I lower my arm, holding the device to my waist, press ‘record’ with my thumb and start walking. The handheld recorder stands a good chance of remaining inconspicuous because the prominent black tuft of the recorder’s wind protection appears to blend in with the colour of my trousers. A lighter coloured flourish bursting out from below my waistline might have attracted some looks of suspicion and blown my cover all together.
I am trying to remain as anonymous as anyone in Adelaide’s Central Markets as people go about their business on a Friday afternoon. It’s a balancing act. I sometimes feel as if I am perched somewhere between an anonymous entity drifting on the periphery of attention and one of those weirdos who gets in too close during a conversation. I am attempting to be a ‘normal’ person in other words: participating in public and blending in with the bustle of the market crowd as bodies circulate, trolleys roll and voices coalesce at every turn. Since I started walking with a recorder in public space again I’ve remembered how tricky it can be to actively document soundscapes in public whilst remaining in a state of visible and mental neutrality. As I carry this recorder around below immediate sight lines and scan the environment around me, I wonder what my face is doing. Do I need to remind myself to not look too obvious about what I’m doing? Don’t worry, I tell myself, they can’t see what your ears are doing. Listen to your environment, keep the recorder in a comfortable steady grip and rely on your vision to keep walking with a semblance of normality and avoid colliding with people. For goodness sake, don’t overthink this.
In this moment or subsequently listening back to a given recording, I sometimes can’t avoid the nagging thought that what I’m doing is slightly sinister - soaking up these ambiences and stray voices with a sophisticated piece of technology. My younger self would have relished this scenario. As a child in the late 1980s - an era saturated with images of hidden recorders, grainy CCTV and rogue satellites - I was obsessed with espionage and spycraft. Now in my forties, I’m living the dream, albeit with a specifically aesthetic agenda. Though it’s hard not to shake the impression of what I’ve seen on film, where professionals with their tools of the trade, start out as they’ve always done - doing it ‘for the art’ - only to find themselves unexpectedly plunged into dangerous situations, be it an unfolding conspiracy or a murder mystery. Here’s three notable examples. David Hemmings in Blow Up as an in-demand hip photographer who descends into sweaty obsession bordering on the existential; Gene Hackman in The Conversation as a lonely sound recordist who descends into anxious paranoia; John Travolta in Blow Out as a slightly-less lonely sound recordist who descends into even-worse anxious paranoia, but also - to cap it off - has the misfortune of being traumatised by his own handiwork at the film’s devastating conclusion.
“What are you doing with that?”
That question doesn’t come up so much when I’m spotted with a handheld recorder. And in any case, the recorder looks like a hairy old-school mobile phone so I suppose they just think I’m eccentric. The prospect of being questioned is more a matter of scale. When I’ve got a bigger microphone in my hand, two microphones attached to a tripod or I’m launching hydrophones into a body of water, then there’s a much higher likelihood that someone’s going to approach me. If I’m asked and I respond along the lines of ‘I’m just recording the sounds’ there’s roughly three reactions I can expect: one of genuine curiosity; one of indifference; and the one where they apologise for asking in the first place and then proceed to back away slowly. Thankfully suspicion, hostility or physical intervention has been a rarity. There has only been one instance of the latter case when - years before I had cultivated a stronger sense of self awareness - I was making a handheld recording of a creek under a footbridge in a suburban park. An elder member of the community, under the presumption that I was graffiti tagging just out of sight, scrambled down the bank, grabbed me roughly by the arm and barked, “you’re coming with me you fucking bastard.” Once it became clear that I was doing something far more wholesome (though not at all conventional), he couldn’t bring himself to formally apologise and instead awkwardly explained that he was only ‘doing it for the community’, then quickly ambled back up to the path to resume his walk. In a partial daze, I went back to recording the creek and it was only after a minute or so that I realised I was standing in ankle-deep water.
It was somewhat ironic then that I adopted a fairly carefree mentality to recording in public when I visited Singapore last year. Of course I wasn’t stupid enough to record under public footbridges, but given its reputation as a surveillance state with cameras everywhere and the odd security robot rolling around, I felt oddly at ease wandering about and acoustically surveying public spaces. Although the thought of being arrested and caned for recording in public did occasionally cross my mind prior to the trip, for every pang of pre-travel paranoia I balanced this out by reassuring myself: you’re not that important. As a case in point, on one evening trip to the city’s famous market, Lau Pa Sat, thousands of people swarmed and circulated around a dense network of food stalls. Much like Adelaide’s markets, unless there was a contingent of urban anthropologists or an inordinate police presence in the crowd, everyone’s attention was directed elsewhere on more pressing and immediate concerns. Caught in the throng seeking dinner (whilst also recording) I have not just an audio document of this collective chaos, but my own and my partner’s verbal annotations of where we were at a given points, such as: “that’s a dead end”, “maybe Malaysian?” and “oh, there are toilets over there.” Listening back, I’m comforted by the realisation that there would have been a multitude of fellow patrons voicing similar observations. In fact, what I’m listening back to now as an indistinct churn of many voices is probably just hundreds of dinner decisions being made at more or less the same time. When I was walking around, at no point did I really give much of a care to the fact that I had an audio recorder in my hand. Aside from the thought of bumping into someone and accidentally dropping the recorder, I was hungry and would probably also need to go to the toilet soon. In that sense, I was at one with the crowd.
It goes without saying too, that in this scenario I would have been wearing light-coloured linen trousers to combat the stifling humidity of the Singapore evening, so the recorder’s black tuft - to anyone bothering to look below my waistline - would have probably been more prominent than it had ever been before.
Thanks! Keen to hear how the headphones pan out :)
Great read! I’m currently sitting on a train recording with my “stealth” Sennheiser Ambeo in ear mics that look like headphones! It’s another solution to the problem but I haven’t used them much so not sure of the quality yet… 😂🎧