"For several reasons I have a rather ambivalent relation towards field
recordings. This ambivalence is not necessarily annoying, disturbing, or
irritating; it is simply that I am often puzzled, confused, and full of
questions after having listened to field recordings. One of these
questions that regularly arises is: To what have I actually listened?
Let’s say that on one side of the spectrum I could consider those
recordings as something like sonic documentaries, introducing me to
unknown, lost, or past soundscapes; on the other side, I do not attempt
to situate or identify the sounds, but perceive the recordings with a
more or less purely aesthetic attitude. Or, to reformulate this, the
former raises questions about the representational value, including
ideas about “sonic journalism” or “docu-music” as Peter Cusack calls it,
whereas the latter is inviting me, first of all, to attentive
listening, to perceiving, without too much reflecting, the richness of
the sounds, their individual layers as well as the complexity of their
potential relations and combinations, close to Pierre Schaeffer’s
acousmatic listening. Choosing between, let’s put it boldly, the
rational and the aesthetic or between “truth” and “beauty,” is often
codetermined by the additional information accompanying the recordings:
abstract or no titles usually seem to demand a listener who is primarily
interested in “the sounds themselves”; Conversely, lots of information
on the exact time and space of the recorded sounds gives me the idea
that the “composer” (also) wants to share knowledge and give a concrete
impression of a particular sonic environment."
http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol06/nr01/a09
