Collecting Sounds. Online Sharing of Field Recordings as Cultural Practice

Abstract

Field recording is a sound practice that gains increasingly more popularity nowadays. We can observe effects of this practice in two contexts: 1. On the websites dedicated to digital sound production; 2. During the activities accompanying various artistic, cultural and educational events. I consider the first context in which I participate as a fieldrecordist, who uses sound recording as a non-visual method of (audio) anthropology. The goal of this article is to look into the field recording as a category of socio-cultural practice related to the technological development and growing significance of sound production, and more generally, to the global process of sounding the western, mainly urban, culture. Websites dedicated to audio recordings are used to publish and share sounds collected by tourists and other travellers, who catch sounds in the same way as they take photographs. These recordings are brought from exotic vacations, business trips, sightseeing tours, or sentimental journeys. Analysis of field recording practices encourages a broader reflection on the status of sounds, why some of them are audible and others are not, how new technologies influence the processes of democratisation of senses and raise public awareness of the importance of acoustic space. Moreover, tourist field recording enable us to take a closer look at the stereotypical hearing and listening processes, as well as the cultural mechanisms of exoticising non-European/non-urban soundscapes.