Exploring Field Recording and
self-reflexive narrative

I was drawn to field recording because of hearing the sounds in my local environment. In April my family and I moved to the Outer Hebrides from England we traveled several hundred miles in our van packed to the brim with our four children and left everything we knew behind. Everything is different here, and yet nothing is different. Life still rolls in cycles but the space and sounds of that life are different outside. I quickly noticed all the sounds I was now situated with. Wind; how it whistles through the house, across the land and the sea, I could hear it everywhere I went. In the summer before I started my masters, or had even considered what I would do if I did enrol, I heard the summer breeze dancing through the boat sails in the dock, they sounded like wooden chimes , I recall the desire to record them and to capture that sound and somehow incorporate it into music in the future. Keeping this in my mind, when given the opportunity to explore a project, I was walking and heard the sound of car tyres hit a small section of water on the road surface and it sounded sublime to my ears, like the perfect snare with just the right level of reverb. This reignited those initial desires to explore field recording and to understand how to manipulate and use found sounds in my music, making it an ideal candidate for a project. 

This exploration project set out to understand how field recordings could be used in my compositional and songwriting practice.

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