‘The more you listen to something the more it allows you to here’
Jez Riley French works as a field sound recorder going around the world collecting interesting and different sounds. What makes Jez’s work extremely interesting is how he finds objects/places/living things and captures there sound in a way that perhaps hasn’t been heard before. His work allows us to have an idea of how much more sound there actually is out there rather than the obvious sound which we perhaps hear every day. He differs from other sound recordists as he prefers the unpredictability about field recording; of how sound can change to it’s environment and how other aspects like nature around it may change the shape of the sound. Other field sound recordists try to prevent this from happening through trying to block out sounds and movements that may effect the sound they are trying to capture; Jez likes the mystery of it all.
He continued to discuss the microphones he used to capture these sounds, my particular favourite was the way he uses contact microphones. He uses them to capture fascinating sounds which you could never imagine came from the object. For example the recording of the ‘Telefrica’ which is a cableway in Italy used to transport goods down a mountain, through a contact microphone this sounds like something out of a science fiction film. He also spoke about how stairwells are a good place to find interesting sounds through a contact mic. My favourite piece he showed us with his contact microphone was the recording of the orchestra with the microphone attached to the stage, this created a really harmonic atmosphere audio (‘Salt – Adagio’). He also spoke of other microphones he used such as hydrophone microphones – to pick up sounds under water. Ultrasonic detectors which pick up ultrasonics and pitch them down so they are audible to the human ear. Geothermal detecters which collect infra red sounds below our hearing. VLF detecters which detect space sounds.
I found Jez’s talk very useful; it certainly opened my eyes up to different ways of getting sounds that you wouldn’t expect to find. I think we will be able to apply a lot of this to our project. Although we don’t have the range of technologies Jez uses we can use some of his techniques. We have now discussed as a group how whilst we are recording we will play around with the positions of our atmos microphones; try explore with the sounds we are getting with the hope that some of them will be able to fit into post. I also want to try using a contact microphone whilst recording the music; this will be perfect for our scenes where the main character is dreaming. I also think we could use contact microphones to create base layers for our atmospheres.