I finished reading ‘In the field’, and these are a few things I thought

I’ve found this book inspiring at times, interesting, and once or twice, frustrating. It is a series of interviews with a number of people involved in field recording. It asks them a series of questions about their practice and why they record and for the most part the responses are very well put together.

For someone who has dabbled with field recording on and off for a long time I found this inspiring and illuminating. Some of the reasons given for recording and for what makes a good recording where superb. But the book isn’t just about recording, and in fact, it is very light on any kind of technical detail, which I suppose should come as no surprise as it is subtitled ‘the art of field recording’.

Quite a number of the interviewees talked extensively about listening as well as recording. This is something that I found really interesting and it’s made me think a lot more about the sounds we (I) experience every day. It’s so easy to overlook sounds that you hear all the time and not appreciate them or explore them, and in many ways recording is a way to do just that.

So the book has given me a lot to think about, and some things to follow up on too. I’m intrigued to find out where it’ll take me next.