In March 2025 I taught an online workshop session for CAMP. Listening with Other Ears: A Practical Introduction to “Expanded” Field Recording was part of a series called Field Recording, Located Sound And Ecoacoustics with Jana Winderen, Francisco Lopez, Raquel Castro, Alice Eldridge, and myself.
I’ve attended their workshops in the past, so it was an honor to helm one of my own. Here’s what we covered:
This online course will explore expanded field recording techniques for “taking the pulse” of the environment, stretching your ears to practice unfamiliar ways of listening, communicating, and inhabiting the world. We will introduce five techniques with live demonstrations, sound examples, historical/critical context, and practical fieldcraft advice using commercial and D.I.Y. tools.
We’ll begin with an investigation of acousmatic listening and its potential to erode the representational bias of visual culture. (After all, we can discover so much about a sound without even wondering what it is.) We will listen together from afar, embracing our subjectivity rather than erasing it, acknowledging that others may be hearing the same vibrations but listening with other ears. From this central point, each technique offers a potential route to worlds beyond human-centric listening:
- Contact Microphones: sonic microscopes hear the vibrations of objects instead of air.
- Hydrophones: underwater microphones that reveal the largest singing cetaceans and the tiniest water beetles.
- Ultrasound Devices: bat detectors and other techniques to hear pitches above the human hearing range.
- RF Devices: electromagnetic coils to hear radio signals leaking from electronics, and large VLF antennas to hear the natural radio of Earth’s ionosphere
- Optical Transducers: devices to translate flickering light into sound.
The course is intended for musicians, sound artists, ecoacoustics researchers, and curious listeners at all levels. Beginners will gain the practical knowledge to choose the best tools for their practice. More experienced recordists will learn fieldcraft techniques and context to use their existing tools to their fullest.
