AudioSpaces: just a lil' archive?
How asking the big questions of archiving can help us with our audio recording journeys. By Sam Newmarch.
Hi everyone, I hope you’re well. We are delighted to finally publish our very first guest article by Sam. For all of us interested in making what we’re doing here work, it really helps to draw insights from a variety of perspectives. That’s why it’s a real treat to have Sam help us think through what makes an archive, why we might (and already do!) use them—and how all of this is completely relevant to AudioSpaces.
The piece brings as many laughs as it opens up questions, and it’d be great to hear from readers for your thoughts. Reflecting on all the different taxonomies that Sam provides here really reminded me that, no matter what I’m recording and in what context, I am always making (and sharing) my own little histories. We’re excited to learn more. Happy rest of the week; I’m sure for some of you, somewhere, the sun will be out soon.
Read time: 11 minutes.
In one of Dylan’s recent articles, he mentioned that one of the questions he gets asked a lot with regards to AudioSpaces is “what do I record?”. He answered by giving us a handy and concise introduction to the theory that underpins and defines field recording. If, like me, you learned a lot but were left with some questions about how to apply the theory, then hopefully this article will help you.
I am interested in power and archives. Here’s one I know well:
At the most basic level, an archive is a repository for things that for whatever reason need to be remembered. They function on a scale from the local through to the international and could be created by anyone: governments, charities, transnational companies, hobbyists, app users. What is entered into an archive is potentially there forever—this is true of physical archives and online ones too. Archives can define historical narratives as well as shape future memory.
I think that some of the important questions which are central to archiving could also help us conceptualise and use AudioSpaces. Why? Because AudioSpaces might be thought of an archive in which memory (in the form of sound) is captured and automatically organised for us using geolocation. This means that we are all basically archivists! How exciting! How democratic! We all get to choose what is recorded in AudioSpaces and anyone can decide what they want to access.
Two of these important questions that an archivist needs to ask are:
What is the purpose of this archive?
What type of material is being stored?
What’s the purpose, what’s the point? (Alongside it being Fun)
As mentioned, different archives serve different purposes. Most companies, councils, official bodies, football teams, public institutions and so on will have some form of an archive. For example, The National Archives, where I work in the UK, is the national record office and holds millions of official documents relating to British citizens, government, international relations, military records and a lot more. In its own words, its purpose is to act as a “repository of evidence, stories and memory.” Think of it as the British State’s memory bank for all things historical.
Alternatively, The Bishopsgate Institute in London’s Liverpool Street is an archive that functions from the bottom-up; they aim to “document the experiences of everyday people, and the extraordinary individuals and organisations who have strived for social, political, and cultural change.”
One of their main purposes is to keep and make available historical sources detailing specific, marginalised histories that generally get lost in bigger archives. Archivists that work at the Bishopsgate Institute have more license to curate and choose what they accession (formally accept & store in the archive). Unlike the National Archives, they have more choice over the stories they want to tell as they have a more specific purpose and focus.
In this newsletter we have already seen various online soundscape archives that have hyper-specific purposes, such as the Pandemic Sensory Archive who intend to “explore experiences of the five senses during the COVID-19 pandemic.” They have one clear purpose that they dedicate their archive to.
Borrowing purpose, finding direction
Well, I’m thinking that we can take inspiration from the purposes and goals of these archives to think about why we might record what we record.
AudioSpaces could, just like the National Archives, be treated as a big old memory bank; a place to store moments in audio form that may also be accessed by friends (a bit like Google photos but for sound). Gigs, late night/early morning conversations and soundscapes, tropical storms, kooky strangers, unexplained noises in weird places and so on. The net is wide and random.
Or, in line with the aims of the Bishopsgate Institute, maybe it could be used as a tool to tell certain histories that you feel are not sufficiently remembered or told. Maybe you want to use the app to keep a bank of snippets of oral histories that relate to a place in a period of change. Maybe you want to record the degradation of a natural area through sound, as natural soundscapes become more urbanised. In this case, the net becomes a bit smaller.
Or maybe, like the Pandemic Sensory Archive, it could even be used for a completely specific and singular purpose. You could dedicate your use of the app to the thing that drives you. You could create an archive of DIY white noise, or an archive of things that sound like other things, or an archive of what the world sounds like every Tuesday at 1pm. The world is your oyster!
For example, as a lover of London and its rich histories, I’d love to start some kind of folklorist AudioSpaces project that focuses on preserving the urban legends around the city. If you look hard enough, there are friendly bards all over whose (sometimes) Homeric tales will be lost before long. I’m thinking beyond the 11am regular pubsmen. Watch this space.
On to the next question.
What’s being stored in AudioSpaces?
We know that it is recorded sound that is being stored in this archive, but where do we begin if we can record anything and everything? What are the different flavours and genres of recorded sound?
Thankfully, some guy called Dr Gallagher has outlined four different styles of field recording that may help us, the majestic users of AudioSpaces, think more specifically about what we might want to record. I feel like I should add the classic disclaimer here that these styles of recording are of course not prescriptive and by no means encompass all possible conceptions of sound recordings. This is meant for inspiration rather than as a strict guide!
Possible styles of recording
The first style he has defined is the “nature style.” This accounts for audio recordings that are used “to ‘capture’ the vibrations of animals, plants, habitats and ecosystems.” Although I don’t know for sure due to my Android affliction, I can sort of see that this is quite a popular style on AudioSpaces, especially judging by the titles of some of the AudioSpaces of the Month (like Dog on Walthamstow Marshes and possibly Leaves need a gentle touch).
Dr Gallagher defines this style as being completely devoid of the “audible presence of humans,” so things like human voices, the noise of cities and transport systems are not the focus. You might wish to record and archive sound in the nature style because you want to preserve a tranquil moment, or maybe a squirrel has started chatting to you in the park. Maybe you could become the first serious twitcher to use AudioSpaces and start your own phone-recorded birdsong archive.
The next style Dr Gallagher has outlined is the “soundscape style.” The aim of this style is to “document and represent the soundings of a particular environment.” To me, a recorded soundscape might serve a similar purpose to taking a candid photo in that the goal is to capture a moment or feeling so it can be literally re-presented indefinitely in the future.
Maybe you’re at Christian camp and a rowdy sermon has charged the crowd up into a fervour and you want to remember how unwavering your faith was in that instance, or maybe you’re enjoying the hum of a late-night market somewhere on the other side of the world. According to this line of thinking, a soundscape-style recording aims to convey how a place sounds (or sounded at that moment in time) by capturing it aurally rather than visually.
The third style he calls the “acousmatic style.” This concerns “ripping sounds out of context and displacing them from their source” and “scrambling the meanings and associations they had in situ.” This has some serious arty potential. Recording sound acousmatically means decontextualising sound and focusing purely on aesthetics. The material context in which the sound was recorded is not the point. This is freedom! It does not have to be about recording in order to re-present a moment in time, but recording to create new realities and feelings based purely on sonics.
The last style Dr Gallagher writes about seems to be the hardest to define. Referred to using the umbrella term “sound art styles,” there seems to be a lot of crossover between this and the acousmatic category, only recording in this style is more intentionally about creating a piece or pieces of sound art. A perfect example, which you can access right now through AudioSpaces, is Jo Scott’s Rio Cavalos Trio. You can read all about this here.
Another bonus style to bear in mind is also the recording of voices—let’s call it the “voice style”—which is understandably a popular style on AudioSpaces. The main characteristic of this style is the isolation of and focus on voice(s). It is often used to record and therefore preserve history that was not written down.
It’s thanks to this style that we can listen to so much old folk music and culture from across space and time! Throughout history different cultural groups have orally preserved their history and traditions, dedicating songs and tales that talk of ancestors and elders, recall epic journeys, fables that warn future generations not to follow in the footsteps of those before, or remember times of hardship—or maybe even better times.
In this video, a BBC and folklorist record the voice of an Irish storyteller who only spoke Gaelic. This bard-like figure was the last of a generation and it’s only really through recording him that these stories and songs have been preserved. Recording voices is a classic means of preserving these tales and is a continuation of telling history in the oral tradition.
Back to the beginning: have we now got a better idea of what we might want to record?
Treating AudioSpaces as an archive has helped me structure my thoughts about how I might want to go about recording and organising memory. Dr Gallagher’s basic taxonomy of soundscapes also provides a solid approach to thinking about how to record. Your purposes for recording and the styles in which you record could be mixed and matched to evoke all sorts of weird feelings.
Thinking about the varying purposes of archives is a useful method of working out your own reason for recording and I’d suggest looking up more archives, if you didn’t find any of the ones discussed in this article inspiring enough.
I would suggest starting with your local history archive (which will likely be attached to the biggest library in your area) as these are often staffed with people who have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of an area. Also interesting is the MayDay Rooms in London for anyone who wants to look more into the histories of “social movements, experimental and marginal cultures.”
Another favourite of mine is Flashbak. It has posts on topics as varied as stories found on the back of photos and postcards bought in charity shops, a history of art on Portuguese tins of fish, and photos from a walk around Dalston in the 1980s. Flashbak is especially great for any other London history nerds.
Returning to the original question of “what do I record?”, I hope that now you might have more of an idea about where to begin. However these are, of course, only ideas. You might read this and be inspired to do things as differently as possible.
What might be your reasons for recording sound? How or why you may want to use AudioSpaces is of course up to you. I suppose the main point is the fun we have along the way…
Sources
Michael Gallagher, ‘Field recording and the sounding of spaces’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33.3, 560–576.
Sam Newmarch lives in London. Having worked in different libraries and archival projects, he’s now based at the UK’s National Archives. He enjoys applying the knowledge he’s gained to explore histories strange and radical, and unfortunately supports Arsenal. You can get hold of him at samnewmarch@gmail.com or on his Twitter.