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"Field recordings."
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Writing the field recording : sound, word, environment
A field recording is any audio recording made outside of the studio. Such recordings have lately become important to contemporary musicians, sound artists and environmentalists. Less attention, however, has been given to the relation of sound, as manifested in the theory and practice of the field recording, to writing. The eleven essays collected here take the recent explosion of interest in field recording as the point of departure for an investigation of the sounded field in music and its relationship to literature, writing and sound studies. This book includes seminal pieces on field thinking by John Berger and Lisa Robertson, alongside the work of composers, musicians, poets and critics. As well as critical reflections on artistic practice, the collection presents an inter-disciplinary exploration of the various registers in which the field recording is written, including the essayistic, the creative, the experimental and the philosophical.
Book
The Beautiful Music All Around Us
The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song \"Shortenin' Bread,\" the fiddle tune \"Bonaparte's Retreat,\" the blues song \"Another Man Done Gone,\" and the spiritual \"Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down,\" these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by._x000B__x000B_Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on \"the Library's recording machine\" in a rendering of \"Rock Island Line\"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme \"Pullin' the Skiff\"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into \"Glory in the Meetinghouse.\"_x000B__x000B_Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, \"amplifying tradition's gifts,\" Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. _x000B__x000B_Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The book also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s._x000B__x000B_
eBook
The beautiful music all around us : field recordings and the American experience
Highlights the stories behind thirteen field recordings captured between 1934 and 1942, focusing on the experiences of the people--ranging from students to prisoners--who contributed to the recordings.
Book
Enhanced synaptic plasticity in mice with phosphomimetic mutation of the GluA1 AMPA receptor
Phosphorylation of the GluA1 subunit of AMPA receptors has been proposed to regulate receptor trafficking and synaptic transmission and plasticity. However, it remains unclear whether GluA1 phosphorylation is permissive or sufficient for enacting these functional changes. Here we investigate the role of GluA1 phosphorylation at S831 and S845 residues in the hippocampus through the analyses of GluA1 S831D/S845D phosphomimetic knock-in mice. S831D/S845D mice showed normal total and surface expression and subcellular localization of GluA1 as well as intact basal synaptic transmission. In addition, theta-burst stimulation, a protocol that was sufficient to induce robust long-term potentiation (LTP) in WT mice, resulted in LTP of similar magnitude in S831D/S845D mice. However, S831D/S845D mice showed LTP induced with 10-Hz stimulation, a protocol that is weaker than theta-burst stimulation and was not sufficient to induce LTP in WT mice. Moreover, S831D/S845D mice exhibited LTP induced with spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) protocol at a long pre-post interval that was subthreshold for WT mice, although a suprathreshold STDP protocol at a short pre-post interval resulted in similarly robust LTP for WT and S831D/S845D mice. These results indicate that phosphorylation of GluA1 at S831 and S845 is sufficient to lower the threshold for LTP induction, increasing the probability of synaptic plasticity.
Journal Article
Getting participants' voices heard: using mobile, participant led, sound-based methods to explore place-making
Varieties of sound-based research methods have been used for exploring participants' relations with environment, space and place. For example, soundwalking, field-recording and audio guides have all been employed to help research participants become attuned to the sonic environment. Some of these have been used as participant-led approaches, enabling participants to devise walking routes and produce their own soundscape compositions. This paper explores these various uses and reports on two primary research collaborations that adopt mobile, participant-led approaches, in which participants negotiate the precise nature of the research collaboration. Furthermore, it examines diverse methods for disseminating soundscape recordings that emerge from such projects. The examples presented here reveal that sound-based research can be employed to do more than attune participants to sonic environments. This research highlights instances of productive, participant-led research that reveal diverse strategies for disseminating this work. There are many channels and media through which sound work can be made available to a wider audience, across disciplines and beyond academia. Reflexively adopted, dissemination through web and social media, exhibition spaces and other public events offers researchers and their participants a performative complement to the publication of work through journal articles.
Journal Article
Listening
Listening as a methodology is about an enhanced receptivity to what is taking place in a research encounter. Reflecting on a process of workshopping audio methodologies, this piece highlights the diverse set of pre‐individual and nonhuman agencies that occupy fields of listening, indifferent to, and often against, the predefined intentions of the researcher. In directing us to the field in these ways, the intervention in listening makes apparent that post‐humanist methodologies are not only about finding new ways of communicating, documenting, or representing research environments, but rather about engendering new ways of relating to them.
Journal Article
In search of the blues
In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. Following the trail of characters like Howard Odum, who combed Mississippi's back roads with a cylinder phonograph to record vagrants, John and Alan Lomax, who prowled Southern penitentiaries and unearthed the rough, melancholy vocals of Leadbelly, and James McKune, a recluse whose record collection came to define the primal sounds of the Delta blues, Hamilton reveals this musical form to be the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music. By excavating the history of the Delta blues, Hamilton reveals the extent to which American culture has been shaped by white fantasies of racial difference.
eBook
ESPERDYNE: A dual‐band heterodyne monitor and ultrasound recorder for bioacoustic field surveys
Background. Ultrasonic monitoring is essential for ecological studies of bats and other animals, yet high‐performance field devices remain prohibitively expensive and inaccessible—particularly in biodiversity‐rich regions with limited research infrastructure. Existing low‐cost options often lack real‐time listening and recording features. There remains a critical need for versatile, affordable and field‐ready tools that support acoustic behavioural research, educational and conservation outreach. New tool. I introduce Esperdyne, an open‐source, dual‐channel ultrasound monitoring and recording system based on the ESP32‐S3 microcontroller. With a component cost under €75, Esperdyne combines real‐time heterodyne monitoring, stereo recording from a retroactive ring buffer, and an intuitive rotary‐based user interface with OLED display. It supports full‐duplex 192 kHz audio, dual‐band tuning for simultaneous frequency‐modulated/constant‐frequency monitoring, and real‐time playback via headphones or a speaker. All audio processing—including adjustable carrier frequency mixing, gain control and file‐saving logic—is implemented without reliance on fixed‐rate audio libraries. Applications. Esperdyne has been tested in field conditions and shown to reliably detect high‐SNR calls and harmonics from free‐flying bats. A companion tool Bat Reviewer supports rapid inspection, playback and export of selected recordings. Together, these tools enable portable, solo‐operated acoustic surveys with minimal training. Beyond ecological research, Esperdyne is suitable for education, outreach, and preliminary field assessments in remote or resource‐constrained settings. Its modular design encourages hardware customisation and firmware extension by interdisciplinary teams. Availability and implementation. Full hardware schematics, firmware and software tools are publicly available. The system can be built using hobbyist‐accessible components and standard Arduino tooling. By sharing this system openly, I aim to lower technical barriers and foster broader participation in ultrasound‐based biodiversity monitoring and conservation. Esperdyne demonstrates how microcontroller‐based platforms can bridge gaps between affordability, usability and scientific capability—supporting global efforts in soundscape ecology.
Journal Article
Post-immersive Listening: Perspectives on the Mediation of Sonic Environments
Unplanned meetings can stem from complex movements across geographies, with serendipity playing a key role. Media artist Budhaditya Chattopadhyay unexpectedly meets researcher Budhaditya Chattopadhyay at a café in Budapest. This is their eighth meeting, following previous encounters in Copenhagen (2017), Den Haag (2021c), Kolkata (2021b), Berlin (2022a), Beirut (2022b), Basel (2023), and Rampurhat (2024). Each interaction has fostered a reflexive exchange of ideas, merging their artistic and theoretical perspectives on sound, listening, migratory experiences, and decolonial activism. Despite the differing lenses they bring, their conversations generate new insights. In the bustling café, surrounded by disengaged students emblematic of the isolation in European universities, the two engage in thoughtful discussions on acoustic ecologies, sonic environments, field recording, and audiovisual media. Their dialogue embodies a spirit of camaraderie, underscoring the value of interdisciplinary exchanges in nurturing knowledge and understanding across artistic and scholarly domains. Encontros não planejados podem surgir de movimentos complexos através de geografias, com a imponderabilidade desempenhando um papel crucial. O artista midiático Budhaditya Chattopadhyay encontra inesperadamente o pesquisador Budhaditya Chattopadhyay em um café em Budapeste. Este é o oitavo encontro deles, após interações anteriores em Copenhague (2017), Haia (2021c), Calcutá (2021b), Berlim (2022a), Beirute (2022b), Basel (2023) e Rampurhat (2024). Cada interação promoveu uma troca reflexiva de ideias, fundindo suas perspectivas artísticas e teóricas sobre som, escuta, experiências migratórias e ativismo decolonial. Apesar das diferentes lentes que trazem, suas conversas geram novos insights. No café movimentado, cercados por estudantes desengajados, sintomas do isolamento típico de universidades europeias, os dois se envolvem em discussões ponderadas sobre ecologias acústicas, ambientes sonoros, gravações de campo e mídias audiovisuais. Seu diálogo reflete um espírito de camaradagem, destacando o valor das trocas interdisciplinares na promoção do conhecimento e da compreensão entre os domínios artístico e acadêmico.
Journal Article