
outdoors. The most prominent adviser was Tony Schwartz, who “lived with a pronounced
agoraphobia that prevented him from traveling beyond a small section of Manhattan,
speciﬁcally the area known for much of his life as Postal Zone 19,”138 which is “boundedon the North by 60th Street, on the South by the Times Square area, on the West by the
Hudson River, and on the East by Fifth Avenue with the exception of Radio City.”139
Yet beyond the conﬁnes of a small chunk of metropolitan New York, Schwartz ﬁrst
found fame on the radio. In 1946 he began a 26-year stint on the New York City
airwaves, contributing to a morning show, Around New York,140 and then hosting the“sound magazine” Adventures in Sound, on WYNC and later on WBAI.141 Schwartz alsoestablished his own person-to-person mail-exchange network to distribute and trade hishomemade recordings.142
In 1952, Schwartz began creating albums for Folkways Records143 at the invitation offounder and president Moses Asch.144 An advocate for amateur recording, Schwartz madesure that his Folkways LPs contained multi-page booklets that offered an expanded

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deﬁnition of folklore that included “the non-commercial musical expression of people
now living and working in New York 19.”145 He also detailed his work procedures alongwith a photo of his surreptitious recording apparatus.146 Much of his advice remains
useful; for example: “To get around background noise in the street, get closer to yoursubject and lower the volume.”147 In response to the wider availability of portable taperecorders, Schwartz’s last LP for Folkways included an advisory price list of recorders
titled “For the guidance of the inspired.”148 To record his 1961 Folkways LP Sounds of
London, Samuel B. Charters mentions hiding his tape recorder “under a shapeless English
dufﬂe coat. The microphone was strapped to the left wrist inside the coat sleeve.
Although there was some loss of ﬁdelity this made it possible to record everywhere in
the city.”149 Unlike Schwartz, Charters did not include a photo or further advice.
Schwartz’s price lists and procedures perhaps make him the ﬁrst to offer ﬁeld recording
advice—though only applicable to the city—to a general, albeit limited audience.
From my vantage point, commercially available books—such as Koch’s Memoirs andEric Simms’s Wildlife Sounds and Their Recording—were all but unknown in the UnitedStates. The aforementioned writings by Fewkes, Gilman, Densmore, Allen, and others
gathered dust on library shelves. Schwartz’s Folkways Records LPs were always niche
products; in the 1980s and 1990s the LPs with liner notes were scarce because they were
held by collectors and never reissued on compact disc.
Lesson 11: Find more advice elsewhere.

Field recording advice became much more accessible after 2000, in Bernie Krause’s
exemplary Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World (2002)150 andFrank Dorritie’s rare, expensive, and out-of-print The Handbook of Field Recording(2003).151 Recent guidance and recommendations can also be found occasionally inSoundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology (which began publishing in 2000).152 Comparatively, Field Notes (four issues from 2008 to 2021)153 and Reﬂections on Process inSound (ﬁve issues from 2012 to 2017)154 contain a trove of advice, suggestions, andwisdom. Each issue of Field Notes contains at least one article that discusses recording inthe ﬁeld. Similarly, every issue of Reﬂections on Process in Sound fulﬁlls its title; artists
reﬂect on technique, subject matter, and of course, struggle. All of these journals are freeand easily downloaded.
Before those books and journals, I was inspired by Bernie Krause’s 1996 book and CD
Notes from the Wild.155 Krause’s mix of anecdote, tales, technical advice, and theoretical
speculation rooted in his three decades in the ﬁeld resonated with me, particularly his
contention that:
Because the material is already changed by the process of ﬁeld recording itself, andbecause the recorded sound is a mere fragment of the source material . . . the raw
material must be edited, mixed and remixed to recreate the illusion of reality.156
Lesson 12: Distinguishing between ﬁeld recording, soundscape composition, andphonography will help answer the questions, Whose reality? and Which reality?

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B A T M A N ’ S B R O T H E R R E D U X : O R I G I N S A N D I T E R A T I O N S O F “P H O N O G R A P H Y “

The often variable, usually tangential relationship of the term “phonography” to ﬁeld
recording also parallels the retconning Batman’s brother, Thomas Wayne Jr., who (staywith me here) on a parallel Earth (Earth-3) is known as Owlman.157 The unsettled usage
and scattered origins of “phonography” open an entryway to reimagining what ﬁeld
recordings are and what they might become.
In 1701 John Jones, MD, published a work entitled Practical Phonography, “which was
designed to assist persons to read and spell the ordinary longhand.”158 As one of countless
quixotic plans to correct the centuries-old inconsistent visual orthography of the English
language through oral spoken language, Practical Phonography and its author have remained obscure. In the mid-19th century, phonography became known as a means fortranscribing oral dictation into writing. Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of the most widespreadversion of phonography, deemed his system of stenography or “writing by sound”159 or“phonography” in 1837 160 “because he claimed that his was the ﬁrst shorthand based
explicitly on the phonetics of English, rather than on its spelling.”161
Pitman had many rivals. Pitman’s chief American competitor and former disciple,
Andrew Jackson Graham, “even used the term phonograph in 1858.”162 Another rival, V.
D. De Stains, published Phonography, a manual of “the art of writing the sounds both ofspeech and music”163 in 1842. Pitman, Graham, and De Stains were by no means outliers;
their respective methods of phonography were among many such “idiosyncratic systemsof squiggles, lines, and dots”164 some of which, including De Stains’s Phonography, encompassed musical transcription.165
Although devised 15 years before Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s “earliest surviving phonoautogram” made in 1857 166 and decades before Edison’s tinfoil phonograph,the various systems of handwritten phonographic inscription conﬁrm Jonathan Sterne’s
contention that “recording did not simply capture reality as it was; it aimed to capturea reality suitable for reproduction.”167 Douglas Kahn, echoing scholars of orality Walter J.
Ong and Martin Jay, suggests the advent of phonography in the 19th century signaled“a dramatic shift in ideas regarding sound, aurality and reality.”168 Media historian Lisa
Gitelman argues that “phonetic shorthand emphasized the oral character of language at
the same time that it sought to perfect a technology for linguistic representation”169;
however, early phonography was designed to exactly capture and enshrine oral communication into the written word. Engendering “the separation of the word from the living
present,”170 speech transcribed with phonography made the aural disposable, forgettable,
and available only as writing in permanent form. Early phonography captured an illusionof reality based only in heard language. Only what was written mattered.
Media scholars continue to connect phonography—a portmanteau of “the Greek
phonē (sound, voice) with graphē (writing) or the related gramma (something
written)”171—in various ways: to 19th-century modes of inscription,172 speciﬁcally tosystems of writing designed to transcribe the spoken word through writing.173 Phonography has also been employed broadly to track the artistic impact of consumer-oriented
recording and playback devices174 and to “deﬁne a period in our relation to music, a period

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marked by a distinct set of attitudes, practices, and institutions made possible by a particular technology.”175 More generally, phonography has been mapped to “the art ofrecorded music”176 as well as to every technique for recording and “actualizing” soundin general.177 Other scholars speciﬁcally employ phonography to denote a practice pertaining to the use of the wax cylinder phonograph and turntable gramophone in the late
19th and early 20th century,178 or to turntablism in the late 20th century.179 Sprawling,inconsistent usages of “phonography” leave the term ill-deﬁned, ﬂexible, and open, a perfect word for a community devoted to ﬁeld recording to coalesce around—the phonography email listserv—in the early 2000s.
The Last Lesson: Find your community. Discussions with comrades will enrich andtransform your work. Every community grows, and eventually evaporates.
PHONOGRAPHY ONLINE

Sometimes pioneers aren’t pioneers. Although I have been grouped with sound artist Dale
Lloyd and other initial members of the phonography listserv,180 online discussions among
artists about ﬁeld recording had already been underway before I joined in 2001. So many
discussions had been transpiring on other email lists (such as the lowercase listserv) thatcomposer and sound artist Marcelo Radulovich set up the phonography listserv on August
16, 2000,181 to discuss the making and creative use of ﬁeld recordings.182 Almost a year later,in an email with the subject line “ﬁeldrecording.org or phonography.org,” Radulovich wrote:
The word PHONOGRAPHY was brought up by Joel Smith (who is in this list) in an
email exchange we had about ﬁeld recordings. I mentioned to him that those words:“ﬁeld recording” did not accurately describe what it is that we do when we’re recording/capturing sounds. I mentioned how National Geographic always pops up in my head
when I say or write the words “ﬁeld recording.”183

Radulovich recalled that the list’s “initial discussions related mostly to straight-up recordings, meaning, unprocessed/unaltered. Apart from minor edits and basic EQing we weregoing for the IT. This was the focus.”184 But “IT“—presumably some kind of aesthetictranscendence—was never speciﬁed, never discussed on the phonography listserv. Some
list members just wanted to make good ﬁeld recordings. But that too was unspeciﬁed;
rather than address or question the skills required to operate microphones, recorders, andother equipment, discussion focused on brands and models to try or to avoid. As for“phonography,” based on my longtime participation on the phonography listserv, theterm was discussed haphazardly, which I summarize below.
Most phonographers I met in person or online in the late 1990s and early 2000s
credited composer David Dunn for applying the term “phonography” to sound work
created with ﬁeld recordings as found in his book and compact disc set Why Do Whales
and Children Sing?
The similarity of recorded sound to photography has been considered but“phonography” has yet to be taken seriously as a discipline beyond its commercial orscientiﬁc applications.185
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In an earlier version of his essay “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred” under the subheading “Hybrid Soundscape Compositions,”186 Dunn connects his work to R. Murray
Schafer and the World Soundscape Project; after summarizing a phonography-based
project he laments, “My job was to pretend that I was not present in the situation inorder to create a false representation of the reality. . . . ”187 But such skeptical realizations
were infrequent in the early days of the phonography listserv.
Some of the discussion opened possibilities for the historical exploration of“phonography.” Composer Yannick Dauby mentioned “Charles Cros, inventor of
the Phonograph (before Edison!), who popularized the word ‘Phonographie’ inFrance.”188 Dauby also alluded189 to François-Bernard Mâche, whose 1992 book
Music, Myth and Nature offered an unexpected point of origin: “The art of phonography was born with the ﬁlm Week-end by W[alter] Ruttman in 1930.”190 A few
days later Marc McNulty contributed a dictionary deﬁnition of phonography, which
included “a system of phonetic shorthand invented by Isaac Pitman in 1837 and so
named by him in 1840.”191
McNulty’s post concluded with a link to a 3,500-word paper written by Lee B. Brown,a philosophy professor at The Ohio State University: “Documentation and Fabrication in
Phonography.”192 Brown’s deﬁnition, “sound-constructs created by the use of recording
machinery,”193 was likely too vague to prompt any discussion on the phonography
listserv.194 Other deﬁnitions were discussed in person, as some of the phonographerson the list such as John Bain, Steve Barsotti, Yitzchak Dumiel, Mark Griswold, Doug
Haire, Alex Keller, Dale Lloyd, Perri Lynch, Rob Millis, Toby Paddock, Jon Tulchin, andJonathan Way lived in (or close to) Seattle, as I did. Along with discussing our own
deﬁnitions of phonography, in pairs and groups we debated usages by Edison and several
scholars as well as deﬁnitions by Dunn, Kahn, and listserv members Joel Smith andYitzchak Dumiel.
In one late-night discussion, Dumiel195 pointed out that in “The Phonograph and
Its Future,”196 Thomas Edison, who patented his invention as a “Phonograph or
Speaking Machine,”197 skirted umbrella terms such as “phonography” altogether. In
Edison’s 1878 essay the only variant, “phonographic,” refers to books, clocks, andadvertisements.198 Published a decade later, the successor to Edison’s landmark article,“The Perfected Phonograph,”199 contains two variants of phonograph,“phonogram”200 and “phonographic,”201 both of which refer to an object—not a process—of recording.
On the recommendations of Alex Keller and Steve Barsotti, I read Douglas Kahn’s
deﬁnition of phonography in the media studies classic Noise Water Meat. Kahn’s
brilliantly enumerated “ideas of phonography,” speciﬁcally “all mechanical, optical,
electrical, digital, genetic, psychotechnic, mnemonic and conceptual means of soundrecording as both technological means, empirical fact, and metaphorical incorporation including 19th century machines prior to the invention of the phonograph”202
was too encyclopedic—as well as more historical than actual and contemporary—for
myself and others phonographers I knew to be useful, at least in the early years of thelistserv.203

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Phonography listserv member Joel Smith had the ﬁrst ofﬁcial word in 2001:
The word “phonography” speaks to me precisely because, like “photography,” it isagnostic; I mean it’s factual rather than semantically loaded like “music” or “art”—
words that signal worthy ambitions and hierarchies that may, or may not, help you hear(or see) fresh. “Phonography” (translated literally) says nothing but: soundwriting.204

Enshrined on the phonography.org site, Smith’s deﬁnition was ahistorical, favored nosingle aesthetic approach, as well as remained uncritical and “factual,” presuming theﬁdelity of the microphone as well as of the phonographer. This apparently self-evident
notion of phonography remained agnostic toward recording equipment and strategies
while implying undeﬁned listening subjects—as if everyone listens a priori in the sameway from the same perspective, as if every sound event tells the same story to every
listener. This ideological, brief, and circumscribed deﬁnition was open-ended enoughto welcome multiple approaches and interests as well as members whose command of
English might not be able to navigate the theoretical language of Kahn et al. I believe thisglossing over of theoretical concerns enabled a ﬂowering of artistic growth for those on
the list; it did for me.

SOUNDSCAPE COMPOSITION OR PHONOGRAPHY?

Here is my attempt to deﬁne phonography and to propose three traits that help deﬁnewhat phonography was in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Inexpensive recording equipment; a community of knowledge rooted in the phonography listserv, limited edition
releases on CD and CD-R as well as streaming audio and the superb resources of
MiniDisc.org; and the “easy ﬁdelity” made possible by portable and lightweight Digital
Audio Tape (DAT) and MiniDisc (MD) recorders. Later on, I contrast phonography
with soundscape composition, noting that phonographers—as heard on the sevenphonography.org compilation albums—hewed to a ﬁxed frame, eschewed digital signal
processing, and presented soundscapes singly instead of marshalling multiple soundscapes,
locations, and vantage points.
This friendly consensus on the phonography listserv spurred my determination to
articulate phonography as an artistic practice. I wondered: What made it possible foranyone to make ﬁeld recordings now? How much did it cost and how might that pricedetermine what was recorded? How was gear selected? I also wondered about other artists
composing with ﬁeld recordings. What might constitute the “great works” or at least
instructive creations of phonography? Was there a canon? Was a counter-canon possible?
Were those of us on the list just making another variety of (or simply rehashing)soundscape composition?
Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp were the ﬁrst to outline the nature ofsoundscape composition and compose pioneering works in the genre.205 Truax statesthat soundscape compositions focus on “the environmental context that is preserved,
enhanced and exploited by the composer,”206 and later expanded “principles of the144

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soundscape composition as derived from its evolved practice” into “a well-developedmodel for the musical use of environmental sound:”207(a) listener recognizability of the source material is maintained, even if it subsequently
undergoes transformation;(b) the listener’s knowledge of the environmental and psychological context of thesoundscape material is invoked and encouraged to complete the network of meanings
ascribed to the music;(c) the composer’s knowledge of the environmental and psychological context of thesoundscape material is allowed to inﬂuence the shape of the composition at every level,
and ultimately the composition is inseparable from some or all of those aspects ofreality; and ideally,(d) the work enhances our understanding of the world, and its inﬂuence carries over
into everyday perceptual habits. . . . Thus the real goal of the soundscape composition is
the re-integration of the listener with the environment in a balanced ecologicalrelationship.208

Westerkamp offers a shorter deﬁnition, afﬁrming “that its essence is the artistic, sonictransmission of meanings about place, time, environment and listening perception. In my
experience, the term eludes any further deﬁnition.”209
Andra McCartney, another indispensable theorist of soundwalking and soundscapecomposition, elaborates on Westerkamp’s open deﬁnition: “Soundscape composers canact as interpreters of the various languages of places, based on their knowledge of theseplaces which is honed through the processes of listening, recording and composing.”210
But many of us on the phonography listserv were up to something else in the early
2000s. Inexpensive recording equipment and the phonography listserv changed who
could record as well as how recordings were made. The advent of the listserv’s community
meant that knowledge—in tandem with tips and encouragement—was shared throughonline discussion, limited edition releases on CD and CD-R, and via streaming audio.
Affordable, almost high ﬁdelity technology meant that “meanings about place, time,environment and listening perception”211 could be placed in ﬂux. Portable recording
equipment, mainly the MiniDisc recorder, meant that new environmental contexts could
be discovered, framed, and challenged as well as “preserved, enhanced, and exploited.”212
Compared to previous decades, recording equipment, especially the MD, was inexpensive—on average from $100 to $300, cheaper used213—portable, and easily researched
for free online. Field recording was no longer restricted to professionals who could deduct
equipment purchases on their taxes, moneyed hobbyists, or scholars fortunate enough to
win funding for research such as John A. Lomax, who in 1937 reported that his“recording machine, including storage battery” was purchased for $500 by the Libraryof Congress.214 The “who” of phonography expanded widely due to lower prices anda broad marketplace connected by the Internet.
Online, eBay facilitated the thriving auction market for used portable MD recorders in
the late 1990s and early 2000s. I won an auction for a used Aiwa AM-F70 MD on eBay

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July 14, 2002, with a bid of $58.01. In 1997, my then-employer purchased for my use
a Tascam DA-P1 portable DAT215 recorder, which had a list price216 of $1,899,217 forabout $1,200, a differential price ratio of 20 to 1. Blank MiniDiscs were also cheap; I paid
from $1 to $4 each, depending on the manufacturer. Every phonographer I knew inperson or corresponded with substantively on the phonography listserv in the early
2000s told me that the substantially lower cost of recording equipment made their work
as phonographers possible.
In addition, the astoundingly compendious site MiniDisc.org provided lucidly impartial, detailed information and technical speciﬁcations for every model of MD.218 Reviewsof recorders and accessories as well as links to vendors, a free archive of user manuals,
tutorials, and FAQs constituted an easily circumnavigated body of knowledge that wascomprehensive, yet welcoming. Members on the phonography listserv responded toindividual queries with kind recommendations. A search for “advice,” “advise,” and“recommend” in the listserv archives conﬁrms that in the ﬁrst ﬁve years of the phonography listserv, a majority of posts on the listserv requested, offered, and discussed recommendations for microphones and MDs.219
How were “meanings about place, time, environment and listening perception”220 inﬂux for those of us on the phonography listserv? The “how” of ﬁeld recording separated
phonographers from those working in soundscape composition in the 1970s and ’80s.
For the phonographers of the mid- and late 1990s, ﬁdelity, especially high- or close tohigh-ﬁdelity was easier. Recording on MD seemed to peel away a discouraging layer of hissheard on portable cassette recorders. Under the moniker “Quiet American,” Ximm
offered a six-point list, “Why Minidisc is the Perfect Format for Travellers,” which begins
with “bullet zero,” audio ﬁdelity: “Contemporary minidisc compression is not an issue
unless you are very rich, very sensitive, or doing professional work.”221
Unlike magnetic tape (or nettlesome Start, Skip, and End IDs on DAT), MiniDisc
indexing made it easy for anyone to mark, retrieve, and frame any sound almost instantly
without rewinding.
In my experience, relatively low-cost microphones222 connected to a portable MD
recorder slightly thicker than a modern cell phone yielded a vivid presence and wider
dynamic range audibly superior to cassette and comparable to DAT. MiniDiscs are
hardier than cassette and DAT due to recording onto a sturdy magneto-optical disk
instead of thin, fragile magnetic tape. But recording with the MD did not guarantee
pristine high ﬁdelity. Unlike cassette or DAT, MD uses various versions of ATRAC(“Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding”), what Ximm called “contemporary minidisc compression.”223 ATRAC is a data compression algorithm.224 Depending on
what is recorded, ATRAC can “take advantage of psychoacoustic effects such as
masking” and “change the recorded signal according to the ear’s dynamic
sensitivity.”225
Nonetheless, recording with an MD or a portable DAT Walkman such as the TCDD8 was easier, less prone to conventional notions of failure. Stick a windscreen on yourmic, point the microphone in the desired direction, and adjust the recording level: Witha steady hand on the microphone (or boom, or grip), a decent recording was the probable
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result, “free of technical ﬂaws such as glitchy audio, a rustling microphone boom, and thethumping crackle of onrushing wind.”226
As can be heard on the seven full-length (at least 65 minutes) phonography.org CD-R
compilations released between 2001 and 2005 and curated by Dale Lloyd on the Seattle
label and/OAR,227 not only was ﬁdelity easier, but also the frame was ﬁxed. Phonographers were not creating montages but “straight-up recordings, meaning, unprocessed/
unaltered”228 sonic snapshots of soundscapes tempered by the type, placement, anddistance of the microphone in tandem with the duration—actual or culled—of therecording, “apart from minor edits and basic EQing.”229
Westerkamp’s proposed “meanings about place, time, environment and listening
perception”230 were rooted by most phonographers on the phonography.org CD-R compilations to a single location, resulting in a ﬁxed frame. Rather than “create a strong
oppositional place of conscious listening,”231 which Westerkamp proposes for soundscapecomposition, this static immersion serves as an invitation to focus on the details of one
place, not many as in her classic 1989 work Kits Beach Soundwalk.232 The lack ofcontrasting soundscapes within a single location enables the listener to perceive, delveinto, and focus on a single place. The result is a stillness in listening, a recorded earwitnessing of a single time and place. Heard over the course of a CD-R audio disc movingfrom one location to another, the panorama shifts from listserv member to listserv
member, not within a single phonographer’s work. To repurpose a line describing one
outcome of “audile technique” asserted by Sterne, “The space of the auditory ﬁeld became
a form of private property, a space for the individual to inhabit alone.”233
This singular space, an aural form of private property, harkens back to the ﬁxed-frame
nature of early recording, not only the one-take nature of early audio production in thestudio234 but of ﬁeld recording as well.235 In the early days of recording in the ﬁeld witha wax cylinder phonograph, the frame was also delimited by time, three to four minuteswith a maximum of ﬁve at a slower speed of rotation.236 The microphone—in this casethe recording horn—did not move, ﬁxing the frame: “Those making recordings had to beplaced close to the recording horn . . . and instructed not to move.”237 Though it waspossible to manipulate recorded audio before the advent of magnetic tape,238 ethnographers did not practice what media historian Patrick Feaster calls “phonomanipulation.”239
Sound was captured and framed in one take.
Recording with the wider dynamic range and frequency response of MiniDisc or DAT
further encloses the frame: Anyone will discover that pressing then releasing the Pause
button on a cassette, DAT, MD, or hard disk recorder out in the ﬁeld will almost always
result in an audible discontinuity. This preference for the single location and ﬁxed frame
also connects phonography to ethnographic ﬁeld recordings whose purpose was andremains “translating their ﬁndings into condensed, itinerant forms”240 that can be transcribed and otherwise analyzed.
Phonographers recorded soundscapes singly for the phonography.org compilations. As
Yitzchak Dumiel wrote in “What is Phonography?”, program notes for the inauguralperformance of the Phonographers Union in 2002, “auditory events are selected, framedby duration and method of capture, and presented in a particular format and context, all

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of which distinguishes a recording from the original event during which it wascaptured.”241 By contrast, soundscape composers marshalled recordings from multiple
recordists, locations, and vantage points, acting as “interpreters of places, based on theirknowledge of these places which is honed through the processes of listening, recording,and composing.”242
Aside from a ﬁxed frame, phonographers whose work was heard on the phonography.
org compilations—the main way to hear the work of listserv members—also eschewed
transformational digital processing such as granular synthesis or ethereal pitch-shifting,techniques that respectively permeate two foundational soundscape compositions, Barry
Truax’s 1986 Rivverrun and Beneath the Forest Floor, composed by Hildegard Westerkamp in 1992. Such processing can enrich “our aural perception of the soundscape andour experience of it”;243 however, after much discussion in early 2001 about the content
and scope of the ﬁrst phonography.org compilation, phonography listserv founder Marcelo Radulovich announced:
My vote is to keep the PHONOGRAPHY SERIES title for untreated stuff [ . . . ] itseems we would have a sharper focus if our releases as a group, concentrate on raw,
unaltered recordings. Phonographies, just the sounds . . . photographies, as opposed toimages enhanced/altered/distorted through Photoshop.244

The following year, Dale Lloyd curated two CD-R phonography.org compilation albums
of “Compositions Using Field Recordings,” which, despite welcoming any and all formsof editing and digital processing, did not garner as much interest among listserv members.
The remaining ﬁve full-length phonography.org compilation contributors abided by
Lloyd’s request: “Please do not send composed, ‘post-capture processed,’ or overly manipulated recordings. Minor editing, EQ, and fades are OK.”245
Listening retrospectively to the phonography.org compilations suggests that thosepieces share a great deal in common with three out of the four tenets of soundscapecomposition as outlined by Truax while being generally congruent with the viewpoints of Westerkamp and McCartney: The source material remains recognizable;
the “listener’s knowledge of the environmental and psychological context of thesoundscape material is invoked” and “the work enhances,” or at least attempts toenhance, “our understanding of the world.”246 And though phonographers did not
use their knowledge of the soundscape “to inﬂuence the shape of the composition at
every level,”247 instead hewing to a ﬁxed frame, each phonographer, to my ears, also
strived to present an “artistic, sonic transmission of meanings about place, time,environment and listening perception”248 while honing their work through“processes of listening, recording, and composing.”249 Phonographers captured still
lifes in sound, an echo of the early decades of photography when subjects were
instructed not to move.
What also set phonographers apart was their community—one open to anyone who
subscribed to the listserv—inexpensive recording equipment, and easy ﬁdelity, all intandem with a collective effort to share ﬁeld recordings conﬁned within a ﬁxed framewith only “minor editing, EQ, and fades.”250
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I too made recordings with easy ﬁdelity and within a ﬁxed frame for most of the 1990s.
But in the late 1990s I had begun rebelling against what Jonathan Sterne later named“audile technique,”251 which, in Western culture “articulated listening and the ear to logic,
analytic thought, industry, professionalism, capitalism, individualism, and mastery.”252

DEFINING PHONOGRAPHY: A MANIFESTO AND REVOLTMy ﬁrst manifesto on ﬁeld recording, “What is an aural safari?” attempted to enshrine
a new direction for my practice, the phonography listserv, and ﬁeld recording.253 Whathubris! But the global village of the Internet seemed smaller then. In the long-since
mapped world of National Geographic and its pictorial “photo safari” tours, “safari”
represented an inward turn to the environment I knew, to home, the city.254 When
“What is an aural safari?” appeared on the phonography.org website in late 2001,
I summarized an approach to recording ﬁdelity that had appeared in my work since 1997.
Inspired by Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk,255 I wanted to capture not
only what I heard but also the act of recording itself. I hoped to attain what David Kolber
describes in his analysis of Kits Beach Soundwalk as “the space to exist however she wants,
and to use that space to express, to compose to make music.”256 Staking out a technological practice, I announced “I treasure the rare happenstance and compelling circumstantial
polyphony of raw audio”257and explained:
I try to incorporate—and when appropriate, afﬁrm—the inevitable inﬂuence andpresence of the recordist and recording gear both in the ﬁeld and back in the studio.
Aggressive editing (abrupt stops, dead silence, frenetic intercutting, obviously artiﬁcial
polyphony, antiphonal spatialization, the traditional transparent crossfade) and audibly
risky tactics (quizzing street hustlers, sidling up to riot police, bobbing through mobs),
as well as the varying and variable ﬁdelities of microphones, tape hiss, technical ﬂaws
(wind noise, boom rustling and even the off-mike intrusions of voices and incongruent
sounds), and the deck itself all help relay the struggle, frustration, and (occasional)
triumph of the hunt.258

I afﬁrmed my “inevitable inﬂuence and presence” in two ways: The inclusion of my offmike and sometimes stuttering voice in my sound works and “aggressive editing,” with theaforementioned litany of techniques.259 Musicologist and soundscape composer Iain
Findlay-Walsh notes:
As with Kits Beach Soundwalk, DeLaurenti’s pieces frequently include the recordist’s
voice, however these vocal interjections are usually real-time responses, comments
captured in reaction to changing environments and situations.260

My “real-time responses” emerged, if not erupted, from the havoc of recording on city
streets, tracking revelers during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and holding fast against
police charges in N30 in tandem with near-random, mapless wandering. I also was copingwith dying batteries and other technical issues born of rapid movement and improvised
recording made amid what documentary ﬁlmmakers Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian

DeLaurenti | Imperfect Sound Forever149ruefully descry as “an inverted funnel of declining possibility” where “every decision
forecloses others and the possibilities become ever narrower.”261
As surprising possibilities unfold in Kits Beach Soundwalk, Westerkamp is masterly.
She exerts complete control of the studio, employing “such products as ‘bandpass ﬁltersand equalizers’ that those tiny voices and sounds may be heard again.”262 By including an
extract of Concret PH composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1958, Westerkamp models a conﬁdent access to the past. “In contrast to Westerkamp’s authorly reﬂections in Kits BeachSoundwalk,” continues Findlay-Walsh, “speciﬁc allusions to his role as recordist throughthe inclusion of direct spoken references . . . foreground DeLaurenti’s changing agency ina variety of everyday situations.”263
Afﬁrming the presence of the recordist smashes through what phonographer MarkPeter Wright has condemned as “a contemporary wall of self-silence” and “overt or
implied, self-dissolution.”264 This innovative afﬁrmation likely originates with poet, novelist, playwright, anthropologist, and ﬁlmmaker Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960).
Crossing the boundary between the recording as objective, scientiﬁc evidence and participant observation, this polymath “tried as much as possible to be both investigator andsubject, participating in the singing, learning the songs as she listened, and singing alongwith the singers and writing it down later.”265 Foreshadowed by Hurston’s practice,
Wright’s proposed turn toward a “self-reﬂexive guise”266 echoes Dunn’s lament267 andWesterkamp’s call for soundscape composition to “create a meaningful place for listenerand composer.”268
I too wanted to create such “a meaningful place” and I did so through “aggressive
editing (abrupt stops, dead silence, frenetic intercutting, obviously artiﬁcial polyphony,antiphonal spatialization, the traditional transparent crossfade)”269 while moving the
microphone, sometimes on the run. With these audibly exaggerated techniques, I attempted to extend the mobile acoustic mapping of place heard in Kit Beach Soundwalk
and other soundscape compositions. Westerkamp’s brilliant response to Schafer’s discomfort with schizophonia—a (presumably) acoustic sound split from its electroacoustic
reproduction—was to suggest that soundscape compositions
can and should perhaps create a strong oppositional place of conscious listening. Rather
than lulling us into false comfort, it can make use of the schizophonic medium toawaken our curiosity and to create a desire for deeper knowledge and information . . . 270

Imperfect sound reveals an imperfect world. My edits should jolt the listener. In many of
my sound works, especially N30: Live at the WTO Protest, November 30, 1999,271
I sought not only to establish “a strong oppositional place of conscious listening”272 but
to stake out an oppositional soundscape, one that welcomed multiple perspectives bydeploying “episodic and disjointed forms”273 that “can be understood as analogous to theperpetually shifting subject-positions of a person engaged in the sense-making processes
common to everyday (auditory) perception and experience.”274
In my work, phonography means inverting “meanings about place, time, environment
and listening perception.”275 The “place” was twofold: the soundscape as captured by mymicrophones in conjunction with the incongruous soundscape of hearing a recording150

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with occasional interjections of my voice, recording ﬂaws, and edits. Translated to a visual
metaphor, it is akin to seeing a photograph whose image includes the photographer’s
ﬁnger partially obtruding the lens. The presence and position within the frame of this
supposed “error” becomes as important as (if not more important than) the ostensible
subjects within the frame. The result, “perpetually shifting subject-positions,”276 was myattempt to shift the frame in real time to perturbate the listener’s perception and dislodge
the single position of an objective (or at least passive) listener.
I intended my aggressive edits to be congruent with the “audibly risky tactics,”277
which in essence entailed taking my microphones to where they are not supposed tobe, such as abandoned tunnels (heard in To the Cooling Tower, Satsop), violent politicalprotests (heard in a cycle of nine works 1999–2021), and orchestra concerts (Favorite
Intermissions)278. The riskiest tactic of all may be my embrace of varying and variableﬁdelities of microphones, tape hiss, and technical ﬂaws.

IMPERFECT SOUND FOREVER

Two kinds of invisibility permeate ﬁeld recording: the transparency of the technology andthe concomitant absence of the phonographer. Martin Spinelli contends that the “historyof digital audio has been almost exclusively about silencing technology”279 with thepromise of high-ﬁdelity, true-to-life reproduction. Furthermore:
While analog media presented us with silence of a sort, at least when compared to thesound quality of electromechanical media, digital silence made obvious all of the noisethat we had previously ignored.280

The remarkable hiss-free signal-to-noise ratios of DAT, MD, and other digital recorders
are measurably more sonically transparent and less prone to deterioration and noise thananalog systems.281 Digital formats such as the MD, compact discs, and CD-Rs also silence
the impermanence of technology. Eternal durability is enshrined by an immutable streamof decoded ones and zeros that putatively embody the ﬁrst advertising slogan of thecompact disc, “perfect sound forever”282—an echo of the utopian marketing languageof Edison, who promised “the faultless ﬁdelity of an instantaneous photograph”283 almosta century earlier. The famed cases of disc rot (a.k.a. “bronzing”) from PDO discs made in
the UK from 1988 to 1993,284 along with difﬁculties in digital data migration due totechnological obsolescence,285 varying lifespans286 of CD-R and DVD-R dyes,287 andmodels of accelerated aging tests sanctioned by the ISO288 make this embodimentunproven, probably ﬁctive, undeniably commercial, and purely ideological.
Transparent technology also requires an invisible operator to abet the illusion of
perfect sound. Heeding the observational, third-person perspective inherent in highﬁdelity audio, paid professionals who offer advice about making ﬁeld recordings recommend avoiding (or subsequently editing out) off-mike (i.e., suddenly distant and muted)
sounds289 and the smothering rumble290 or white noise-like hiss291 of wind. The corporeal
body must also be mute;292 in his liner notes to Ruth Happel’s compact disc Loons of Echo
Pond,293 Bernie Krause wrote admiringly, “Ruth switched on her recorder and just lay

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quietly, unmoving on the ground for hours at a time.”294 Hands should ﬁrmly remain stillto avoid imparting handling noise via the mic or boom pole.295
Gordon Hempton, another renowned and pioneering nature recordist, reminds usthat out in the ﬁeld, the entire body must be silent—even when “a football ﬁeldaway”296—from shallow, silent breathing297 and surface-caressing footfalls298 to quiet,
plain-textured clothing299 and, for me, a well-considered diet, lest intestinal creaks andborborygmi dapple the recording. The resulting audio recording should have no incongruous shifts where “the stereo image swings around unrealistically as the mic moves.”300
Ideally, the stereo imaging should be “dramatic, and that insects, birds and mammals
appear to move naturally through the aural space.”301
You can hear examples of how I use varying and variable ﬁdelities of microphones, tapehiss, and technical ﬂaws online for free.302 The opening minutes of N30: Live at the
WTO Protest, November 30, 1999 are rife with handling noise, off-mike sounds, wind
distortion, and bursts of hiss due to clumsy level adjustments. Microphones clearly crunch
during several police assaults in N30, and distortion remains audible throughout several
segments of street drumming. In my work, Findlay-Walsh cannily points out that microphone handling noises “occur frequently, marking beginnings or key transitions in his
compositions.”303 I employ shifts in ﬁdelity to emphasize particular sounds, favor or ﬁlter
individual voices, and shape listener attention to “create a strong oppositional place of
conscious listening.”304
As a manifesto, “What is an aural safari?” failed as a public document. While thedesperation and moodiness of “What is an aural safari?” can be traced historically to theﬂâneur, who “serves as a focal device for organizing the wealth of the city’s sights andsounds into a panorama that presents the attractions in an orderly narrative,”305 I had
hoped to inspire myself, my fellow phonographers, and indeed anyone bringing microphones out into the world.
But the disparate farrago of my proposed counter-canon306 and call to embrace
multiple ﬁdelities failed to sway the phonography listserv and ﬁeld recording as a discipline. There was never any discussion of “What is an aural safari?” on the phonography
listserv. In 2004, I did reiterate my views on phonography in a scholarly journal,307 but tono avail.

POST-PHONOGRAPHY

Here’s my forecast for phonography, or what will become post-phonography. Field
recordings will be made increasingly by remote control, at one or more removes fromthe source; recording may be complicated by voice print technology; and phonography,
though part of the increasing tsunami of proﬂigate media-making, will continue tocapture what I call unimagined data.
Almost every longform work I have made—from Live at Occupy Wall St. (2012) to Fit
the Description (Ferguson, 9–13 August 2014) to Live in Washington DC January 18–21,
2017 to Rebellion Summer (2020–21)—incorporates ﬁeld recordings made by othersfrom their cameras, voice mail messages left by friends, and other materials collated from152

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social media. In the future such recordings might be gathered by small unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAV) equipped with microphones designed to ﬁlter out (or otherwise mitigate)
noise from wind and motion. Soundscape-sensitive UAVs may capture and create (or inreverse, amplify and project a kind of Potemkin Village soundscape of) ﬁeld recordings
rooted in artiﬁcial intelligence, generating predicted sounds interpolated from massivearchival databases.
One outcome of remote ﬁeld recording has already been foreshadowed by law
enforcement agencies using ShotSpotter, which employs acoustic sensors to triangulate
and localize gunﬁre,308 and scraping of camera phone videos to identify those who
participated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.309 In my three
decades of recording, I have only twice shot video or taken a photo of people’s faces at
any mass protest for fear of the ever-increasing accuracy of facial recognition technology. Popularized in the ﬁlm 2001, automated “voice print identiﬁcation” is still viewed
as unreliable by audio forensics experts;310 as the interrogator in John Le Carré’s spy
novel The Little Drummer Girl says, “The ear selects, you see, dear. Machines don’t.”311
Regarding human-based software-assisted voice identiﬁcation SpeechPro, makers ofvoice recognition software used by law enforcement, claim that the research on voiceprint identiﬁcation “demonstrates the validity and reliability of the process when
performed by a trained and certiﬁed examiner using established, standardized
procedures.”312
Identifying individuals by voiceprint remains unreliable in urban environments due tothe Lombard Effect. Also known as “Lombard speech,” speakers raise and alter fundamental characteristics of their voices in loud and/or noisy environments.313 According torecent research, “plain speech mixed with noise is signiﬁcantly degraded when tested on
noisy Lombard speech”314 in audio-only speech recognition. Few researchers “have investigated the effect of the Lombard reﬂex on visual and audio-visual speech recognition andthe results are not conclusive.”315 Yet the anonymity of a voice on the street may soon end
unless activists develop a linguistic equivalent of dazzle camouﬂage.
Post-phonography tends to be seen as well as heard. You have already heard those
aforementioned aspects of phonography—varying and variable ﬁdelities of microphones,
tape hiss, and technical ﬂaws—on YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, and more recently on
Zoom video calls where each person is marked by a proportionally unique suite of those
traits: Some voices glitch while others remain audible though frosted by hiss. Audio andvideo compression renders one person’s voice as if underwater while delayed bufferingslurs one-syllable words into two or three words, maybe with a bonus phoneme.
But unlike postmodernism, which emerged “as speciﬁc reactions against the establishedforms of high modernism,”316 post-phonography has emerged from economic expediency
in tandem with commodiﬁed friendships and other Internet-based networked social
relations: Inexpensive cell phone videos made with tiny camera-mounted microphones;
budget-conscious TV networks that, along with reduced (and sometimes contingently
hired) technical staff, no longer fund news bureaus beyond a chosen metropole; andcheap speakers mounted in laptops, and earbuds—all of which have become essential ina time of protest and pandemic.

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Post-phonography already conforms to Jameson’s notion of effacement,317 blurringboundaries between high and low culture; almost everyone, from the poor and precarious
to the well funded, has lower expectations of audio ﬁdelity. Not everything sounds “bad,”yet variable audio ﬁdelity is pervasive, far beyond the alternating binary soundscape ofnewsreader/location reporting on television and host/call-in guest on radio (and podcast).
Far from undermining and thwarting the “relentless pursuit of naturalism”318 endemic tomost visual and sonic media, the avalanche of content—aural warts and all—instills
McLuhan’s “never-explained numbness.”319 Every media object, even content “produced”
by a team of professionals, becomes another form or quickly forgotten moment (“hey, thebody mic went dead we’re just hearing the room mic!”) of verité.
Making ﬁeld recordings—as a phonographer, post-phonographer, or whichever label
you choose or avoid—means defying (or joining) the tsunami, what media theorist Lisa
Gitelman describes as the “extensive” use and prevalence of media. Unlike “intensive
media” in which people “consume a little material repeatedly and with greater intensity”
such as a family Bible or McGuffey Readers during 19th-century rural America, consuming media extensively means “moving quickly from one text to another.”320 One byproduct of the intensiﬁcation of our “disposable, proﬂigate”321 media-devouring culture is anincreasing emphasis on the paratexts and epitexts. Identiﬁed by literary theorist Gérard
Genette, the paratext encompasses “a certain number of productions, themselves verbal ornot, like an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations,”322 while the epitext is concomitant, enfolding an author’s (or maker’s) public image, reception, reputation, andactions.323
From a grand vantage point, media and its makers seem fungible and replaceable. We
are all water in a tsunami. Amid an ongoing ﬂood of extensive media, an artist’s epitexts(e.g., objectionable actions, statements, and characteristics)—whether true or false or
somewhere in between—are enough to nullify interest in the artist and the artist’s work.
The inexorably tightening bond between the artist and their work will widen the entryway for AI-generated art, free of a creator with eventually disappointing character defects.
I don’t have a surfboard, let alone an escape route for the tsunami. If you make ﬁeld
recordings and love it you should continue. I struggle to judge the merit of my own work(or what other artists make), but I am consoled by two possibilities: First, that I am
recording and making unimagined data—objects that may be of use and beneﬁt in waysthat I cannot imagine—and second, that recording offers a route to freedom. Remember
Henry Thunder?
Henry Thunder, a Winnebago, refused to sing unless he could record in a grove, where
he could see in all directions and be sure that no one would overhear him.324

This observation made by Frances Densmore reads as a throwaway aside amid thethousands of pages Densmore wrote, but this precious scrap of resistance and Indigenous
power is an example of “unimagined data,” micro-epistemologies with potentially significant implications. Densmore’s aside and Thunder’s insistence suggests a reciprocal, if not
deﬁant relationship to the act of recording and should prompt a new examination of the154

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recording relationship between ethnographers and their putative subjects, between technology and its users. Where else might deﬁance and resistance be located?
Here’s my favorite formulation of listening as a route to liberation; Charles Mingus
told jazz critic Nat Hentoff in the 1950s:
People are getting so fragmented, and part of that is that fewer and fewer people aremaking a real effort any more to ﬁnd exactly who they are and to build on thatknowledge. Most people are forced to do things they don’t want to most of the time,and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choice about
anything important, including who they are. We create our own slavery. But I’m goingto keep on getting through, and ﬁnding out the kind of man I am, through my music.
That’s the one place I can be free.325

Field recording opens a route to freedom, toward an awareness that guides and impels
action, inspiring and teaching acts of resistance. I make ﬁeld recordings to teach myself tolisten, to liberate myself, to cope with living in a narrowing world, and to say what I andothers feel without fear. Maybe you will too.
Good luck, and keep in touch! n
C HRISTOPHER D E L AURENTI makes sound works for installations, albums, live performances, and radio broadcasts
including N30: Live at the WTO Protest November 30, 1999 (2000); Two Secret Wars (2003); Favorite
Intermissions (2007); Live at Occupy Wall St. (2012); No Sound is Stolen: Fair Use Music 1983–2013 (2013); Fit
The Description (Ferguson, 9–13 August 2014) (2014); To the Cooling Tower, Satsop (2015); and subaudible
phonography (2020). He has performed live on countless stages from dingy bars and dives to tony venues
including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Biennial. DeLaurenti holds an MFA from Bard College
and completed his PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. During the last decade, he has taught courses and led
workshops at William & Mary, Cornish, Harvard, Peabody Conservatory, School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Duke, UC Boulder, Cornell, and elsewhere. Much of his sound work is usually free and mostly online: https://delaurenti.net

N OT ES1. Michael Pisaro, “Ten Framing Considerations of the Field,” The Experimental Yearbook(2010), https://www.experimentalmusicyearbook.com/ten-framing-considerations-of-theﬁeld (accessed February 26, 2021).
2. Rick Altman, “Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice,ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 19, 23–31.
3. My students would recognize (and I hope smile at my rewording of) the fourth sentence ofa core, oft-assigned (and oft-discussed) course reading by Barry Truax, “Letter to a 25-Year Old
Electroacoustic Composer,” https://www.sfu.ca/~truax/bourges2.html (accessed March 3, 2021).
4. David W. Samuels et al., “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 39 (2010): 335.
5. Tullis Rennie, “Power Struggles,” Leonardo Music Journal 25 (2015): 18.
6. Notable examples include my albums Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven-Stravinsky-Holst (2007); Wallingford Food Bank (2009); of silences intemporally sung:
Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-stille, an Diotima (2011); and To the Cooling Tower, Satsop (2015).
7. Christopher DeLaurenti, N30, mimeomeme, compact disc, 2000.
8. Peter Cusack, “Sonic Journalism,” Sounds from Dangerous Places (website), September 16,
2013, https://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/sonic-journalism/ (accessed February 21,2021).

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9. Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg
Publishers, 2003).
10. Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
11. Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
12. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
13. Michael Bull, ed., Sound Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London and
New York: Routledge, 2013).
14. Georgina Born, ed., Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
15. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds., Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC, and London:
Duke University Press, 2015).
16. Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg, and Barry Truax, The Routledge Companion to Sounding
Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
17. Michael Bull, ed., The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (London and New York:
Routledge, 2019).
18. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
19. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
20. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003).
21. Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne(London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 3.
22. Ibid., 3–4.
23. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books,
1966), 19.
24. Ibid., 21.
25. Calibrated ﬁnger rub auditory screening test; see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC2677516/ for instructions (accessed February 27, 2021).
26. Cathy Lane, “A Manifesto for New Listening,” Reﬂections on Process in Sound 5 (Autumn2017): 76, http://www.reﬂections-on-process-in-sound.net/issue-5/ (accessed January 11,2021). Emphasis in original.
27. David Miles Huber, Modern Recording Techniques, 9th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018),130.
28. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, ed.
Werner Hamacher (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 5.
29. Ibid.
30. Bernie Krause, Notes from the Wild (Roslyn, NY: Ellipsis Arts, 1996), 10.
31. Ibid., 86.
32. Carryl L. Baldwin, Auditory Cognition (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2012), 36.
33. Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony and God (New York: New Directions,
1995), 119.
34. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s concept of the sonic color line “describes the process of racializing
sound—how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst
particular sounds—and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between ‘whiteness’and ‘blackness.’” The Sonic Color Line (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 7.
35. Ludwig Koch, Memoirs of a Birdman (London: Phoenix House Ltd., 1955), 44.
36. Tim Hodgkinson, Music and the Myth of Wholeness (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT
Press, 2016), 148.
37. Pisaro, “Ten Framing Considerations of the Field.”156

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38. Salome Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019),
168.
39. Ibid.
40. Bob Haney, “Wipe the Blood Off My Name,” World’s Finest Comics 223 (May–June 1974):
4–25.
41. Mitchell Akiyama, “The Phonographic Memory: A History of Sound Recording in the Field”(PhD diss., McGill University, 2014), 16–17.
42. Earl I. Sponable, “Some Technical Aspects of the MovieTone,” Transactions of the Society of
Motion Picture Engineers XI, no. 29 (1927): 466.
43. Ibid.: “A complete ﬁeld recording outﬁt consists essentially of a microphone, a special ampliﬁer containing a volume indicator, the ‘Aeo’ light circuit, and a special sound camera.”
44. Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1999), 60.
45. Henry C. Davis, “Negro Folk-Lore in South Carolina,” The Journal of American Folk-Lore
XXVII, no. CV (1914): 242.
46. H. M. Belden, “Balladry in America,” The Journal of American Folk-Lore XXV, no. XCV(1912): 22.
47. John Comfort Fillmore, “What Do Indians Mean When They Sing, and How Far Do They
Succeed?”, The Journal of American Folk-Lore VIII, no. XXIX (April-June 1895): 138–39.
48. Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,2013), 4.
49. Dean Miles, Location Audio Simpliﬁed (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2015), 3.
50. Michael Tierno, Location and Postproduction Sound for Low-Budget Filmmakers (New York:
Routledge, 2020), 15.
51. See the discussion of cultural privacy in Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture?
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 27–42.
52. Christopher DeLaurenti, “Activist Sound: Field Recording, Phonography, and Soundscapes ofProtest” (PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2020), 10.
53. Frances Densmore, “The Study of Indian Music,” in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of
The Smithsonian Institution, Publication 3651 (1942): 534.
54. Brigitte Robindoré, “Luc Ferrari: Interview with an Intimate Iconoclast,” Computer Music
Journal 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 12.
55. Ibid.
56. Susan Schmidt Horning, “Recording Studios in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production, ed. Simon Zagorski-Thomas and Andrew
Bourbon (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 110.
57. Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 30.
58. Richard James Burgess, The History of Music Production (New York: Oxford University Press,
2014), 27.
59. Sterne, The Audible Past, 236.
60. Burgess, The History of Music Production, 16.
61. Rudolf A. Bruil, “Microphone Placement,” in Wilma Cozart Fine Is Mercury, 2001, http://
www.soundfountain.com/amb/mercury.html#MIKE (accessed February 10, 2021).
62. David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology of Sound and Recording in America (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 149, 161.
63. Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” 21.
64. Ibid.
65. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 21.
66. Ibid.
67. Brady, A Spiral Way, 60–61.

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68. Ibid., 60.
69. Ibid.
70. American Folklife Center, The Federal Cylinder Project: A Guide to Field Cylinder Collections
in Federal Agencies. Studies in American Folklife 3, vol 2, eds. Judith A. Gray and Dorothy Sara
Lee (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1985), 3. Patrick Feaster, “The Origins ofEthnographic Sound Recording, 1878–1892,” Resound: A Quarterly of the Archives of Traditional Music 20, nos. 1–2 (January–April 2001): 1, 3–7, chronicles other scholars who,
antedating Fewkes, “envisioned using the phonograph for anthropology” (ibid., 3) in the ﬁeld
but did not succeed, including Eugan Zintgraff and Felix von Luschan.
71. Jesse Walter Fewkes, “On the Use of the Phonograph in the Study of the Languages ofAmerican Indians,” Science 15, no. 378 (May 2, 1890): 268.
72. Densmore, “The Study of Indian Music,” 528.
73. Fewkes, “On the Use of the Phonograph,” 267.
74. Ibid., 268.
75. Jesse Walter Fewkes, “Additional Studies of Zuñi Songs and Rituals with the Phonograph,”
The American Naturalist 24, no. 287 (November 1890): 1094.
76. Ibid.
77. Benjamin Ives Gilman, “Hopi Songs,” Journal of Ethnology and Archaeology 5 (1908): 1–226.
78. Ibid., 47: “The counting of revolutions of the cylinder is conveniently effected by holding theﬁnder lightly against the screw-head that projects from about the middle of the axis.”
79. Ibid., 46: “ . . . the rate of the instrument either remained or was kept by adjustment of theelectrical supply constant to within a ratio equivalent to an interval of about a tenth of a tone
[10 cents] during the whole examination of each song.”
80. Ibid., 25–53.
81. Helen Myers, “Field Technology,” in Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, ed. Helen Myers(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 84.
82. Myers, ed., Ethnomusicology.
83. Joan M. Jensen, “Getting the Depression Blues,” in Travels with Frances Densmore: Her Life,
Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies, eds. Joan M. Jensen and Michelle Wick
Patterson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 175.
84. Rachel Mundy, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018), 84.
85. American Folklife Center, The Federal Cylinder Project: A Guide to Field Cylinder Collections
in Federal Agencies. Studies in American Folklife 3, vol. 5., eds. Judith A. Gray and Edwin J.
Schupman, Jr. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1990), 386.
86. Densmore “The Study of Indian Music,” 532–37.
87. Ibid., 542.
88. Judith Gray, “An Archival Dilemma: The Densmore Cylinder Recording Speeds,” in Travels
with Frances Densmore: Her Life, Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies, eds. Joan M.
Jensen and Michelle Wick Patterson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 374.
89. Harold Lindsay, “Magnetic Recording: Part II,” db: The Sound Engineering Magazine 12, no. 1(January 1978): 41.
90. Marvin Camras, Magnetic Recording Handbook (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1988), 275–76.
91. Bruno Nettl, Recording Primitive and Folk Music in the Field,” American Anthropologist 56,
no. 6, part 1 (December 1954): 1101–02.
92. Ibid., 1101.
93. Founded in 1888, the journal American Anthropologist is a standard bearer in its ﬁeld;
professionally typeset, it was well distributed throughout the mid- and late 20th century.
Hand-typed, photocopied, and edited by a graduate student, mid-century issues of The

158

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Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers were dedicated to publishing articles that were unlikely
to be published elsewhere and strove to publish scholarship by students.
94. Alan P. Merriam, “The Selection of Recording Equipment for Field Use,” The Kroeber
Anthropological Society Papers 10 (Spring 1954): 5–9.
95. P. B. Peabody, “Song Notes and Nesting Notes of the Western Meadowlark,” The Osprey 1,
nos. 11–12 (July–August 1897): 139.
96. Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., “In Memoriam: Arthur A. Allen,” The Auk, 85, no. 2 (April 1968):
198.
97. Ibid.
98. Albert Brand, “Recording Sounds of Wild Birds,” The Auk 49, no. 4 (October 1932): 436.
99. Ibid., 438.
100. Ibid., 438–39.
101. Ibid., 439.
102. Arthur A. Allen, “Hunting with a Microphone the Voices of Vanishing Birds,” The National
Geographic Magazine LXXI, no. 6 (June 1937): 696–724.
103. Ibid., 713.
104. Ibid., 717.
105. Ibid., 704.
106. Ibid., 708.
107. J. F. Burton, “The BBC Natural History Unit Wildlife Sound Library 1948–1988,” Wildlife
Sound: The Journal of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society 12, no. 4 (Autumn 2012): 19.
108. Eric Simms, Wildlife Sounds and Their Recording (London: Paul Elek, 1979), 2.
109. Ibid., 6.
110. Koch, Memoirs, 26.
111. Ibid., 27.
112. Cheryl Tipp, “Shadows and Reﬂections - Cheryl Tipp,” Caught by the River, December 3,
2014, https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/12/shadows-and-reﬂections-cheryl-tipp/ (accessed December 2, 2018).
113. Paul Gorski, “Complicating ‘White Privilege’: Race, Poverty, and the Nature of theKnapsack,” CounterPunch, December 30, 2011, https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/
30/complicating-white-privilege/ (accessed March 4, 2021).
114. Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital (London: Penguin Books,
2011).
115. I have coined “corporeal privilege” as a strike against the overuse and bland dilution of “body”
and “bodies” in contemporary discourse.
116. Luis A. Fernandez, Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-Globalization Movement(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 9.
117. This contention is borne out by having been “detained” but never arrested at the many
protests I have attended.
118. Hugh Tracey, “Recording African Music in the Field,” African Music 1, no. 2 (1955): 10.
119. Sterne, The Audible Past, 236.
120. Samuel B. Charters, “Some Do’s and Don’ts of Field Recording,” Sing Out! 12, no. 3 (Summer
1962): 51.
121. Laura Boulton, “I Search for Ancient Music,” Columbia Library Columns XII, no. 2 (February1963): 13.
122. Andrew W. Cordier, “Introduction,” in Laura Boulton, The Music Hunter (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday & Company, 1969), xiii.
123. Boulton, The Music Hunter, 3.
124. Ibid.
125. Brady, A Spiral Way, 64.

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126. Myers, Ethnomusicology, 85.
127. Steven Feld, “Dialogic Editing: Interpreting How Kaluli Read Sound and Sentiment,” Cultural
Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1987): 191.
128. Joan M. Jensen, “Gone but Not Quite Forgotten,” in Travels with Frances Densmore: Her Life,
Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies, eds. Joan M. Jensen and Michelle Wick
Patterson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 243.
129. Boulton “I Search for Ancient Music,” 15.
130. Ibid.
131. Michael Veal and E. Tammy Kim, “Introduction,” in Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars
Listen to Sublime Frequencies, eds. Michael E. Veal and E. Tammy Kim (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2016), 19.
132. Personal conversation, November 26, 2011.
133. Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935–1945, ed. Ronald D.
Cohen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 19.
134. John Szwed, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (New York: Viking, 2010), 96.
135. Bruno Nettl, Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2010), 97.
136. David Novak, “The Sublime Frequencies of Old Media,” Public Culture 23, no. 3 (2011):
630–31.
137. Arvel Ahlers, Family Fun in Tape Recording (New York: Popular Library, 1965).
138. Carla Arton et al., Tony Schwartz Collection (Washington, DC: Motion Picture, Broadcasting
and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, 2012), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsrs/
eadmbrs.rs011002 (accessed March 2, 2021).
139. Tony Schwartz, “New York 19,” liner notes to New York 19, LP Record [1954], FD5558 (NewYork: Folkways Records & Service Corporation, 1954), 3.
140. David Suisman,” Listening to the City,” Smithsonian Folkways Magazine, Fall/Winter 2012,https://folkways.si.edu/magazine-fall-winter-2 0 1 2-listening-city/sounds/music/article/smithsonian (accessed March 3, 2021).
141. Arton et al., Tony Schwartz Collection, 6.
142. Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), xii, gives
1946 as the start of this exchange network; however, in Schwartz “New York 19,” 3, he states:“Since 1947 when I ﬁrst purchased a magnetic tape recorder, I have been exchanging recordings with people all over the world.”
143. Richard Carlin, Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways (New York: Harper
Collins, 2008), 239.
144. Schwartz, The Responsive Chord, xiii.
145. Schwartz, “New York 19,” 3.
146. Tony Schwartz, “Sounds of My City,” liner notes to Sounds of My City, LP Record, FC7341(New York: Folkways Records & Service Corporation, 1956), 6–8.
147. Ibid, 7.
148. Tony Schwartz, “For the Guidance of the Inspired,” liner notes to You’re Stepping on My
Shadow, LP Record, FD5582 (New York: Folkways Records & Service Corporation, 1962), 3.
149. Samuel B. Charters, “Sounds of London,” liner notes to The Sounds of London, LP Record,
FD5901 (New York: Folkways Records & Service Corporation, 1961), 4.
150. Bernie Krause, Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World (Berkeley, CA:
Wilderness Press, 2002).
151. Frank Dorritie, The Handbook of Field Recording (Vallejo, CA: ProAudio Press, 2003).
152. Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, https://www.wfae.net/ (accessed February 16,2021).
153. Field Notes, https://www.gruenrekorder.de/ﬁeldnotes/ (accessed February 16, 2021).

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154. Reﬂections on Process in Sound, http://www.reﬂections-on-process-in-sound.net/ (accessed
February 16, 2021).
155. Krause, Notes from the Wild.
156. Ibid., 87.
157. Grant Morrison, JLA: Earth 2 (New York: DC Comics, 2000).
158. Alfred Baker, The Life of Sir Isaac Pitman (Inventor of Phonography) (London: Sir Isaac
Pitman & Sons, 1908), 46–47.
159. Isaac Pitman, Phonography, or Writing by Sound (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1840), 1.
160. Katie Chenoweth, The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French
Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 137.
161. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison
Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 24.
162. Ibid., italics in original.
163. V. D. De Stains, Phonography; or The Writing of Sounds, 2nd ed. (London: Efﬁngham Wilson,
Royal Exchange, 1842), 9.
164. J. Mackenzie Pierce, “Writing at the Speed of Sound: Music Stenography and Recording
Beyond the Phonograph,” 19th-Century Music 41, no. 2 (2017): 121–50.
165. Ibid., 146–50.
166. Patrick Feaster, “‘A Compass of Extraordinary Range’: The Forgotten Origins of
Phonomanipulation,” ARSC Journal 42, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 179.
167. Sterne, The Audible Past, 236.
168. Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999), 70.
169. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 24.
170. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, 30th Anniversary
Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 80.
171. Patrick Feaster, “Phonography,” in Keywords in Sound, eds. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 139.
172. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines; Kahn, Noise Water Meat.
173. Pierce, “Writing at the Speed of Sound.”174. Duncan Campbell, “Reading Phonography, Inscribing Interdisciplinarity,” in Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and Translation, ed. Stefan Herbrechter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002)
131–46; Mack Hagood, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Durham, NC, and London:
Duke University Press, 2019), 142.
175. Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters, “Deﬁning Phonography: An Experiment in
Theory,” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 242–64.
176. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle To Zappa (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1988), 105.
177. Feaster, “Phonography,” 164.
178. Tony Grajeda, “Introduction,” in Music, Sound, and Technology in America, eds. Timothy D.
Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press,2012), 140.
179. Bernardo Alexander Attias, “Subjectivity in the Groove: Phonography, Digitality, andFidelity,” in DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance
Music, eds. Bernardo Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas, and Hillegonda C. Rietveld (NewYork and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 15–49; Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle,”
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5, no. 2 (November 2013): 44; Tobias
C. Van Veen, “Turn/Stile: Interpreting Udo Kasemets’ CaleNdarON for a Single Turntablewith Treatment and Surfaces,” Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003): 75–76.

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180. Patrick McGinley, Dale Lloyd, and Marcelo Radulovich, “A Brief History of Framework andPhonography.org,” April 2004, http://www.murmerings.com/phonography-earshot-4/ (accessed March 4, 2021).
181. I derived this date from the Yahoo Groups page for the phonography list; however, it should
be noted that the phonography list began at another, now-defunct host, egroups.com. Because
only “the moderator can view the list of previous posts” (Marcelo Radulovich, “Re: Welcome
to phonography.” August 26, 2000, https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/
conversations/topics/6 (accessed June 1, 2019)), the ﬁrst three messages to the group, presumably including the welcome message, are no longer available. https://groups.yahoo.com/
neo/groups/phonography/info (accessed July 16, 2019). n.b.: Yahoo deleted their publicYahoo Groups archive on January 31, 2020: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahooextends-deadline-for-deletion-of-yahoo-groups-data/340033/ (accessed January 14, 2021).
182. McGinley et al., “A Brief History.”
183. Marcelo Radulovich, “ﬁeldrecording.org or phonography.org, June 11, 2001, https://groups.
yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/conversations/messages/362 (accessed June 1, 2019).
Emphasis in original.
184. McGinley et al., “A Brief History.”
185. David Dunn, Why Do Whales and Children Sing? A Guide to Listening in Nature (Santa Fe,
NM: EarthEar, 1999), 11.
186. David Dunn, “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred,” in The Book of Music and Nature, 2nd ed.,eds. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,2009), 103.
187. Ibid., 104
188. Yannick Dauby, “Re: [phonography] Digest Number 90.” June 13, 2001, https://groups.
yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/conversations/messages/402 (accessed June 1, 2019).
189. Ibid.
190. Cited in John Levack Drever, “Field Recording Centered Composition Practices,” in The
Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, eds. Marcel Corbussen, Vincent Meelberg, and Barry
Truax (New York: Routledge, 2017), 75.
191. Marc McNulty, “Re: [phonography] Fieldrecording.org or Phonography.org,” June 11, 2001,
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/conversations/messages/363 (accessed
June 2, 2019).
192. Lee B. Brown, “Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music,” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 4 (2000): 361–72.
193. Ibid., 361.
194. This deﬁnition could easily include “reproducing” rolls and roll perforators made for player
pianos. See Brian Dolan, Inventing Entertainment: The Player Piano and the Origins of an
American Musical Industry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, 2009), 45–47;
95–96.
195. Yitzchak Dumiel, a.k.a. Du Yisa, né Isaac Sterling (1970–2013), instigated the ﬁrst Phonographers Union performance in 2002 and wrote the group’s manifesto. He also organized
Seattle performances by Francisco López, mnortham, and other adventurous artists of the era.
For a biography and explication of his polynyms see Aaron Sterling, “In Memoriam: Yitzchak
Dumiel,” undated, Nanoexplanations: the blog of Aaron Sterling. https://nanoexplanations.
wordpress.com/in-memoriam-yitzchak-dumiel/ (accessed March 19, 2021).
196. Thomas Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future,” North American Review 126, no. 262(May–June 1878): 527–38.
197. Oliver Reed and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph(Indianapolis and New York: Howard W. Sams & Company, 1959), 7.
198. Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future,” 534.

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199. Thomas Edison, “The Perfected Phonograph,” The North American Review 146, no. 379(June 1888): 641–50.
200. Ibid., 646, 647, 649.
201. Ibid., 645, 647, 649.
202. Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat, 17.
203. Between 2002 and 2009 list members Catherine Clover, Andy Ditzler, Yitzchak Dumiel,
Eric Leonardson, Mark Ragsdale, James Reynolds, and Bill Thompson mentioned, cited, or
recommended Kahn’s Noise Water Meat; however, Kahn’s ideas were never discussed in depth
beyond the initial poster’s comments.
204. Joel Smith, “The Word “phonography” - Joel Smith (posted 6/12/01),” http://www.
phonography.org/word.htm (accessed October 14, 2019).
205. Other composers active in the early years of the World Soundscape Project—Howard Broomﬁeld, Bruce Davis, and Peter Huse (see Barry Truax, “Soundscape Studies: An Introduction to
the World Soundscape Project,” Numus West no. 5 (Spring 1974): 38)—have discographies of
one or two hard-to-ﬁnd solo works or releases and did not write extensively about composing.
206. Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1984),
207.
207. Barry Truax, “Soundscape Composition as Global Music,” Sound Escape conference text
presented at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, July 1, 2000, http://www.sfu.ca/*truax/soundescape.html (accessed March 1, 2021).
208. Ibid.
209. Hildegard Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” Organised
Sound 7, no. 1 (2002): 52.
210. Andra McCartney, “Circumscribed Journeys Through Soundscape Composition,” Organised
Sound 7, no. 1 (2002): 1–3.
211. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52.
212. Truax, Acoustic Communication, 207.
213. For a price survey of the major makers of MD namely Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, and Aiwa see:
http://minidisc.org/part_Recorders_Sony.html https://minidisc.org/part_Recorders_Sharp.
html, http://minidisc.org/part_Recorders_Panasonic.html, and http://minidisc.org/part_
Recorders_Aiwa.html (accessed January 12, 2021).
214. John A. Lomax, “Field Experiences with Recording Machines,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 1
no. 2 (June 1937): 59.
215. Introduced in 1987, Digital Audio Tape is a fragile and obsolete format for making highﬁdelity digital recordings onto a thin magnetic tape (see Luc Baert, Luc Theunissen, andGuido Vergult, Digital Audio and Compact Disc Technology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Newnes, 1992),
20, 23), housed in a VHS-like cassette (see John Watkinson, An Introduction to Digital Audio,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Focal Press, 2002), 302–6). For a comprehensive review of DAT machines
and portable recorders of that era see Gino Robair, “What’s Up with DAT?”, Electronic
Musician, November 1, 1999; updated November 29, 2017, https://www.emusician.com/
gear/whats-up-with-dat (accessed June 1, 2019).
216. Known in the UK as RRP (“recommended retail price”) and in recent decades in the USA as
MSRP (“manufacturer’s suggested retail price”), list price is a ﬁctive price point high enoughfor a retailer to discount without an actual loss of proﬁt, and thus grant consumers the sense
they are getting a discount.
217. Harris Broadcast Division, The 1997 Harris Catalogue (Richmond, IN: Harris Broadcast
Division, 1997), 74.
218. As of this writing, http://minidisc.org/ suffers from link rot to vendors and suppliers; however, the core information—manuals, prices, and equipment summaries—remains accessible(accessed January 12, 2021).

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219. I base this contention of text searches made in October 2019: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/search/messages?query¼advice and https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/search/messages?query¼advise and https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/search/messages?query¼recommend (accessed October 2, 2019). n.b.:Yahoo deleted their public Yahoo Groups archive on January 31, 2020: https://www.
searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-extends-deadline-for-deletion-of-yahoo-groups-data/
340033/ (accessed January 14, 2021).
220. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52.
221. Aaron Ximm, “Thoughts on Field Recording,” originally posted at http://www.
quietamerican.org/commentary.htm, captured August 24, 2000 as https://web.archive.org/
web/20000824050540/http://www.quietamerican.org/commentary.html (accessed March
9, 2021).
222. I purchased a “stereo tie pin” lavalier microphone model 33–3028 at Radio Shack on August
31, 2002, for $32.63. Sony E55B lavalier microphones “cost about $410 each” (Krause, Wild
Soundscapes 2002, 77), a differential price ratio of 25 to 1.
223. Ximm, “Thoughts on Field Recording.”
224. Ken C. Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 488.
225. Ibid., 500.
226. Christopher DeLaurenti, “What is an aural safari?” [2001], https://web.archive.org/web/20181002091107/http://www.phonography.org/safari.htm (accessed March 10, 2021).
227. See https://www.discogs.com/label/38571-phonographyorg for a complete list (accessed
March 3, 2021).
228. McGinley et al., “A Brief History.”
229. Ibid.
230. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52.
231. Ibid., italics in original.
232. Hildegard Westerkamp, Transformations, compact disc, IMED 9631 (Montreal: emprientes
DIGITALes, 1996).
233. Sterne, The Audible Past, 160. Italics added.
234. Adam Patrick Bell, Dawn of the DAW: The Studio as Musical Instrument (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018), 8–11.
235. Morton, Off the Record, 147.
236. Brady, A Spiral Way, 22.
237. Morton, Off the Record, 147.
238. Feaster, “‘A Compass of Extraordinary Range.’”239. Ibid.
240. John Levack Drever, “Soundscape Composition: The Convergence of Ethnography and
Acousmatic Music,” Organised Sound 7, no. 1 (2002): 24.
241. Yitzchak Dumiel, “What is Phonography?” essay including in performance program,“Phonographer’s Union 111002” October 11, 2002.
242. McCartney, “Circumscribed Journeys,” 1.
243. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 53.
244. Marcelo Radulovich, “Re: [phonography] comp discussion, round two,” March 14, 2001,
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/conversations/messages/214 (accessed
June 6, 2019).
245. Dale Lloyd, “(ﬁnal call) guidelines for the next phonography comp,” February 26, 2003,
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/phonography/conversations/messages/2656 (accessed
September 15, 2019).
246. Truax, “Soundscape Composition as Global Music.”
247. Ibid.

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248. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52.
249. McCartney, “Circumscribed Journeys,” 1.
250. Lloyd, “(ﬁnal call) guidelines.”251. Sterne, The Audible Past, 90.
252. Ibid., 95.
253. DeLaurenti, “What is an aural safari?”
254. I once owned a dozens of thrift-store purchased National Geographic magazines, only keeping
prized articles on London, Honolulu, Wisconsin, Australia, Vietnam, Estonia, Aden, North
Africa, and Switzerland.
255. Hildegard Westerkamp, Transformations.
256. David Kolber, “Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk: Shifting Perspectives in RealWorld Music,” Organised Sound 7, no. 1 (2002): 41.
257. DeLaurenti, “What is an aural safari?”
258. Ibid.
259. Ibid.
260. Iain Findlay-Walsh, “Sonic Autoethnographies: Personal listening as compositional context,”
Organised Sound 23, no. 1 (2017): 123.
261. Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, “Editing Reality: New Social History and Documentary,”
Visual Sociology 9, no. 1 (1994): 62.
262. Kolber, “Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk,” 42.
263. Findlay-Walsh, “Sonic Autoethnographies,” 123.
264. Mark Peter Wright, “Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields: The Poetics and Politics ofEnvironmental Sound Arts,” (PhD diss. University of the Arts, London, 2015), 35.
265. Szwed, Alan Lomax, 80. For an explication of Hurston’s innovations, see chapter 2 of Daphne
A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
266. Wright, “Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields,” 37.
267. Dunn, “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred,” 104.
268. Hildegard Westerkamp, “Soundscape Composition (1): Linking Inner and Outer Worlds,”
conference address written for the “Soundscape Before 2000” conference, Amsterdam,
November 19–-26, 1999, https://www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/writings/writingsby/?post_
id¼19&title¼%E2%80%8Bsoundscape-composition:-linking-inner-and-outer-worlds- (accessed March 5, 2021).
269. DeLaurenti, “What is an aural safari?”
270. Westerkamp. “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52.
271. DeLaurenti, N30.
272. Westerkamp. “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52; Westerkamp,“Soundscape Composition.” Italics in original.
273. Findlay-Walsh, “Sonic Autoethnographies,” 123.
274. Ibid.
275. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52.
276. Findlay-Walsh, “Sonic Autoethnographies,” 123.
277. DeLaurenti, “What is an aural safari?”
278. Christopher DeLaurenti, Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven-Stravinsky-Holst, compact disc, GD019 (New York: GD Stereo, 2007).
279. Martin Spinelli, “Electric Line: The Poetics of Digital Audio Editing,” in New Media Poetics:
Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, eds. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007), 103.
280. Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen, Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization
on Popular Music Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 61.

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281. Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio, 19. Pohlmann refers to short-term deterioration in thesignal path, not the archival longevity of media.
282. Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (New York: Faber
and Faber, 2009), 218.
283. Edison, “The Perfected Phonograph,” 648.
284. Tom Bishop, “Is Music Safe on Compact Disc?” BBC News, August 27, 2004, http://news.
bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3940669.stm (accessed March 4, 2021).
285. Jamie M. Niehof et al., “Long-term Preservation of Deprecated Media: How Can Libraries
Provide Information From Today’s CD-ROMs in the Future?” Paper presentation #21833 atthe 2018 American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, Salt
Lake City, https://peer.asee.org/30777 (accessed March 4, 2021).
286. Joe Iraci, “Longevity of Optical Disc Media: Accelerated Ageing Predictions and Natural
Ageing Data,” Restaurator: International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival
Material 38, no. 3 (September 2017): 273–98.
287. Joe Iraci, “The Stability of DVD Optical Disc Formats,” Restaurator: International Journal for
the Preservation of Library and Archival Material 32, no. 1 (March 2011): 39–59.
288. OSTA, “Understanding CD-R & CD-RW,” white paper (Cupertino, CA: Optical Storage
Technology Association (2003): 32, http://www.osta.org/technology/pdf/cdr_cdrw.pdf (accessed March 10, 2021).
289. Jay Rose, Producing Great Sound for Film and Video, 4th ed. (Burlington, MA: Focal Press,2015), 178, 384.
290. Richard Patton, Sound Man: An Introduction to the Art, Science, and Business of Location
Sound (Vancouver: Location Sound Ltd., 2010), 149.
291. Dorritie, The Handbook of Field Recording, 53.
292. Ibid., 77.
293. Ruth Happel, Loons of Echo Pond, compact disc, 09006-23110-2 (Seattle: Miramar Recordings, 1998).
294. Bernie Krause, “Loons of Echo Pond,” Liner notes to Happel, Loons of Echo Pond.
295. Patton, Sound Man, 79, 262.
296. Gordon Hempton, One Square Inch of Silence (New York: Free Press, 2009), 193.
297. Ibid., 99.
298. Ibid, 24, 36; Dorritie, The Handbook of Field Recording, 64.
299. Hempton, One Square Inch, 99.
300. Rose, Producing Great Sound, 161.
301. Krause, Notes from the Wild, 85.
302. https://delaurenti.net/protest/ (accessed March 1, 2021).
303. Findlay-Walsh, “Sonic Autoethnographies,” 123.
304. Westerkamp. “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” 52. Italics inoriginal.
305. Aimee Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana, Chicago, andSpringﬁeld: University of Illinois Press, 2015,) 11.
306. The works I listed included Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy (1992); Annea Lockwood’s “Delta
Run” from her CD Breaking the Surface (1999); Claude Matthews’ self-released DogPoundFoundSound (1996); Rachel McInturff’s “By Heart” (1997); and Charles Amirkhanian’s Pas
De Voix (1988), which intersected artists across eras, genres, gender, and age.
307. Christopher DeLaurenti, “On Phonography: A Response to Michael Rüsenberg,” Soundscape:
The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 6, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 6.
308. ShotSpotter, “How Gunshot Detection Works,” https://www.shotspotter.com/technology/(accessed March 1, 2021).

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309. Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell, and Spencer S. Hsu, “Police Let Most Capitol Rioters Walk
Away. But Cellphone Data and Videos Could Now Lead to More Arrests,” Washington Post,
January 8, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/08/trump-mobtech-arrests/ (accessed January 15, 2021).
310. Robert C. Maher, Principles of Forensic Audio Analysis (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 36.
311. John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 125.
312. Speech Technology Center, “Forensic Audio Technique Overview,” white paper (New York:
SpeechPro, 2013), https://speechpro.com/ﬁles/ﬁleﬁeld_stats/2739/1579/0/cc68849421fac5
a4acfe5972ca825236 (accessed March 10, 2021).
313. Priscilla Lau, “The Lombard Effect as a Communicative Phenomenon,” white paper, UC
Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2008):2, http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/
documents/2008/lau.pdf (accessed March 10, 2021).
314. Pingchuan Ma, Stavros Petridis, and Maja Pantic, “Investigating the Lombard Effect Inﬂuence
on End-to-End Audio-Visual Speech Recognition,” paper accepted for publication at Interspeech (2019): 1, https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02112 (accessed March 10, 2021).
315. Ibid.
316. Frederic Jameson, “Post-Modernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal
Foster (New York: The New Press, 1998 [reprint of 1983 edition]), 111.
317. Ibid., 112.
318. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 80.
319. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 21.
320. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 63
321. Ibid.
322. Gérard Genette, “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (Spring 1991):
261.
323. Ibid., 262.
324. Densmore, “The Study of Indian Music,” 534.
325. Nat Hentoff, At the Jazz Band Ball: 60 Years on the Jazz Scene (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2010), 214.

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