Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx Christina Katopodis (bio) Joeri Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018, 237 pp. $34.00 paper. How does the practice of scientific observation change when scientists must close their eyes and trust their ears? Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx addresses the challenges of accuracy and authenticity in sound recording and traces the history of how standard practices for collecting, interpreting, and sharing those recordings were established. Listening in the Field offers a refreshing analysis of the science of birdsong by refusing to isolate science from aesthetics, and by examining the interdisciplinary networks of collaboration that contributed to the field. Focusing on major shifts in technology and method, Bruyninckx argues that sound recording practices offer science an opportunity to redefine itself and engage with a public audience. Listening in the Field invites us to reflect on how the instruments scientists use are not as objective as we might think; rather, sound recording technologies and practices shape end results, impacting a listener's perception of sound. Listening to a recording of a thrush at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds, for instance, one must critically examine the sonic context of the recording and the curative choices made by recordists. Bruyninckx, by tracing the history of sound recording from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, emphasizes that recordings are not simply found in the field, as one might assume, but are, in fact, made. Bruyninckx centers his study around key pivot points in sound recording, such as radical departures from traditional musical notation, and attends, in particular, to the implications of new inventions, such as the parabolic reflector, magnetic tape, and the sound spectrograph. In addition, Bruyninckx treats sound recordings as circulating knowledges in translation between fields of study and between recordists working toward very different goals in science, in libraries, in entertainment, and, in [End Page 120] some cases, simply for the love of sound. Countless case studies reveal that birdsong is perpetually encoded and decoded across changing disciplines, from ornithology to ethology to anthropology, and recordings of birdsong are reshaped between academic scholars, amateur naturalists, and radio stations and filmmakers that draw from natural soundscapes. While Listening in the Field focuses particularly on technology and notable collaborations, it gestures toward larger theoretical questions of knowledge production; problems of authority and authenticity when recording in a breathing, living soundscape; the relationship between science and culture; and the ethics of ownership and access. Bruyninckx begins in the late nineteenth century when attempts to capture the elusive qualities of birdsong in musical notation reveal the inadequacy of human musical notation for the task, mainly due to the limiting factors of human hearing and the standardized key and time of music. Efforts to notate nonhuman music led to elaborate visual illustrations that attempted to capture the multidimensionality of sound. The diverse attempts to narrate, notate, draw, mimic, whistle, and represent sound visually or through syllabic onomatopoeia demonstrate the difficulty in translating situated knowledge from the field to paper, nonhuman music to human understanding, and the aural to the visual. Would sound recording technology resolve these tensions? The answer Bruyninckx offers is, resoundly, no. Bruyninckx argues, for example, that an invention such as the parabolic microphone, which focuses closely on sounds coming from one direction at a time, generates a "perspectiveless close-up recording" (p. 88) that shrinks the perceived space between listener and sound producer in the listener's experience. It also isolates the individual bird as a standard unit of analysis by eliminating other ambient sounds. Directional recording techniques contributed to what Bruyninckx calls the "laboratorization" of the field (p. 90). Although sounds were recorded as they were found, really, those recordings are not representations of "authentic nature" but, instead, have been artificially isolated and made to sound closer than they were in the field. Once magnetic tape enters the scene, sound recording rapidly changes the field of ornithology by generating a large amount of data not just about individual birds but also about particular species and variations in...