I take great pleasure in going about my day. In a big city where there is always something to do, I like to run errands on my bike, visit the public library, and help run the food scrap drop-off at my community garden. I find much to appreciate in the mundane and in the unexpected moments that make up every day. Yet as much as I’d love to live in the moment, there is an urge to keep evidence of what I experience. I want proof that I am having a good or interesting time! 

“As much as I’d love to live in the moment, there is an urge to keep evidence of what I experience.”

For years, like many others, I’ve collected evidence through taking photos on my phone. Anything I find beautiful, or funny, or interesting. Over the course of an illustrious career on social media (ha!), I’ve taken photos so I could post them to share with an audience of friends, family, and total strangers.

This upkeep grew exhausting and unpleasant, and I’ve since then mostly retired from social media. Still, I’ve held onto all the photos I had taken, and have kept taking more out of habit. 

Digital clutter accumulates in a way that’s much harder to notice than physical clutter. A few months ago, I remembered I have been paying for cloud storage — for years, I think? — and decided to look at what I’ve been paying to store. There are photos of some precious moments, for sure, but also so many images of my cats engaging in the same few activities, or screenshots of text message exchanges that annoyed or stressed me out at the time and still do. There are dozens of nearly identical photos of tulips at the botanical garden every spring.

For every nice photo I’ve taken, there are outtakes of something humblingly blurry, or friends’ faces growing increasingly strained as I ask them to hold their smile. Is it worth the money I’m paying to keep all of these photos? And, moving forward, do I need to take that many more of them?

“Is it worth the money I’m paying to keep all of these photos? And, moving forward, do I need to take that many more of them?”

While the mindlessness with which I take and save photos leaves something to be desired, I feel more intentional about hearing and recording sound. I’m a musician and in recent years my taste and output have leaned more experimental. I’ve grown more patient and introspective, seeking out ambient noise and dreamy, repetitive drones. I like to create the kind of music that could be played in the background but benefits from being considered by a thoughtful ear. It often mixes together the natural and synthetic, and musical instruments with sounds from real life.

In the spirit of experimentation, I could add all sorts of sounds to my music, but first, I need to collect them. And so, following in the footsteps of a long history of avant-garde musicians and ethnomusicologists, I have been taking field recordings.

Field recording refers to capturing audio in real-world environments. Basically, field recordings let us hear the world as we live in it, including natural sounds and environments, as well as urban spaces, like where I live. These kinds of recordings are common in the worlds of radio documentary and among environmental explorers like birders and whale watchers. Armed with my ears, my curiosity, and my phone’s voice memo app, I am an amateur field recordist but an enthusiastic one. Whereas taking a photo has become so commonplace that I forget I’m doing it, I appreciate how recording sound requires a bit more intentionality. 

“Whereas taking a photo has become so commonplace that I forget I’m doing it, I appreciate how recording sound requires a bit more intentionality.”

My first foray into field recording was a few years ago while traveling in northern Thailand. I was traveling alone but part of a tour group that would go on excursions, take photos, and then get back into a van and share them with each other — typical vacation stuff. As our tour progressed, I felt inundated with photos. Here I was, surrounded by incredible mountains and waterfalls, looking for WiFi so I could share my blurry photos with my tourmates. Meanwhile, scooters whizzed by constantly, and bells were ringing at the temples we visited.

I walked over many wooden bridges and took a bike ride over bumpy roads, past playgrounds and schools where bands were practicing. I was somewhere I had never been before, with fascinating sounds surrounding me, and so I started to record.

On this first trip, I learned a few things about recording sound on your phone. One is that sound recordings can be a great way to document a moment that photos might struggle to capture, like when we rode a raft through a dimly lit bat cave or watched the sun set over a canyon. (I know from experience my photo of the sunset would look okay-to-bad.)

“Sound recordings can be a great way to document a moment that photos might struggle to capture.”

I also learned that, with my equipment at least, some things that seem beautiful or unique IRL may sound less appealing once recorded. Waterfalls bring to mind running water in the bathroom. Leaves crunching beneath my feet on a hike across the world sound, well, like I’m walking on dead leaves just about anywhere. Still, there is something nice about the universality of certain sounds, and I felt inspired to record more at home.

Back at home, there is plenty of noise to play with. The radiator in my apartment is impressively loud. I live on the sixth floor and hear five slow beeps each time I ride the elevator — one for each floor we pass. Six floors up, street-level noise somehow finds a way to float through my open windows: Kids screaming (er, playing) on the playground, marching bands and steel drum bands practicing in the park. Car stereos — and car alarms — from below mix with helicopters flying overhead. It’s a nightmare for a Zoom call or when a guest who isn’t used to this level of commotion is staying over and trying to get to sleep. But for someone searching for sound, it’s a treasure trove.

Too often, I think we are quick to judge noise as being bad. People wear noise-canceling headphones so they can avoid “undesirable” noise that’s happening around them and instead turn their full attention to their music, podcasts, or meetings. The practice of taking audio recordings has refreshed my mindset. These days, noises that used to irritate me feels neutral or even good by the nature of it being fascinating. Since I’ve started recording sounds, I find myself observing without judgment. 

“Too often, I think we are quick to judge noise as being bad.”

There is a flexibility inherent to field recording. Sound is fluid, and often one will mix with another. In a yard recently, I hear what I think might be a cardinal — the trick a birder friend taught me is that they sound like a car alarm — and take a recording to ask my friend if I’m identifying it correctly. As soon as I press record, construction noises fill the air from a neighboring yard, and then more from a yard on the other side. In the file, the construction noise overpowers what I meant to record, but the cardinal still comes through, and my friend can identify the bird, plus two others I hadn’t even noticed. 

This kind of moment happens a lot, especially in the city. I’ll stop to record one thing, say church bells playing a sweet song, and the predominant sound I end up with will be motorcycles, eventually fading into birdsong. Unexpected moments stack on top of each other, and what I started out wanting turns into something completely new — and often better.

“What I started out wanting turns into something completely new — and often better.”

On a recent visit to the botanical garden, I find the tulips in full bloom again. I am tempted to take out my phone to photograph some of the tulips I find particularly astonishing, especially these grids of colors and ruffled petals I feel like I’ve never seen before. (If I checked my saved photos, I’m sure I’d find photos of these exact colors and ruffles from last year and the year before.) I take a beat and instead record sound as an experiment in restraint and curiosity.

Unlike when I’m trying to record a bird or church bells and getting other sounds mixed in, this time I’m capturing the whole scene. I get: Water from a fountain, various birds singing, babies crying, and the low murmur of people reading placards or talking about flowers, or something completely irrelevant.

I hear cars outside the garden, or a helicopter overhead, and it reminds me that we are in the real, full world.

Jenny Nelson is a writer, artist, and community gardener originally from Chicago and living in Brooklyn, NY. She makes music under the name Concourse and plays keyboard in the band Jupiter Boys, among others.