Listen to your world – it may be more interesting than all the things you buy to escape from it
Recorded sounds from an urban environment played a role when Detroit-based house producer Theo Parrish paid tribute to the city’s black music tradition with his 2008 track Somethin’.
Spoken recollections of the Motown era, when soul, doo-wop, rhythm & blues and pop merged in the 1960s, are embedded in a highly rhythmic soundscape of city noises, singing and music recorded on location in the streets.
There is a three-minute making-of clip showing Parrish at work, recording the sounds of his city with a microphone attached to a boom pole. Between scenes, he also explains some of his ideas about listening and sound. Although the clip is presented – and therefore paid for – by Adidas, the brand is only briefly visible in the first and last seconds of the film.
The poetry of pure nature was the focus of English recordist Chris Watson’s interest during his numerous visits to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. The former member of the industrial band Cabaret Voltaire was fascinated by the idea that what you see and hear today has not changed for hundreds of years – back to the time when the place was an important centre of Celtic Christianity under saints such as Cuthbert, who was active there in the 7th century.
The island lies off the north-east coast of England and is an area that undergoes major changes throughout the year and is known for its diverse wildlife – birds from both Arctic regions stop there on their migratory routes.
Watson spent many years capturing the sounds of this magical-sounding place with microphones. Organised by season, he arranged the recordings into four soundscapes in his studio in 2013.
“Listen to your world. It may be more interesting than all the things you buy to escape from it.” This observation by American writer Sasha Frere-Jones in 1999 came thirty years after composer R. Murray Schafer and the soundscape movement introduced sound as a fascinating element for understanding aspects of human cultural history.
Sounds Central’s thematic mix Filed Recordings – Miking the World presents some further ideas on the subject of sound and listening – from an artistic perspective. It includes record producer Eckart Rahn’s discovery of imaginary rhythms in a pachinko parlour in Tokyo, an excerpt from musician Geir Jenssen’s audio diary about climbing an eight-thousander in the Himalayas, and the sound of waves breaking on the rocks of Australia’s north-eastern coast, which inspired artist Bill Fontana to draw analogies between field recordings and photography.
Being affected by misophonia does not necessarily mean that you cannot enjoy such auditory pleasures. On the contrary, a trained ear that can listen consciously can help people to understand the nature of their disorder and its circumstances better and more deeply.