BEFORE YOU START…

Open ears, open mind

Many sounds interact in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Practise listening analytically, tracking pitch changes in continuous sounds or separating frequency components in any larger soundscapes you have.

Found sound fashion and etiquette

Silence is golden. Minimise the amount of rustling your clothes produce, put your phone in flight mode, invest in decent microphone suspensions and wind shields, and try not to breathe too loudly. Necessary excess To isolate discrete sources from broader sound fields, capture as much pure background sound as you can, to feed de-noiser algorithms or analysing before filtering out.

Backup plan

Before plunging into the fun of editing, make a ‘raw’ or ‘unedited’ folder in case of an emergency.

What’s in a name?

Thoughtful file naming is key to good field recording and found sound archiving. Include data like place, recording device, sound source and date. Create a coding system with an accompanying text file as a key.