Article31st October, 2025 / making music
Composing with field recordings
Musician Henry Claude asked me some questions for his field recording research project, and was kind enough to let me archive my detailed responses here.
Regarding field recording for use in electroacoustic music
Field recordings often require processing for use in electroacoustic compositions such as basic EQ treatment, filtering or compression. Do you believe this to be a reductive or an additive process and why?
It’s probably worth noting upfront that, with an art college education and thirty-plus years as a creative professional (predominantly in graphic and digital design), I have come to loathe the limitations and opportunities for gatekeeping that come with rigid processes. The idea that there is only one right way to do something has always infuriated me to the point that even if it is right, I still want to look at the alternatives, because they could be ripe with opportunities for fresh approaches.
To answer this first question directly: I am less interested in the quality of a field recording than its value as a signifier of place and/or experience. I’m very adept with EQ and compression and will aim to refine a recording or target specific sounds at the expense of others, but I’d never immediately throw out a recording due to poor quality. I like the democratisation of creative pursuits and like to think something can be interesting and valuable whether captured on an iPhone or via an expensive shotgun rig. If we judge creativity only on quality, we block a lot of people from the space or dismiss their work for the wrong reasons. That’s not how I feel about something like painting, where I’m quite opinionated about the quality of brushwork and mark-making, but in terms of music and sound art I care less about quality or evidence of trained skill and think more in terms of emotional connection or evidence of meaning. I guess, like most humans, I’m full of contradictions.
My initial EPs concerning experiences in several Japanese cities (made and released between 2021-23 and which I consider to be my musical apprenticeship, full of mistakes) lean on field recordings I captured during two earlier trips, recorded using my phone, a binaural headset and Tascam DR-40. These recordings are all over the place in terms of quality, and that never concerned me because they acted as narrative guidelines and evidence of place and experience; in this sense, they ooze integrity.
A good example would be the two girls singing at the end of my song Institute for Nature Study, which leans heavily on field recordings throughout. As the music fades, we leave the green oasis and cut to the busy streets of Meguro, Tokyo and the two girls under a bus shelter, harmonising a popular song. The recording was unplanned, captured on my iPhone (TapeIt app, which I love) and it’s very noisy and shrill, and whilst I did reduce some background noise and focus on the singing, it’s of very low quality. However, the importance of that moment to the song, to the place and to capturing the memory meant it was always going to be a dominant feature. In the end, I used it isolated with no music to obscure or disguise its flaws.
So, I don’t have a strong opinion about processing being additive or reductive, because in my opinion it’s about being true to the material, improving it if/where necessary and ensuring the final result has integrity. How another artist gets to that final result and how true it is to their initial idea is up to that artist and whether they’re prepared to manipulate it beyond a certain point. We all use artistic license to some degree, and we each have different ideas of what constitutes truth in art.
In the documentary Cinema For My Ears (2000) by Uli Aumüller, French composer Francis Dhomont likens field recording to fly fishing. Do you resonate with this analogy and what do you infer from this statement?
I’m not familiar with the documentary or composer, but taking the analogy as it is, I can appreciate it. I infer the idea that whilst one can prepare for many possibilities and conditions, and have specific targets, there’s no guarantee that the day’s catch will meet expectations — and that’s OK because it’s largely about the process, the hunt, and about occasionally being pleasantly surprised or thrilled.
Above all, I feel that fly fishing and field recording have a higher value regarding personal experience, understanding geography and conditions, and offering us a deeper way to connect with a specific place. There is also the fetishisation of equipment. If the process of field recording is of greatest importance to the person in the field, having that experience in that place at that time (and potentially escaping something that happens somewhere else), then it is all about the process and being on one’s own in a way that fly fishing absolutely is. Perhaps I infer that the experience and/or process is more important on a personal level than the resulting art.
In Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines (trans 2017), Pierre Schaeffer offers the notion that ‘the advances in recording machines have all been about fidelity to the signal and have revealed nothing about the powers of the ear’. To what degree, if at all, do you believe the fidelity of field recording to be important when used in electroacoustic composition and why?
I haven’t read that text but am of course familiar with Schaeffer and Musique Concrète. I think my answers to your first question can be relevant here also, as I care less about fidelity than evidence and integrity. Personally, I value the advances but more for the connectivity and compatibility (e.g. allowing me to connect tape machines and lots of mics or strange input devices in the field) and portability. I do think it’s helpful to capture a wide stereo field and broad range of frequencies rather than have too little during production. But am I relying on the machines to tell me what I’m hearing? Do I hear more in the studio than I did in the field? If anything, I think that at times I hear more with my own ears than I capture, because my ears ‘experience’ the world in ways the machine does not. I can hear the wind but I can also feel it, or I sense the bird flying from behind me before I hear it. And that’s me; what about the listener who encounters a piece of music I’ve assembled? What do they make of the field recordings? What are they hearing and what are they being given?
Maybe I’m jumping around a bit here as things occur to me, but perhaps to answer the question: I’m not sure what is to be gained by poor quality. I’d say that capturing high-quality source material is favourable, even when, like me, you push against perfection in the studio. However, another contradiction:
I am drawn to using tape in the field, typically my old 4-track powered by USB, recording the environment via DR-40 or other mics to 1/8” tape, sometimes four mics (connected via very long extensions) into the four channels. The resulting recording loses some highs, compresses things, and is generally reductive. And yet, it has a sense of ‘grain’ that I value as a signifier of memory, that sense of direct contact with a recording medium, with magnetic tape. It’s a tangible document in a way a digital file is not, and for me, this adds more than is taken away. But for the ear? Maybe I’m keeping the real experience for myself and offering the listener a reduced experience, but I think the idea that the final piece feels like a memory in some way is more important. The listener never really knows what they’re not experiencing, that the actual frequency spectrum was wider or whatever. I think it’s as simple as: we feel something, or we do not, when we listen to the final piece.
Many instances of experiencing field recordings in music come without visual or previously acquired knowledge of the causation. How would you articulate this diminishing of contextual artefacts affects our relationship with the recording?
I agree with this to an extent and lament the lack of care for album art and liner notes, or an awareness of connected research and intentions. However, I often find and interact with field recording releases (and music that utilises them) via Bandcamp, articles (good online mags, the Ableton blog’s excellent interviews, etc.) or books (e.g. Ben Murphy's Ears To The Ground), so I’m often armed with context and things to listen for. I also buy a lot of old vinyl, such as decades-old Japanese field recording and library albums from Idle Moments, and often the liner notes are incredibly detailed, like you’re actually buying an audible field guide.
I think of my own releases as though artist’s multiples, with the EPs packaged to include diary entries, maps, and location data. As a whole, each release brings experiences to life and helps represent the place in a different form and time (this is largely why I use the moniker Site Nonsite). I could not imagine releasing anything without providing digital or printed material to contextualise it and help justify some of the thousands of decisions I make during production.
I also think there is a responsibility for the listener, should their interest be piqued, to learn more about a place or topic they might first encounter as a digital or streamed audio file. Your curiosity requires you to do a little work. If you listened to a documentary album of field recordings about, I don’t know, the Thames estuary or something, you can use the internet to find out more about the place, its history or ecology, and the artist. I like to provide a lot of material, but too often we unnecessarily task artists with providing context or explaining their work. It can be just as important to open a space into which listeners can offer their own understanding without being fed specific information. In this way, I can listen to that work about the Thames and think of a river closer to home (and my experiences of that river) or a mountain or person, if I prefer.
Field recordings are captured in uncontrolled environments and often yield unpredictable outcomes. What implications does this have on the compositional process or do you believe this surrender of control to inform musical decisions at all?
For me, unpredictability is a feature, not a bug. I welcome passersby and vocal contributions, the way a car on a nearby road might help describe the stereo distance, or the reality of a passenger jet overhead. A good example is Deathbed Convert’s album Inverse Field Vol.1 – Inishowen, which features field recordings and overdubbed environmental sound. At the end of the song Malin Head, an unplanned conversation with a curious passerby allows the artist to extract further context from the stranger (we’re asked perhaps to consider whether he/Ireland is more approving of church music and ‘real’ instruments rather than the artist’s laptop) and explain a little about the work; sharing this benefits everyone who listens. I also love the barking dog and his response at the end of 55°13'37.0"N 7°28'27.7"W.
My work is increasingly about wild locations such as open moorland and high plateau, and if I’m up on Kinder Scout, the reality is that I am also recording evidence of Manchester Airport, over-tourism, wildlife loss and a changing climate. This suits me as my current project investigates modern landscapes, not some sort of idyllic bucolic bygone world where all we hear is birdsong.
Of course, I edit the true experience when I enter the studio, looking for highlights or evidence to suit a bias or condense an experience into something simpler. We edit our use of field recordings much as we edit our lives for social media. I talk about integrity and truth to experience, but I’m as guilty as anyone of editing and manipulating in the studio. But then again, field recordings also have an integrity as straightforward material in the way musical drones and textures do, and I can splice field recordings together as though arranging musical notes. I want to be true to the place and experience, but I also have a vision for how I’d like the resulting compositions to sound.
I include a lot of macro field recording in my practice, weird textures captured via hydrophone or contact mic, and life’s too short to treat these with respect when I’m looking to create unique textural layers. Serendipity and chance have a very positive role in offering interesting material for use in production.
What are your personal motivations as a composer for including field recordings in your work?
I’ve collected material my entire life. As a kid, I collected maps and leaflets, I’d draw maps to document day trips, and I’d keep bird logs. As a visual artist, I was drawn to document my experiences in landscapes. In my adult life I embraced online tools for diarising and documenting my life. Field recording is an extension of that obsession.
I collected field recordings before I had any outlet for them. I was simply drawn to collect sound as documentary evidence the way we might collect photos. In spring 2016 and 2018, I wandered around Japan collecting sounds because I knew sound was a fundamental layer and helped describe and explain the city and transport, and I was interested in what I would collect. It was two years later that I started making music and realised I had hours of recordings from those Japan trips. I like what I make to have purpose, and decided that a series of narrative-driven EPs built around and inspired by the field recordings would focus my practice. Over the next couple of years I identified several signature components in my music, with field recordings being a fundamental component.
I think there is an anthropological angle, the desire to truly understand a place before you try to describe or represent it through art. I welcomed sound artist and musician Emeka Ogboh’s thoughts here when I, at one point, wondered if my Japan-themed work when leaning a little on pentatonic scales and shakuhachi, etc., might be accused of appropriation. Ogboh said:
I see field recordings more like an anthropological thing – digging into a place to know a place. The music could help you do that because maybe in the process of making the music, you spend a lot of time actively listening, trying to identify and pick out sounds. In that way, you’re taking an anthropological dive to understand the place. That’s not exoticising.
It’s also important to me that an artist is evident in the work, which acts against the idea that field recordings should be pristine, perfect. A snapped twig, crunched leaves or a my breath is a reason to keep the recording, not delete it. I mean, I am there, standing, recording, present. I’m activating the place by being there and in that sense I am welcome. Why put distance between myself and the place? I like Toshiya Tsunoda’s thoughts on this, and I’m a huge fan of his work Landscape and Voice where he is clearly present, inserting his voice into the recording in a truly unique and captivating way:
I want to know how to fix the experience of landscape. / The awareness of space changes with one’s intentionality. / I have been exploring how I can establish a subjective relationship with an environment, rather than seeing it merely as an object to be recorded.
I guess that ultimately my work is about intimacy, not distance. It’s about being in direct contact with a place rather than viewing it from a distance. I use field recordings to help involve the listener and bring them with me, to offer them a sense of contact, and also to share my experiences, so that my memories and expressions of those memories might also resonate with them, and trigger something emotional within them. Perhaps my documentary can also become yours.
I release music as Site Nonsite. Henry Claude is a singer, synthesist, and guitarist who releases music as Never Ending Birthdays. He’s also one half of Brown Fang (Fang Jr) and a sometime collaborator with Huw Costin and Torn Sail. His music has been released by Delia Recordings, NuNorthern Soul and other labels. My responses support research for his dissertation on composing acousmatic music for multi-speaker arrays.