I spent most of last week attending the very excellent Field Studies summer school.

Ostensibly a course in sound appreciation & design for architects, the course actually attracted an excitingly diverse range of people: artists, musicians, journalists, engineers, anthropologists, producers, students, post-grads…  (and architects).

My main motivation for going back to school was the realisation that environmental noise, as well as ‘ambient’ and ‘found’ sounds,  have inevitably become a significant part of my recent outdoor projects.

The wind, for example, was my prime enemy during my walks in Scotland and Schleswig Holstein, screwing up many a Flipcam clip or Audioboo. The sounds of nature and of the street, though, have also become my friends during Blakewalks and whilst developing TheHaunter. 

I’ve felt for a while now that instead of trying either to screen out or roughly endure the sounds of drills, of cars, of  planes, of seagulls and crows, of weirs and the wind in the trees, I really should learn to embrace these sounds, capture them properly and use them effectively in the resulting work.

At the very least the quality of the recorded audio that I use in my projects has needed to improve (I guess working with audio pros at BBC Radio 4 for the last few years has finally shamed me).

At Field Studies I was lucky enough to be in a group led and mentored by Esther Venrooy, who insisted that we spend two whole days of our allotted four simply listening and trying to write down on paper what it was that we were hearing.

The final two days were then spent creating a piece of work based on the paper description of sounds in a space over time produced by someone else in the group. Here’s the audio sketch I received (it looks a bit like a Dadaist poem, I think):

And here’s my attempt at a sound piece that presents some of the sounds described in the first section of the sketch:

During final presentation I asked the audience to ‘fill in the gaps’ – to add the sounds from the poem that weren’t in the sound piece itself – using a combination of flash cards and an animated sequence to prompt people into making the appropriate noises of shuffling, dragging feet, bloops, a-choos etc. You can try it yourself if you like by ‘singing’ along to the movie:

This course really helped me to face up to the reality of how hard it is to describe sound or to ‘capture’ it. In particular, I don’t think I really appreciated how sound slips and slides in and then away over time, so that no two 5-sec sequences are the same. Just by playing this movie twice and adding your vocal sounds a different way or in a different order, you’ll understand what I mean.

And that wasn’t all that Field Studies provided. When we weren’t working on paper or rapidly prototyping ideas, we were enjoying thought-provoking lectures. (One by Tim Ingold author of ‘Against soundscape‘ I think probably requires a separate post). And then there was the work and thoughts of the other students to process and enjoy (although I had to leave early on the last day so I really missed out in this regard.)

What was most striking about the course in the end was how little time we spent playing with kit or learning how to use microphones or noodling with audio software. This was a bit unsettling at first, but I think I was ultimately persuaded that the gadgetry and the tech were nothing to worry about (well not too much, I guess).

Instead, I came away with a range of different strategies for becoming a more effective listener or hearer (cue distant laughter from my wife) – and I now have a much stronger sense of how one might  document and map a sound space *before* one attempts to record it. In some cases, I now think that hearing, listening and some form of visual mapping may be the *only* thing you need to do and no actual audio recording is required.

Now that really is a curious outcome of a week-long education in sound.