I found this blog that Jez runs where he interviews sound artists on their experience with field recording, this was helpful to get a further idea of others’ opinions.
MARTYNA POZNANSKA
I got my first recorder and started to rediscover my urban surroundings becoming aware of the sonic density and my presence within it as well as its endless potentiality. The ability to choose and extract fragments of it through field recordings fascinated me and led me to further studies and exploration in this area bringing me into researching listening and hearing in the urban environment as a bodily experience, which was inspired by the phenomenological approach in the Auditive Architecture course I took some years later when studying at the Berlin University of The Arts.
Choosing and extracting is a great way of describing the manipulation that goes with producing field recordings. As well as hearing as a bodily experience.
I treat it as a substance and a main component I can sculpt in. On one hand plasticity of the sound material and on the other its ephemerality, which contains the possibility of transformation constitutes an ongoing inspiration for my artistic work. Field recording allows me to document the sonic environment in its micro and macro scale, it becomes an extension of my hearing and is being reflected not only through the sonic material but also in my writings and images that become part of my work. Although the listening experience cannot be lived in the same way in a recorded artefact, to record ‘scraps’ and ‘remnants’ of it comes to be a poetic gesture, an ear suspended somewhere along the electric lines in the midst of the city.
Sound being plasticity and also transformative is how I consider it as well. A poetic gesture or a sonic postcard like Sofia does.
CATHY LANE
Most of my work at the moment focuses on a sound-based investigation of a place (eg. my work in the Outer Hebrides http://hebrides-suite.co.uk) or a theme (eg. cultural assimilation and how family memory is preserved and transmitted and lost in ‘The Ties that Bind’ https://soundcloud.com/playingwithwords/the-ties-that-bind-stereo-mix) and field recordings are one of the main elements that I use as compositional material along with interviews and existing oral history recordings.
I think that using field recordings as a sound-based investigation is also perhaps what I’m attempting to do, search for the ghosts and investigate through sound.