Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow

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Student Guide

Introduction Field recordings are audio recordings of the varied sounds of the world, produced outside of acoustically controlled spaces. As a research method, field recording offers intriguing possibilities for researchers interested in the sonic aspects of spaces and places. This exemplar explores how field recordings can be analysed as research data, using recordings of electronic machine voices from Scotland and Greece as examples. The exemplar draws on research conducted by Dr Michael Gallagher from Manchester Metropolitan University examining the sounds of ruins and cities. This research took place during 2012-2013. The dataset presented here includes recordings from Glasgow in Scotland and Athens in Greece. The research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the United Kingdom. The exemplar will be of most use to researchers interested in the aesthetic and sensory aspects of environments, and those who wish to experiment with digital media methods.

Field Recording as a Research Method Field recording has a varied history: for bioacoustic research and wildlife documentation; to provide material for experimental music; in sound art, as a way of working with the background noise of spaces; in radio, television and film production; and amongst hobbyists and DIY enthusiasts. Field recording can

Page 2 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 also be used as a method for researching the distinctive sounds associated with particular places, spaces and environments. Drever (2002) suggests that soundscape composition – a type of experimental music using field recordings to represent places – has much in common with ethnography, and there has been interest in the method from anthropologists and human geographers (Gallagher and Prior, 2014).

Field recordings can be made systematically, as part of well-defined research projects. Yet sometimes the most interesting sounds present themselves at unexpected moments. Many recordists carry a portable recorder at all times, to enable what social scientists would call opportunistic sampling. The recordings presented here were more opportunistic than systematic.

Thus as well as using field recordings to investigate spaces, field recordings can be part of an ad-hoc approach to research, following a thread of interest to see where it leads. This approach embraces the messiness of research, but sits uneasily with traditional principles of research design. Drawing inspiration from the arts, the aim is to produce experimental forms of social science.

It is relatively easy to make field recordings, at least for those from affluent countries. Portable digital recorders are available cheaply, and recordings can be edited, archived and uploaded online using personal computers. The trickier question is what can usefully be done with the resulting data. The internet offers interesting opportunities for public dissemination, through audio maps such as Radio Aporee for example, but methods for the analysis of audio recordings are less well developed.

Data Exemplar: Recording Automated Voice Announcements The recordings of machine voices presented here were made in the course of other research activities. In neither case was there an explicit aim to record

Page 3 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 machine voices; instead this happened in an improvised, exploratory way.

The first recording is of an automated safety announcement and the surrounding ambience at Glasgow Queen Street station, made in 2012. These sounds were heard by chance, on the way to a fieldwork site: the ruins of an iconic post-war modernist building, St Peter’s College, and its surrounding landscape. St Peter’s is in a state of advanced decay and an arts organisation is attempting to reinvent the site.

In this context, the ‘Invisible College’ research project investigated the past, present and possible future of this remarkable site. The Queen Street announcement, whilst not at the site, raised questions about the nature of health and safety in cities as compared to ruinous places. It was therefore recorded and used in an audio work for portable MP3 players, which was one of the outputs from the project (Gallagher, 2014).

The second recording was made in central Athens in 2013, during the daytime, on the roof terrace of a hotel near the Acropolis. An electronic voice is audible amidst the bustling ambience of the city.

The recording was made opportunistically, during a trip to attend a conference on urban sounds. The strange electronic voice, heard by chance one morning, was distinctive and unusual. It was recorded as a document of the sounds of Athens.

The aim of making these recordings was to explore:

• the role of electronic voices in the production and regulation of urban space • the aesthetic and affective qualities of electronic machine voices • how these voices contribute to the ambiences and atmospheres of cities • the spatial politics of electronic voices.

Both recordings were made using a binaural stereo set-up. In binaural recording

Page 4 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 miniature microphones are mounted close to the recordist’s ears to incorporate the acoustics of a human head into the process. The resulting recordings, when auditioned on headphones, create an effective rendition of the acoustic space heard by the recordist.

Analysing Field Recordings In these examples of field recording, at what point does the analytical work take place? Is it in the initial listening and the selection of a sound to record? In the playback of the recording and the editing of audio files? In gathering information about context and background? In the public airing of edited recordings? Or is analysis something that happens afterwards, by reflecting on and making interpretations of the recordings, as would be done with textual qualitative data?

Some level of analysis is involved in all these processes. There are parallels with traditional participant observation, where analysis begins with the choice of what to observe, and proceeds through the writing, categorisation and interpretation of field notes.

In what follows, Dr Michael Gallagher, who recorded these sounds, outlines some key analytical moments in the production and dissemination of these field recordings. He then discusses more specific listening and transcription procedures that can be used for sonic analysis.

Audio 1: Safety, Danger and Being Patronised by a Machine The first analytical moment with this recording happened some time before it was made. As part of research on the ruins of St Peter’s College, I spent a lot of time doing fieldwork in and around the building. It is a dangerous place, full of steep drops, slippery surfaces and hazardous debris. At the time of my research, public access was officially prohibited, but the fences surrounding the ruin were easy to

Page 5 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 circumvent.

On my way home one day, waiting for a train, an automated female voice instructed me that ‘due to today’s wet weather’ I ought to ‘take care as station surfaces may be slippery’. I was simultaneously irritated and amused. I had spent the whole day clambering around a crumbling wreck, but was being told to take care on a well-maintained flat platform covered in grip tread. The advice seemed absurd, and my annoyance at an automated process equally ridiculous. I was struck by the disjuncture between the unmanaged space of the ruin and the over- regulated, over-designed, risk-averse character of contemporary urban space. This tension turned out to be a recurring theme of the project.

Over the course of repeated trips to St Peter’s, I came across another automated voice in Glasgow Queen Street low level station, cautioning travellers to take care on the stairs. This seemed like the perfect soundtrack for St Peter’s, whose main staircase has been so decimated by vandalism that there are no steps left, just a concrete ramp. The sound was outside the official remit of the project, but I recorded it anyway. I included it in an audio work designed to be listened to on portable MP3 players whilst walking around the site. I hoped that this section of the work might provoke listeners to think about what health and safety might mean in ruins, producing further in situ analytical moments.

Audio 2: Decoding Athenian Junk-Sellers Hearing an unidentifiable electronic voice in Athens, analysis began immediately, as I tried to guess what might be making the sound. The sound seemed to be drifting up from the streets. It was clearly some kind of amplified public announcement. A sense of spatial movement suggested a vehicle driving around. Could it be a vehicle reversing announcement? Or a political campaign or demonstration? Various associations came to mind: the electronic pop music of Kraftwerk, daleks from Dr Who, vocoders, the Apple Mac voice used by Stephen

Page 6 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 Hawking, Afrika Bambaataa’s classic electro track ‘Planet Rock’.

A second analytical moment came through an email exchange with a Greek soundscape researcher I had met at the conference, Dr Anastasia Karandinou (University of Portsmouth). I sent her the recording, asking if she could enlighten me about the electronic voice. She explained that this sound is very characteristic of Athens, and is made by junk dealers advertising their services. Quoting from her email:

‘They’ve got small vans, they drive around the neighbourhoods and they buy old stuff. In Greek he is called paliatzis, the person who buys old stuff. A typical message you often hear says something like "here’s the paliatzis – I buy everything – I buy your old furniture, old appliances, etc." Sometimes they also sell stuff … it is a common sound which, however, often remains in the background … [in the recording] I think that he is selling soil … I think he says "soil for the plants" (in Greek it sounds like: “homa yia ta fita“).’

Analytical Listening In every instance of the analysis of sound, the central practice is that of listening. It is therefore useful to think about what listening does, distinguishing between different styles of listening. Chion’s (1994) three-way typology is a helpful starting point:

• causal listening, which strives to determine what caused the sound, as with my guesses about what might be making the paliatzis announcement • semantic listening, which strives to determine what the sound means, as in Anastasia’s translation of the paliatzis • reduced listening, which attends to the aesthetic characteristics of the sound, setting aside possible causes and meanings.

Page 7 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 I suggest that we might also consider:

• associative listening, attending to the memories and associations evoked by a particular sound • affective listening, attending to how the body feels within sound, such as my mix of annoyance and amusement hearing the station safety announcement • spatial listening, sensing the direction and distance of sound sources in space in relation to the listener • critical listening, listening for the wider social, economic, historical and political context of sound – which may also involve gathering additional information.

Shifting between different listening styles can draw out different insights. However, in practice listening tends to drift from one register to another. Rather than resisting this movement, following it can enable an appreciation of the multiplicity of sound. Transcription can be used to map out some of this multiplicity. Different styles of listening, and the insights they afford, can then be identified in the resulting transcript.

Audio Transcription In Athens, my co-presenter at the conference, Dr Michelle Duffy (Monash University), showed me how she transcribes sound recordings. Moving across the two-dimensional space of the page, she notes correspondences, such as how rhythms from the ambient sound environment are picked up by voices. More recently, I have been working with Dr Anja Kanngieser (Goldsmiths) and Dr Jonathan Prior (Cardiff University), to develop a style of transcription that borrows principles from graphic scores. Sounds are mapped with abstract lines, shapes and colours, embellished with representational sketches and written annotations.

Page 8 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 I like to use the vertical dimension of the page for frequency. Where the temporal sequencing of sounds seems important, I work from left to right in time, as in the Glasgow Queen Street transcript below. With soundscapes where the spatial aspects seem more salient, I use the horizontal axis to locate sounds spatially from left to right, as with the Athens transcript. Different colours can be used to distinguish different sonic elements.

Glasgow Queen Street announcements

Athens announcement

With each of these examples, before transcription I edited out a representative clip of around two minutes to make the analysis manageable. Using headphones, I listened to the clips repeatedly, around 8–10 times, transcribing additional elements with each run through until everything I could hear was on the page. Finally I added some contextual and technical details.

My approach is to let my listening rove around every aspect of the sound: listening for loud sounds, quiet sounds, high frequencies, low frequencies, transient sounds, continuous sounds, rhythms, repetition, transitions (e.g. cuts, fades), changes in dynamics such as crescendos (sounds getting louder), pitched sounds and modulations of pitch, shifts of phase. I listen across the whole of the stereo space and to how sounds move around that space. I note associations, emotions, possible causes, meanings, textures and timbres. I listen to whether sonic

Page 10 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 elements seem rough, smooth, sharp, warm, glassy, bright, hollow, brittle and so on. The results are messy, reflecting the multiplicity of environmental sound.

Every conscious being with a body can listen to sound, but analytical listening – like any kind of analysis – is a skill that takes time to cultivate. As well as using the different modes of listening listed above, I draw on experience of music production, my knowledge of audio technology, and of experimental and electronic music, all built up gradually over many years. Also useful are ideas from sound studies, such as typologies of different kinds of sonic effects and discussions of the politics of sound (e.g. Augoyard and Torgue, 2006; Goodman, 2009).

The table below summarises my analysis of the two recordings, drawing out key elements from the transcripts discussed above.

Mode of Glasgow Queen Street Athens listening

Footsteps; train door alert; loudspeakers; pre- Bird chirps; cutlery and crockery; human voice processed Causal recorded announcements; tunnels and hard by electronics and amplification; traffic. surfaces; electric train.

Safety, warning and travel information Semantic Announcement, selling soil for plants. Greek voice. announcements. Scottish accents.

Reduced Flat voice; brash, strident voice; thin high drone; Hiss; clinks, clunks, rattles; pitched ‘boing’; monotone (acousmatic) hiss, shussh, fsss; glassy whine. voice; smooth undulating background drone.

Associative Hollow drone like a hoover pipe or empty tunnel. Robot voice – Kraftwerk, daleks, vocoder.

Flat, dour male voice; brash, strident, upbeat Not covered in transcript. But could include intrigue, Affective female voice; annoyance, abrasion (‘shut up!’); confusion, calm. alarm, startle; haunting drone.

Sense of large, empty, reverberant space. Distant traffic noise is enveloping, but also moves across Spatial Movement of footsteps. Machine voices close, stereo space; electronic voice is on middle-right, in middle reverberating human voices more distant. distance; birds also middle right, closer.

Hawking wares as part a marginal, itinerant existence in Critical Control, regulation, health and safety. the city. Urban poverty – perhaps related to Greek economic crisis?

Reflective Questions

1. What do you hear in these recordings? 2. Listening to the audio, looking at the transcripts and then the table, how do these different modes of presentation affect the insights you can gather? 3. What modes and concepts of listening would you use? Can you think of other modes of listening not covered here?

Further Reading/References Augoyard, J. F., & Torgue, H. (2006). Sonic experience: a guide to everyday sounds, Montréal; London: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: sound on screen. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press.

Drever, J. L. (2002). Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and acousmatic music. Organised Sound, 7, 21–27.

Gallagher, M. (2013). Listening, meaning and power. In A. Carlyle, & C. Lane (Eds.), On listening (pp. 41–44). Axminster, Devon: Uniformbooks.

Gallagher, M. (2014). Sounding ruins: reflections on the production of an ‘audio drift’. Cultural Geographies.

Gallagher, M., & Prior, J. (2014). Sonic geographies: exploring phonographic methods. Progress in Human Geography, 38, 267–284.

Goodman, S. (2009). Sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear.

Page 12 of 13 Audio Methods: Analysing Field Recordings of Electronic Voices in Athens and Glasgow SAGE SAGE Research Methods Datasets Part 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Law, J. (2004). After method: mess in social science research. London: Routledge.

Schafer, R. M. (1994). The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.

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