3. How to Fail a Field Recording?
Assume that:
- “proper” microphones have been placed “sensibly” (whatever that means);
- the recording levels have been adjusted for enough loudness without clipping;
- wind doesn’t blow straight into the microphone, and no fly buzzes too close to it;
- and, generally, that all technical issues have been sorted.
Will the resultant recording then qualify as a field recording? The recording device will document as faithfully as its technology allows the pressure waves that occur in its vicinity. But the abundance of literature on how field recordings should be done clearly indicates that this is not enough.
There are at least two reasons, then, to ask how “field” recordings can fail. First, the possibility to refute an assertion by empirical means (what Karl Popper called its “falsifiability,” 2002) is the core requisite of scientific claims. If the recording is to be treated as a piece of evidence about a “field,” then it should also be able to be “wrong.” What kind of field recording would be a false one? Secondly, as works of art, field recordings must at least interest the listener. This is not about aesthetics (whether one “likes” what one hears or not). It is about the minimal condition of engaging in a listening experience: that one will be willing to keep on listening. This can certainly fail. Should the failure be attributed to the recording or to the listener?
In a short and incisive critique, Salomé Voegelin argues that some field recordists “mistake the reduced sonic data for the sensorial complexity of the encounter, and forget the frame of reference left behind that needs reframing if it is to trigger anything” (Voegelin 2014: online version). Without this tension of transformation, she writes, “listeners stare in puzzlement at sleeve notes and press releases trying to intellectually grasp the significance and joy of what is absent. […] From these outskirts we hear not the field but its absence” (Voegelin 2014: online version). Perhaps this is the most dramatic – and also the most general – way a field recording can fail. Voegelin argues that “exciting field recording does not record the field but produces a plurality of fields” (Voegelin 2014: online version). With this understanding, recordings do not mediate between reality and the listener. They “respond” to reality and provide a playground (a “playfield,” one might venture) for the listener to explore. At this point, although recordings of “music” are often opposed to recordings of “soundscapes,” there is not much left to differentiate them. “Music” is a set of acoustic events that seems to stand “apart from the ordinary workings of cause and effect, and which is irreducible to any physical organisation” (Scruton 1997: 39). A Bergerian field, in the acoustic domain, is something very similar. A form of “enchantment” accompanies that listening posture which relates sounds to each other rather than to their physical causes.[11]
A few years ago, a friend in Bucharest gave me a CD. It contained a few songs by a female singer accompanied on accordion. They were in Rom, aesthetically pleasant but not exceptional from a musical point of view. The quality of the recording was average as well. It sounded like a private party in a living room. One could hear the resonance of the walls; there were some other people talking occasionally; some glasses tinkled. The CD had only one handwritten inscription: “Nora Luca, 24/12/2010.” My friend smiled: “See, I’ve found her! It’s for you. A field recording!” This is all that he ever said about it.