field recording

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Returning Sound to the Commons

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Returning Sound to the Commons

am always teaching that sound is immediate, it enters our being before we can prepare, before thought can form a perceptual shield against it. From the time we are in the womb, before ‘King Sight’ (Walter Murch in Chion’s Audio Vision) has taken over we are learning and understanding about the our world through it, and then when we born, our existence in the world is to be immersed in it, pulled into relations that we do not choose but cannot escape. Unlike sight, a sense which allows for distance and framing, sound insists on intimacy, it places us inside the world and ourselves. Ever since, just over 50 years ago, R. Murray Schafer tried to “tune the world” and formalised the notion of ‘soundscape’ and thus soundscape studies which has lead increasing formalisation within the frameworks of academia and now government legislation (for example in the Noise and Soundscape Plan for Wales 2023-2028).

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Understanding the Universal Category System (UCS)

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Understanding the Universal Category System (UCS)

For those of us who are sound designers or field recordists, we all have tons of recordings which may or may not be well labelled or traceable once they get copied on to a hard drive. Being able to search, find and understand what a recording contains is a major requirement when working professionally, as a badly organised or unlabelled library becomes a veritable haystack from which you are trying to extract a needle! UCS offers a method which means you can easily work through your own and other professional sound libaries. Here is a practical introduction and how-to guide on what it is and how you can use it.

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What sample rate and bit depth should I use?

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What sample rate and bit depth should I use?

This is probably one of the questions I get asked more than any other and it (thanks to the extremism of the internet) can provoke all manner of responses. As such I have put together the following set of guidelines which I use, and through explanation with my students suggest that they use. I hope that you find these guidelines useful when you are struggling with what sample rate and bit depth to use for your project.

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Train station // Binaural soundscape

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Train station // Binaural soundscape

I love the buzz and vibrance of a train station platform. There is always so much to take in sonically, but often we are distracted by the hustle and bustle of what is going on as we wait. I find soundscape recordings of train stations give you another insight and perspective to the inner workings of our hive like behaviour at transport hubs.