Bitterly cold this morning in Queens Wood but not too cold to hear the woman calling her dogs with a fluting falling call – ooh oooh – that reminded me of the similar calls my mother would sound out over garden fences when she wanted to speak to a neighbour, often using it in lieu of the doorbell as she stood on their front path. When I was a child I thought of this ‘attention’ melody as a normal and unremarkable mode of female vocalisation (and clearly it remains so for women of a certain age); now I hear it as an ethnomusicologist might once have heard whistle language in Gomera, weeping in death ceremonies or the kind of tumbling shouts used in Papua New Guinea to communicate from one hillside to another. Vernacular improvised language; mostly overlooked and forgotten.
Woodpeckers were drumming in the distance, their time of year. I thought of something Daniela Cascella wrote recently in her blog, En Abime (enabime.wordpress.com) . . . “a problematic tendency, in field recording, toward the dissolution of the recording subject into the field.” I hear the woodpeckers as distance event, spatial, a communicative calling, a temporal marking of season and life cycle, but the energy of the event is extra-human in its sudden bursting and equally sudden cutting. Not a human aesthetic. A drummer’s imitation would tend to force emphasis to the front of the event (maybe a press roll comes closest to the mechanics of the woodpecker and the tree). As I walked my attention was caught by a small piece of card fixed to a tree with rusted safety pins. A few lines were typed on the card, a Buddhist idea of life being in the mind. Who is the recording subject, I wonder? Fixed by a recording device none of these sounds carry with them the associative thoughts, emotions and memories of the primary listener, the experience of improvising a hearing event; a proportion of their interest disappears in the sharing of sound, replaced by whatever is stimulated or not in new listeners.
As I write this I am listening to a recording, “Flowing Water” (Liu Shui), performed by Kuan P’ing-hu on Guqin, released in 1969 by the Anthology Record and Tape Corporation (in 1977, this same piece was sent into outer space by NASA on the Voyager spacecraft). The music uses many technical devices to convey the complexity of flow – too many devices for Chinese scholars at its publication in 1876, who disdained its “lack of constraint and premeditated showiness”, according to Fredric Lieberman’s LP notes. Yet it communicates the way in which humans construct events by translating impossible complexity into something comprehensible, rich in associative feelings and ideas. Of all these methods of recording – inner reflection, text, recording device or instrument – which one conveys an experience or memory while leaving the least burdensome trace?
davidtoop 
Hello David,
For now, here’s a subject in a field:
Some words to follow soon
Daniela