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This article explores the role of the radio as an artistic instrument. It discusses both contemporary and historical art experiments, namely those where the sound of the radio or the form of radio reception is an important aspect of the final work. We examine the question, 'What does it mean for a radio to be an instrument?' And to clarify, we mean any kind of instrument, not just a musical one. To answer this question, this article focuses on the concepts and theory of those Polish artists who have used radio in their artwork, either as the source of a particular type of sound or as a medium that collects and transmits the sound of its surroundings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of the use and reception of field recordings on radio, in France and Britain, outside the categories considered as art or music such as hörspiel or musique concrète. It shows that radio producers had diverse reactions to the use of sonic ambiences recorded in the field. There was an opposition between a 'Pure Sound School', which promoted the use of field recordings instead of voice to depict the environment where the reporter was, and a school that privileged voice. If the use of recordings of sonic ambiences was not new, their utilisation on radio as elements autonomous in themselves was. They were falling between categories: they were not reports (because of the absence of voice), they were not musique concrète (because sounds were not modified and were presented within their context, that is, not as sound objects), they were not sound effects (because they lasted several minutes and could be composed through editing), and they were not wildlife recordings (because wildlife could be absent). Sonic ambiences were new sonic objects that took time to digest. This time also represented a listening mutation, and this will be analysed through the beginnings of radio documentaries and the works of sound hunters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steven Connor's book Giving Way begins with a list of unappreciated qualities, the first of which is a capitalised: 'SILENCE'. Shyness, reserve, withdrawal and holding back accompany silence in a long sentence of qualities, which 'tend to be marked with disapproval, sympathy or revulsion', and some of which are, as Connor notes, 'characterized as a mental disorder, in the form of social anxiety or social phobia' (Connor 2019: 1). Silence is often seen as a lack of agency, an anti-social and suspect unwillingness to participate. But as a sound artist working with field-recording, I am aware that silence, withdrawal and holding back can also be a form or method of practice and participation. Since 2004, my creative practice has included a series of physical and imagined silent releases. This article draws on these works and their documentation to explore silence as a potential, shared and communal space; an immediate composition that invites both listener and non-listener into its congress. Listening in on the conversation of telephone pauses and the closed paragraphs of library shelves, silence can be heard undoing purposeful agency, shyly engaging us in the anti-social practice of inaction, so that we might not participate together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores recent theories of listening, perception and embodiment, including those by Mark Grimshaw and Tom Garner, Salomé Voegelin, and Eric Clarke, as well as consequences and possibilities arising from them in relation to field recording and soundscape art practice. These theories of listening propose auditory perception as an embodied process of engaging with and understanding lived environment. Such phenomenological listening is understood as a relational engagement with the world in motion, as movement and change, which grants access to the listener's emerging presence, agency and place in the world. Such ideas on listening have developed concurrently with new approaches to making and presenting field recordings, with a focus on developing phonographic methods for capturing and presenting the recordist's embodied auditory perspective. In the present study, 'first-person' field recording is defined as both method and culturally significant material whereby a single recordist carries, wears or remains present with a microphone, consciously and reflexively documenting their personal listening encounters. This article examines the practice of first-person field recording and considers its specific applications in a range of sound art and soundscape art examples, including work by Gabi Losoncy, Graham Lambkin, Christopher Delaurenti and Klaysstarr (the author). In the examination of these methods and works, first-person field recording is considered as a means of capturing the proximate auditory space of the recordist as a mediated 'point of ear', which may be embodied, inhabited, and listened through by a subsequent listener. The article concludes with a brief summary of the discussion before some closing thoughts on recording, listening and the field, on field recording as practice-research and on potential connections with other fields in which the production of virtual environments is a key focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes two site-specific sound installations conceived as part of interdisciplinary collaborations which aimed to explore different acoustic and perceptual features of urban and rural landscapes. The creative process involved in the design and implementation of both installations is described, focusing on the organic montage techniques based on spatial and temporal features of field recording methods. Future developments of the works will consider ways of developing further spatial-temporal sampling methods to assess particular features of soundscapes by panels of trained listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is an analysis of two sound art performances that took place in June 2015 in outdoor public spaces at the social housing area Urbanplanen in Copenhagen, Denmark. The two performances were On the Productions of a Poor Acoustics by Brandon LaBelle and Green Interactive Biofeedback Environments (GIBE) by Jeremy Woodruff. In order to investigate the complex situation that arises when sound art is staged in such contexts, the authors of this article suggest exploring the events through approaching them as ‘situations’ (Doherty 2009). With this approach it becomes possible to engage and combine theories from several fields. Aspects of sound art studies, performance studies and contemporary art studies are presented in order to theoretically explore the very diverse dimensions of the two sound art pieces. Visual, auditory, performative, social, spatial and durational dimensions become integrated within the analysis in our pursuit of the most comprehensive interpretation of the pieces possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the presence of ‘self-reflexive narrative’ in field recording. The authors interrogate a common presumption within sonic arts practice and sound studies discourse that field recordings represent authentic, impartial and neutral documents. Historically, field recording practice has not clearly represented narratives of how, when, why and by whom a field recording is made. In contrast, the social sciences have already experienced a narrative ‘turn’ since the 1970s, which highlighted the importance of recognising the presence and role of the researcher in the field, and also in representations of fieldwork. This provides an alternative framework for understanding field recording, in considering the importance of the recordist and their relationship with their recordings. Many sonic arts practitioners have already acknowledged that the subjective, personal qualities of field recording should be embraced, highlighted and even orated in their work. The authors’ own collaborative project Thoughts in the Field further explores these ideas, by vocalising ‘self-reflexive narratives’ in real time, within field recordings. The authors’ collaborative composition, Getting Lost (2015), demonstrates the compositional potentials this approach offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a brief survey of composition in which field recordings or other referential sounds are transcribed for acoustic instruments. Through a discussion of how electroacoustic music and scholarship have conceptualised the notion of mimesis, and how various forms of contemporary acoustic music have adopted electroacoustic techniques, it identifies a recent musical practice in which these concerns are brought together. The article proposes the term mimetic instrumental resynthesis as a way of describing the common threads behind works that employ electronic-assisted or computer-assisted techniques towards instrumental imitations of environmental and extra-musical sounds. The article also highlights some of the conceptual and aesthetic questions emerging from such a practice, including the idea of transformation, issues of referentiality, listening, the influence of different technologies and their aesthetic implications, and the tension between abstract and concrete conceptions of the works discussed. Finally, the article raises concerns surrounding the language of discussing what is necessarily an interdisciplinary venture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors describe and discuss UrbanRemix, a platform consisting of mobile-device applications and web-based tools to facilitate collaborative field recording, sound exploration, and soundscape creation. Reflecting on its use at workshops, festivals and community events, they evaluate the project in terms of its ability to enable participants to engage with their aural environments and to uncover their own creativity in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is an essay exploring issues of essentialism, sound-in-itself and representation that were central to a project I completed in 2010. It covers this project in the context of theory and work by Seth Kim-Cohen, CREED, Don Ihde and Annea Lockwood.The field recording is often presented in sound art as an unproblematic account of a sonic event or environment. It also prompts a particular kind of listening that approaches the sound as somehow real or accurate. This article, and my work in general, problematises this encounter and seeks to uncover the various approaches to listening that occur when dealing with field recordings, as well as the possibilities within field recordings for exploring essentialism, imagined sound and the conceptual. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the mid twentieth century, space was developed as a composable dimension. Composers used the three spatial dimensions in their own fashion, but space was understood primarily as an abstract concept. It was not until the development of sound installation art that space was discovered in a concrete manner, explored, performed in and could even acquire its own specificity, called site-sound (Ortsklang). The article shows consequences and strategies of site-sound installations in three sections - from spatial sound to site-sound, public space as performance venue, and public strategies (acoustic interventions, interactive installations and participatory projects) - with three examples of site-sound installations (Site-Sound Marl Mitte, meta.stases and towersounds.2: watch tower). Acoustic art in public spaces basically involves installing a space in another existing space, both physically and sensorially, and metaphysically and mentally - an interior space in an exterior space, so to speak. The original quality of sound art lies in the oscillation of interior and exterior space. Thus public spaces intensified by sound art cause transitional spaces to come into being, in a political and a psychoanalytic sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of sound for representation and narrative may go beyond what we might conventionally term musical. Film has gradually brought into focus the practice of sound art as something distinct from music yet existing at the end of a unified continuum between abstraction and representation. Music has gradually been subsumed into the soundtrack as another element of the film sound world, and sound design is often on an equal footing with it. Sound designers are now increasingly exploring the more psychological (as opposed to merely representational) dimensions of sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commercially available field recordings of Francisco López and Toshiya Tsunoda are difficult to classify. These field recordings are not site specific in the conventional sense because they are not tied to a particular architectural or listening space. Nor can field recordings be categorised as just another subgenre of experimental electronic music. Whereas in musique concrète and acousmatic music, sounds are organised according to musical or thematic parameters, López's and Tsunoda's field recording sounds are subjected to minimal editing and processing, and are organised according to the innate traits of the sounds themselves. It would be insufficient, however, to offer the usual conciliatory conclusion that López's and Tsunoda's recordings straddle the sound art/music divide by possessing qualities of both. This article argues that these field recordings can best be understood in relation to the visual arts concept of objecthood, Michael Fried's term for deciphering minimalist sculpture of the late 1960s. Objecthood explains how these field recordings use appropriated sounds that are nonetheless treated as non-referential, autonomous materials. This strategy posits its own type of site specificity that purports to be acultural and ahistorical, yet is nevertheless steeped in culture and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]