We all know that photography can select or eliminate elements from a picture. The saying goes that if it’s not in the frame, it doesn’t exist. In all my years of photography that has been true. Even if it was inevitably in the frame, there were ways to get still rid of something in post-processing.
For sound recording, that is quite different. We may have microphones that are predominantly sensitive in one single direction like shotgun mics, but they don’t eliminate everything else.
Change the microphone type to an omnidirectional mic, and you capture everything in a sphere around the microphone capsule. Including your own body sounds. Your stomach may growl for food, a tiny whistle in your nose, everything gets recorded. Take the sound of birds in my backyard for example. The faraway traffic is still present.
Granted, you can move away from the mics, but then other things might come up. In urban environments, this is inevitable. Sounds of cars, people, music, radios and everything else that you can think of will be picked up by that mic.
So I often go far away from any humans and hope for the best. Sometimes I try my backyard for this, early in the morning. The bird song is often quite good, with the occasional loon flying over.
Until this happens:
That will take away all pleasure of recording anything until they have finished cutting their grass. The same goes for airplanes overhead. That will put a pause to recording for at least 15-20 minutes in quiet areas.
If it’s not in the frame it might not exist in photography, but it sure does in field recording!
Until next time…