Field Recording / Binaural Recordings

I have always loved recording things. Ever since I was ten, I would tape almost everything on the television. I had a cassette recorder, which I sometimes would record the audio from television and listen to it on the way to school. When I was a teenager, I would tape albums for friends or make comp tapes for myself. I made sure I wrote out the track listing, and even included producer credits on my tape jackets.

It's no surprise that I would end up collecting lots of different playback devices; I have several turntables, including one that can play 78's, a reel-to-reel deck that I bought at a garage sale, a table-top 8-track player with Dolby noise reduction, CD players, VCR's, DVD player, cassette decks, and a lot more throughout my life.

It's also no surprise that I would love the process of recording and get interested in the technology of that. I have read several books on the subject, and I have my own personal studio that I have set-up to play around with.

Stereo recordings that really capture the soundscape have always been fascinating to me, and when I record my own music, I always try to exaggerate the stereo effect whenever possible. I collect stereo demonstration records, and I love the late 50's and early 60's recording style of drastically panning sounds from one channel to the other to exploit the stereo image, whether it is a realistic representation or not.

I remember owning a few binaural recordings as a kid, and learning how some musicians, like Lou Reed, dabbled with this technology. Binaural recordings consist of capturing the sound of any given type by employing a realistic representation of the human head and ears in a recording setup. Tiny microphones are implanted in a dummy head (usually) and the sound is recorded. The disadvantages of this system are that the playback requires headphones; for specialty recordings this is not a drastic penalty, but for popular music that might be rebroadcast or played in a variety of situations, it isn't a feasible means of capturing music. When you listen with headphones, suddenly there is no left and right; there is all around. Since ears captured the sound, they have all the natural filtering and subtle time shifting that our own ears use; the effect is a feeling of being immersed into the environment, with sound coming from in front, behind, side to side, above, and below. A demonstration of this technique is on the Monsters, Inc. Supplemental DVD, where the technical aspects of the method are described, and then John Goodman and Billy Crystal demonstrate the effect.

I was researching on the internet about field recordings (unedited recordings of various environments) when I stumbled upon the hobby of phonography; taking a snapshot of a place using an audio recorder rather than a camera.

It's really an intriguing thing when you stop and think about it; seeing a photograph has limitations in re-living an event, while hearing it stirs up a whole bunch of memories. To prove my point, if you have a family video handy, I would urge you to watch it without the sound on. Spend a few minutes with it, and then turn the sound on and don't watch the video. Aren't you more impressed with the way grandma sounds? How you all are singing, "Our House, in the middle of the street."? I have a movie that I made called Miles From Nowhere where I had used a field recorder and captured the turmoil that had ensued on a car trip. In this movie I also used a camera, and the most effective parts of the movie, in my opinion, are when the recordings play on the soundtrack.

I was intrigued by the notion of capturing a soundscape, and I explored the possibility of doing this myself. When I found instructions on building your own binaural microphone setup for five dollars, I took action. I purchased a used mini-disc recorder that works quite well, is lightweight, and makes near CD quality recordings. I built the microphones as the plans on the internet suggested, employing a different methodology than traditional binaural recordings; my own head and ears are used. I embed the microphones, which are the size of pencil eraser, into my ears and record the action around me. I try not to move my head around too much; otherwise something in the left ear would drastically whoosh around to another point in the soundfield.

So far I have captured a car drive in my VW van, riding on a boat with my brother, walking through Washington Square Park, and cruising Times Square. Anytime I play back the recordings to friends, they are amazed at the experience. I plan on capturing more environments in the near future, and hopefully more abstract ones; recording things that you don't have access to can be interesting as well, like a refrigerator motor, or inside an engine, pipes, or anything we don't tend to focus on. This would touch on the musique concrete philosophy that everything that we hear could be music. Sounds, manipulated or not, can be beautiful if we focus on them and enjoy the process of hearing.

Samples of Sounds I Captured (mp3's to download, must listen with headphones)

Binaural Links

Field Recording / Phonography

Assorted Dead Media Links

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