Episode 26: THE ART OF FIELD RECORDING - Bernie Krause - Wild Sanctuary and Melissa Pons - Melissapons.com Artwork

The Quiet Mark Podcast

Welcome to The Quiet Mark Podcast. Hosted by Simon Gosling CMO at Quiet Mark, the global award programme associated with the UK Noise Abatement Society, this series uniquely explores the vital role acoustics will play in the future of global living, building and product design sharing conversations with thought-leading designers, architects, and sound experts. The World Health Organization (WHO) recognises environmental noise as the 2nd largest environmental health risk in Western Europe after air quality. Noise contributes to a range of physical and mental health problems, disturbed sleep, affects people’s hearing, communication and learning. And, in our smart-phone era, noise isn’t only about the big sounds of planes, traffic and construction sites, smaller sounds like someone FaceTiming on the bus or playing music loudly through their tinny headphones can cause stress, annoyance and impacts our mental health. During this time of Lockdown our world is much quieter than usual, every sound is more noticeable, quietness has never seemed more important or front of mind, where could this take us and how will we live, build, and work after this profound period of change? To help navigate the world-changes around us, these exclusive insights into pioneering projects and visions, explore the future on the other side of the crisis.

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Episode 26: THE ART OF FIELD RECORDING - Bernie Krause - Wild Sanctuary and Melissa Pons - Melissapons.com

August 09, 2021 • Quiet Mark

Earlier this year, in February's Episode 16 of The Quiet Mark Podcast, we discussed the inaugural Sound of the Year Awards with Chair-Judge, Matthew Herbert - BBC New Radiophonic Workshop & fellow Judge, Cheryl Tipp - Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds - British Museum.

One of the categories, Best Field Sound Recordist, was being judged by legendary Soundscape Ecologist, Bernie Krause, and one of the works nominated in that category was the incredible Wolf Soundscapes, by Melissa Pons.

So, it is with immense pleasure that, in this Episode 26, exploring The Art of Field Recording, we are joined by Bernie and Melissa, to find out more about why they record sounds of nature, what it has taught them, and what we might learn from listening to their works.

Bernie Krause, often referred to as the Godfather of Field Recording, is a seven-time author with north of 50 years experience. He posited the ‘acoustic niche hypothesis’ that all organisms establish a frequency and bandwidth to ‘vocalise’ themselves in their habitat. That explains why those animalistic elements in the rainforest never seem to clash, but all have their own established space. He’s recorded 5,000 hours and a huge 15,0000 species. First working as a studio musician, Bernie even introduced the MOOG synthesizer to film soundtracks and popular artists like Peter Gabriel, Van Morrison, Brian Eno and David Byrne (to name but a few…)

Melissa Pons is a fellow field recordist whose work is, in her own words ‘slow’. She acclimatises to the cultural context of the situation and environment in which she finds herself. She came from a background of commercial sound design, but has chosen to focus on ‘more meaningful’ projects—allowing a portion of her profits to be ploughed back into the people and places she’s introduced to—via her recordings. These have included recording in tropical forests in Brazil, and also living with and recording packs of wolves.

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Simon Gosling

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