Dream of Fields

Not long after completing A Welcome Suburbia, I had the thought to go into my gigabytes of field recordings, pull out files that I particularly liked, and put together a compilation of them.  Since getting my H4N Pro in '17, I have spent a fair amount of time with it (in fact, I keep it in my bag/purse), recording a wide range of aural phenomena from creaking floors to bird calls, A/C units to wind in fences, nighttime choruses to midday cityscapes, hits to pads to soundscapes.  Nearly all of it, especially in my first year or so, was learning/experimenting.  Three years into it, I'm certainly no master, but I'm beginning to have some sense of what I can and can't do, as well as what I want out of the medium artistically.  Revisiting my collection has reified my values as regards how environmental sounds should be used and the result are these two "sister" albums:





I call them sister albums because they came out of the same project, but they developed into different things.  The first, Ambiences, is a collection of my longest, largely natural-world soundscape recordings, collected while traveling in environments I don't normally get to hear.  These are intended to be listened to in a leisurely way, entering into and fading from conscious awareness in the true sense of ambient music and sound.  The second, Brief Fields, is comprised of relatively short soundscapes that are local and infused with fore- or backgrounded human activity.  I selected them because, for various reasons, I liked their content or atmosphere, but they were either too short or too intense to be what I think of as ambient.

Putting them together was, as I said above, validating.  As I was editing, deciding what sounds should be kept and which should be cut, I felt increasingly that I should leave in as much of what the microphones captured as esthetics could allow.  Retaining the odd car driving past or the jet in the distance that pulls the ear away from whatever foreground there was grew to be more and more important -- more honest, more real.  In the end, the only exceptions to this approach were one or two instances where a sudden change in the soundscape was jarring or overpowering (and were thus edited out and crossfaded) and wind.

Wind noise is the bane of many a field recordist's dreams; it is not merely an unpleasant sound but an unnatural one, arising from artifacts in the structure of the microphone being used and thus not something one would experience without the act of recording.  The first approach to minimizing this is through mic placement and use of windscreens, but these solutions are spotty at best in their effectiveness and often limit what you can actually capture.  Nearly all mic/wind interaction noise occurs below about 85Hz or 90Hz, so it is easy enough to filter out in post-production, but some soundscapes have enough going on in the two-plus octave range from there to the low end of human hearing that doing so often feels -- and sounds -- like an amputation.

My solution in these albums was a combination of the above.  As best I could, I made my recordings in wind-sheltered locations and always used a deadcat.  Almost inevitably, however, wind noise leaks through at least a bit in recordings of all but the most becalmed places.  In these cases my first step is to select stretches of audio in which no wind occurred, thus sometimes wind noise -- or its lack -- effectively determined recording length.  If a particular recording had esthetic interest in the same frequency range as some low-level and infrequent wind noise -- say, trucks going by or surf -- I attempted to filter the noise out using a shelving filter, which could cut enough of the artifactual sound to be tolerable but still leave the otherwise interesting low frequencies perceptible.  In other samples, where the wind noise was more prevalent and the bulk of the soundscape's interest was above 80Hz or so, I used a more sharply inclined high-pass filter, excising entirely all sound below the threshold of wind.  I don't typically like this solution, as the missing bottom end can be noticeable, but in some tracks, it was workable.

Another insight that came out of compiling this was that I like long environmental recordings.  I'm especially proud of the two longest tracks on Ambiences, "New England Suburban Midnight" and "New England Rural Sunrise."  (At 1:53:53/600Mb, the former is at the limit of what Bandcamp allows artists to upload.)  These are ambiences that you can put on your stereo and they hold a space and they are long enough that the captured soundscape changes from beginning to end; the day is never static.  I've learned that my H4N Pro is limited to files of 2:14:45 in length at 44100 sample rates and 24-bit resolution; this is a bit above CD quality (which is 16-bit), so I might be able to get a bit more length, but I'm finding myself coveting longer file sizes.  Yes, of course, you can crossfade files together imperceptibly to make effectively limitless lengths, but somehow the esthetic of knowing the sound is uninterrupted carries weight for me.

Barring unexpected developments, this will be my last field recording project for a while:  I intend next to focus my efforts on an album of viola music, some covers, some original, mostly solo/unaccompanied, a few with computer or other instruments.  These two sister albums have been in keeping with my commitment to a Depth Year, taking what I already have and building on and/or completing it, and the viola project is also very much in the same vein:  I've had several works for viola percolating for months or years and it feels like it's time to put bow to string and get it done.

Going Down

Around the European winter holidays, a forum I participate in, lines.co, typically has threads about goals -- what you accomplished this year, what your plans are for next year, usually focused on music, but also incorporating life in general.  This year, one member posted about his plan for a Depth Year and his post resonated with a lot of folks, including me.  The idea is to "go deep rather than wide" or, stated more practically, focus on engaging with what you already have, rather than adding new stuff.  This is based in part on the principle that you don't need new stuff to be happy -- or that relying on new stuff to make you happy can make you unhappy -- which, like many of us in this consumer culture, I get and endorse, but maybe sometimes occasionally have a hard time following.

This year, though, a Depth Year seems not only a fit, but a natural outgrowth of last year.  In 2019, in the wake of my father's death, my mom, my wife, and I decided that we should all live together and buy a house.  This entailed helping my octogenarian mother sell and move out of her house, transport her and her stuff 1800 miles over to our neck of the woods, find and purchase a house all three of us like and which has room for one of our adult children, too, pack up our household, move, and unpack a total of three households into that one house.  This while my wife started grad school full time and I maintained a full-time private practice in psychology.  The previous several years were not dramatically different in terms of novel experiences:  major career changes, family deaths and tragedies, kids in college, etc.  So, yeah, we've had our share of new stuff.

Music-wise, too, a Depth Year feels right.  Since re-acquainting with my musical self back in late '10, I've done a lot of experimenting and exploring which, naturally, means trying new stuff.  I'm pleased with and proud of most of that work, even as I've chosen not to follow many paths I was introduced to.  On the contrary:  that exploration has wrapped me back around to where I am now, focusing on my viola, ambient music, and field recording.  Those areas feel the richest to me, with the greatest potential for satisfaction, and those are domains I intend to go deeper into.

Thus, my Depth Year will be focused, musically, on testing out how far I might be able to go technically and compositionally with my viola, exploring harmony and timbre in ambient music, and expanding field recording into longer forms (more on that in the next post).  I might also spend some time rebuilding my (piano) keyboard skills, which were never particularly great, but would be good to have, and to expand my use of and facility with my Push2, which I've had for more than three years now.  Max/MSP and Ableton Live remain my go-to software; I intend to spend more time exploring the plug-ins that are bundled with Live, especially those built with M4L, and using the knowledge I have from building my own stuff to understand them better rather than reinventing the wheel.

Personally, my mom, my wife, and I have things we want to do with our new home.  We also want to care for and support our kids as they transition to adulthood and to enjoy our time together.  I plan to spend (and have been spending) time with cherished friends, building on established relationships.  I'm also expanding my self-care, going to the gym, working with my medical providers and my psychotherapist, and using my mentor more. 

Already, I see how rich my life is and how much there is to dig into; new stuff is not really necessary.