This is another post in which I share audio recorded in a forest near my home in Montana. In it, you hear a variety of birds including two pileated woodpeckers who hammered their rhythms back and forth across the forest in a strange call-and-response. This is field audio recording: just me, with a shotgun microphone and a boom pole in a forest, listening to the sounds of the world, and recording it so that it may be shared with you. It is quiet, and I hope it adds a moment of texture and relaxation to your day. For the last few years, I have used photography to guide me out into the world at a time when the world has tried very hard to keep me sequestered at home. Through the pandemic, photography has lured me from my comfortable chair in my sheltered house and pushed me to drive all over the American West and most of New England. Without my cameras, I would never have gotten out the door. I must admit that the writing has been secondary, and while I do write a great deal while traveling, most of what people read has been reworked later. What gets written on the road is always the start of something, rarely the end. In recent months, recording audio has become as much a motivator as photography. Recording audio was something I started doing while working as a digital journalist. For well over 10 years, it has been a tool I use for story gathering. In my newspaper days, I would record interviews because neither my memory nor my note-taking skills were reliable and I could always pull accurate quotes from recordings. Very quickly, as I was the digital news person in mostly traditional print news environments, I started pushing for audio as a supplemental or even standalone product. I started adding audio and video to print stories for online editions and pushing reporters to release podcasts instead of simply blogging. In my time at Mamalode Magazine, I launched and produced a podcast in which I even took to the microphone (not something I had ever been interested in) and I interviewed a bunch of fascinating people; filmmakers, writers, musicians, and business people. I never stopped hating the sound of my own voice, but I loved the conversations I was able to have. I’ve since done much more of this but without a specific home. Some of my audio interviews are easy enough to find. Others have mysteriously disappeared. Recently, I participated in a conversation with other Substack users about podcasting on the platform and I very quickly realized that what I wanted to do with field audio recordings was somewhat unique on the platform. That’s both good and bad. Doing something unique means you are more able to distinguish yourself and what you do. But doing something unique is often bad because it is so much harder for people to figure out what you are doing. Fortunately for me, I’m doing what my interest and instincts tell me is the best way to present the world, and at this point in my life, with the world in the state it is in, I’m very comfortable presenting the world as I find it. No need for intro or outro music or lots of fancy sound design and editorial sculpting. I just try to select what I share with some care. (If you are interested in that sort of thing, check out some of the more narrative audio experiments I’ve been doing with “found audio” on Soundcloud.) This is the third field audio recording I’m posting to this newsletter, and with it, I am ready to make it a much more regular thing. If you like it, please let me know. If you don’t, you are welcome to let me know as well. So far, the audio I’ve posted has gotten more attention than what I write. I’ll take that as a sign of interest. You may not have noticed, but I’ve always disabled comments on my posts except to paid subscribers. I’m going to open comments to all on these publicly shared audio posts. Let me know what you think. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelandbuck.substack.com/subscribe
