Why do people listen to her records? “Honestly, I don't know,” she said. “It's still very difficult for me to go to a dinner party and say, ‘I compose what's loosely called music from field recordings.’ It's not the average way to make a living. But more people are getting interested in nature, and more listen to experimental music, so naturally they discover it.”
The most prominent field recordist today is Chris Watson, a soft-spoken 62-year-old from Sheffield, England, who has won numerous awards including for his work on BBC nature documentaries.
Mr Watson has been making recordings since he was 11, when his parents gave him a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and he left it on a bird feeder to see if he could hear what birds sounded like eating.
“I was amazed when I played it back,” he said. “I just couldn't believe you could eavesdrop onto a world where you could never be yourself. I'm still excited by that idea.”
Among his recordings are the sounds of ice straining, tearing and melting in the Antarctic and of vultures picking apart a zebra carcass in Kenya. (He attached microphones to it, then hid far away listening via a long cable, waiting hours for the vultures to land.)
Mr. Watson shapes his recording into albums and performance pieces meant to be listened to like symphonies. His most recent was a 40-minute sound portrait of Newcastle's town moor, a huge area in the city where cows graze. His favorite sound is the noise of the insect known as the water boatman in the moor's pond, said to be the loudest animal relative to its body size.
“It's the sound of them rubbing their penises beneath their abdomens to sing to attract females,” Mr. Watson said with a boyish smile. “I love the fact that in this relatively tranquil environment, all that noise is going on below the surface.”
At a performance of the town-moor piece in a movie theater in Newcastle, the audience sat in darkness, surrounded by speakers. “It's like the old cliche that radio is better than television because the pictures are better,” Mr. Watson told the audience. “Sound surrounds you. It releases your imagination.”
Mr. Watson said he seeks to capture the “spirit of places” in his music, but he also sees the world as being filled with breathtaking sounds that instruments cannot reproduce that more people should hear. “Everyone should listen more,” he said. “But they should just start with what they've got. I've traveled a lot, but still the most awesome sound I've ever heard - the most beautiful, the most rich, the most musical - is the blackbirds in my garden.”
