This week’s guest lecture was conducted by Jez Riley-French who is an experimental sound artist whose work focuses a lot on field recording. A lot of today’s lecture consisted of Jez showcasing some of the different work he has done, all of which was recorded in variety of interesting locations. He began by playing the sound of teleferica cables being blown about by the wind in Italy which he had recorded with some contact microphones he had made himself. As he continued to showcase his work, he discussed the different skills and techniques he’d used to capture them as well as the different microphones he’d used such as hydrophones, ultrasonic recordings and infrasound. One of his pieces I really enjoyed was Height Of The Reeds where he’d placed contact microphones in the roof of a building to capture the sound of an orchestra. This led to the piece sounding really eerie whilst simultaneously sounding extremely musical and rich. This is an experimental technique I may now use in my music production and is reflective of Jez saying that you should treat the recording space and the microphone as an extra instrument.

Jez also gave some tips and hints into the world of experimental sound recording which were; to try and record things for as long as possible as short recordings may get perceived as sound effects, technology is the least important tool and its more about how you use it (also mentioned by Dean in the previous week), always try to record at low gain levels to avoid unwanted compression, there’s always a market for your work if you specialize in a certain area, make you sure you have good quality head phones, acoustics are crucial when presenting a sound design piece and a lot of sound recording is all about the experience.