Reality-Based Sound Workshop with Ernst Karel

This two-day workshop will focus on an approach to documentary audio through the practice of location recording and composing with location recordings. (Often called ‘field recordings’, these might better be considered as ‘fields recordings’.) This approach to working with sound does not privilege the human voice, and considers the process of recording as part of engaging in an encounter with a social situation or lived environment through all of one’s senses. And through this encounter, audio recordings arise. Once audio recordings have arisen, we engage with them anew in the process of listening back and editing. In the workshop we will listen to and discuss relevant audio pieces, as well as ideas about audio as a way of exploring ‘place’. We will then get started right away by choosing a site or network of sites, where participants will engage in the acts of listening and recording. Individually, participants will listen back to their recordings, and make selections to present to the rest of the group. At this point, the emphasis shifts from the original site of engagement with sound, to the new space of an encounter with audio in the studio. As a group we will listen to, discuss, and work on issues of editing and composition both collectively and individually, using a multitrack editing environment (Reaper).
This workshop is part of the symposium ‘Space, Time and the Visceral in Southeast Asian Cinemas’, organized by the Southeast Asian Cinemas Research network, in collaboration with Hanoi DocLab; sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.