Tokyo is a sound-saturated city: bustling traffic, train station announcements, people everywhere, the barrage of loud adverts, drunk salarymen singing in the Ginza streets at night, and even the loud caws of the Tokyo’s infamous large crows. Then there’s the seemingly ubiquitous background music in shopping centers, department stores, offices, and super markets. Read the rest
Since the birth of audio recording in the 19th century, people have used the technology to capture the ambient sounds of our world for later playback. With the invention of high-quality, portable tape recorders in the 1960s, field recording evolved into its own art form. Now, all of us carry high-quality digital recorders in our pockets and myriad sound artists continue to push the form forward. Good field recordings have the power to transport us and, sometimes, attune our own senses so that we too listen more actively to our own experiences in the world. In this short documentary "Sound Fields," director Sam Campbell introduces us to contemporary field recordists who are masters at active listening and share what they hear with all of us.
