I saw this in another essay bibliography and through searching online for more research to do with field recording discourse. I found this short essay/article interesting as it describes and relates the noisy-non self as a monster, something that stays hidden throughout the recording. I want to perhaps challenge this with my own recordings. Why do I chase this idea of perfection and silence myself through the recording? Why can’t it be a loud recording, something obvious?
Here are some quotes.
This article endeavours to re-hear the fringe identity of the environmental field recordist and analyze the promises and threats of self-erasure. I propose a new concept , the Noisy-Nonself, as a way of understanding such an identity. It is a chimeric figuration that seeks to collapse human, animal, and technological binaries, prompt ethical critique, and ask, “What are the consequences of hearing our own monsters?”
I like this opening statement, to consider the threats of self-erasure as something worthy of discourse is down my league currently.
Recording and archiving environmental sounds enabled the medium itself to be considered a viable social and cultural artifact, something that soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project would later harness in the context of acoustic ecology. These bioacoustic archival bloodlines silenced their own authors in order to privilege objective “facts.” The legacies that arrive from such preservation-based contexts prioritize non-intrusive or hi-fidelity recordings of an environment or species.
This battle between science and the arts, for the silencing of the recordist, means that perhaps the value of the field recording is for information on the recorded subject or environment and the human noise is unwanted, but why do we still consider this for our own creative field recordings?
I initiated a persona that would represent a troubling doubling of the archetypal nature recordist: a crypto-character, part shadow, part absurd doppelgänger, a bipedal assemblage of another. I moved towards my own spectral and material skins that grafted technology and the body as well as the animal. “Naturally” a fluffy onesie that resembled a microphone windshield was developed (!). Windshields or windjammers are used primarily to suppress breathing sounds and wind noise: they are the mediators of self-silence. Made commercially from synthetic fur but often adapted by DIY enthusiasts from real animal furs such as wolverines, the material encases the microphone within its meshed cage. They are commonly referred to as “fluffys” or “dead cats.” Smaller windjammers are known as “dead kittens.” The windshield continually cancels mediating bodies; technical, human, environmental apparatus, and subjects are softened into an absorbent milieu. It renders recordists as soundless agents: mute performers matted within the flesh and fur of their own bodyapparatus.
Mark created a personal onesie covered in Ryecote windjammer synthetic fur. Something I recently purchased, I was angry at the recordings being windy, perhaps I should take it off? Wind noise could be good? If on purpose? I also like this idea of the archetype of the nature recordist, part shadow, the sneaking silent person who records animals without disturbance, attempting to never influence the environment it goes into, it’s kind of difficult not to think how absurd this sounds.
Whom do “we” speak for in the continual sounding of species and phenomena? What is really being captured and processed beyond the so-called signal? What is not being heard
Again to think that our recordings represent something, or perhaps even other species, that have hugely different ways of experiencing our field recordings is not accurate. I strive to do the opposite, I want my field recordings to be an emotional response. Not fact.
The Noisy-Nonself simultaneously invades environments and evades self-analysis; it occupies a parasite-host duality like a shimmering thing caught in its own medial web of entrapment.
It’s true, the recordist fails to analyse their own position in the field, something I believe is what I’m attempting to do currently with this project. How will I do that? Perhaps by making sure I’m heard in my recording.