Stand on a black sand beach in Iceland with a microphone in a furry windshield and you quickly learn that the ocean is not one sound. There is the deep thud of a wave landing, the hiss of foam pulling back over stones, and the wind worrying at your jacket the whole time.
Field recording is the practice of capturing sound like this, outside the studio, where it actually happens. It began as a tool for scientists, folklorists and broadcasters, and it has become one of the most open and rewarding methods in contemporary art.
This guide looks at what field recording is, how artists use it, what kit you really need and how to come home with recordings worth keeping.
What field recording actually is
At its simplest, field recording means taking a recorder to a place and capturing what you hear there. That might be birdsong at dawn, traffic under a bridge, ice cracking on a lake or the hum of a ventilation shaft.
What separates it from simply pressing record on a phone is attention. A field recordist chooses where to stand, when to start, which microphone to use and what to leave out. Those choices shape the result as much as framing shapes a photograph.
For artists, the recording is rarely the end point. It becomes raw material for a composition, a sound installation, a radio piece, a drawing, or a body of evidence in a longer research project.
A short history of listening outdoors
Early field recordings were mostly documentary. Ethnographers carried wax cylinder phonographs from the 1890s onwards to record songs and speech, and naturalists later lugged heavy tape machines into forests to capture bird calls.
In the late 1960s, the composer R. Murray Schafer founded the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in Canada. The group studied how whole environments sound and coined much of the language still used today, including the idea of the soundscape itself.
One of its members, Hildegard Westerkamp, went on to make Kits Beach Soundwalk in 1989, a piece in which her own voice guides you through a recording of a Vancouver shoreline. It remains one of the clearest examples of how a recordist's presence can become part of the work.
How artists use field recordings
Some artists treat recordings almost like photographs, presenting them with little or no editing. The British recordist Chris Watson, known for his work on natural history television, released Weather Report in 2003, an album built from long, carefully composed recordings of places in Kenya, Scotland and Iceland.
Others use recordings as a map. Annea Lockwood's A Sound Map of the Hudson River, from 1982, follows the river from its source in the Adirondacks down to the Atlantic, letting the water's changing voice describe the journey.
Closer to home for Nordic listeners, Norwegian artist Jana Winderen works with hydrophones to record what happens under water and under ice. Her pieces reveal a busy, crackling world of fish, shrimp and insects that most of us never hear.
Bernie Krause, a musician turned soundscape ecologist, has spent decades recording wild places and coined the term biophony for the collective sound of living organisms in a habitat. His archive shows how recordings can also become evidence of environmental change.
The kit: what you really need
You can start with a phone and a cheap clip-on microphone. The limits show up fast, though: phones process sound heavily, struggle with wind and add noise in quiet places.
A dedicated portable field recorder is the usual next step. Small handheld units with built-in stereo microphones are light and quick to use, while larger recorders with XLR inputs let you plug in better external microphones.
Many current recorders, including models from Zoom, Sound Devices and Tascam, can record in 32-bit float. This format captures such a wide range of loudness that a sudden shout or slammed door is far less likely to distort, and levels can be adjusted afterwards. A 32-bit float recorder is especially forgiving when you cannot predict what a place will throw at you.
Beyond the recorder, a few accessories make a bigger difference than a new microphone. Good closed headphones let you hear what you are actually getting, and a proper windshield, the furry cover often called a dead cat, is essential outdoors.
Microphones that open up hidden sound
Stereo microphones capture a place roughly as you hear it, with a sense of left and right. Directional shotgun microphones narrow in on a single source, which helps with a distant bird or a voice.
Contact microphones pick up vibrations through solid surfaces rather than air. Pressed against a fence, a railing or a frozen lake, they reveal sounds that are completely inaudible to the ear.
Hydrophones do the same for water, and binaural microphones worn in the ears create recordings that feel strikingly three-dimensional on headphones. Each tool changes not just the quality of the sound but what you can notice at all.
Choosing the best recorder for field recording
There is no single best field recorder, only the best fit for how you work. Start with three questions: how far will you carry it, what will you plug into it and how quiet are the places you record?
If you walk long distances, weight and battery life matter more than input count. If you plan to use quiet external microphones for nature recording, look for low-noise preamps and the right number of inputs.
It is also worth thinking about workflow. Some recorders can be controlled from a phone app, which is handy when you set the kit down and walk away so your footsteps and breathing stay out of the recording.
Working in the field
Arrive early and listen before you record. Ten quiet minutes tell you where the interesting sounds are, which direction the wind is coming from and what noise you will have to work around.
Record longer than feels necessary. Many of the best moments arrive unannounced, and a long take gives you room to edit later. Keep still, silence your phone and say a short spoken note at the start of each take with the place, date and conditions.
Cold and remote locations add their own problems. Batteries drain quickly in low temperatures, so keep spares close to your body, and plan travel and safety carefully. Our piece on the logistics of Arctic fieldwork covers much of what changes when the site is hard to reach.
Ethics, permission and people
Recording in public is usually lawful, but that does not settle every question. If people's voices are clearly identifiable, think about whether they would expect to be recorded, and ask when you can.
Private land, protected nature areas and sensitive wildlife sites may have rules about access or disturbance. Recording birds at the nest, for example, can stress the animals, and playing calls back to attract them is discouraged in many places.
When a recording becomes part of a published artwork, keep track of where and when it was made. Good notes protect you and make the work more credible as research.
From raw audio to a finished work
Back home, start by organising files with clear names and backing them up in at least two places. Field recordings are often impossible to repeat, so losing a card can mean losing a season of work.
Editing can be light or heavy. Some artists only trim the start and end, while others layer, slow down or filter recordings until they become something new. Neither approach is more honest, as long as you are clear about what you have done.
Keeping a simple log of takes, locations and edits pays off later, especially in an academic setting. Our overview of research documentation tools artists actually use suggests practical ways to keep that record without slowing down the work.
Where field recording can take you
Field recording trains a kind of listening that stays with you. Once you have spent an hour with headphones on a beach or in a forest, ordinary places start to sound richer and more detailed.
It also connects naturally to other forms. Recordings can be played back through speakers in a gallery, shaped into a radio piece or used as a score for drawing. If you want to see how recorded sound can fill and shape a space, our guide to audio art installation is a good next step.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.