Sound Art, and Why I Can't Stop Field Recording: Module 3

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.There is a recording going around of a well-known voice saying something outrageous, and it never happened. Not one word of it. A machine made it. So how would you know? What in the sound itself would tell you whether it was real?This is the audio lecture for the third module, the week we finally name the thing this course has been circling: sound art. We start with a definition wide enough to hold a field recording, a soundwalk, or a gallery installation, and with Edgard Varèse's idea that music is simply "organised sound," which quietly puts you at the center of the art form.Then the history, told honestly, as not one tidy origin but several at once: Luigi Russolo and his hand-cranked noise machines in 1913, Halim El-Dabh transforming a recorded zaar ceremony in 1944 Cairo, four years before Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète in 1948, whose razor blade is the direct ancestor of every clip you split in a DAW. Along the way: R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, with its keynotes, signals, and soundmarks; the soundwalk, from Hildegard Westerkamp to Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks; and the practice I honestly cannot stop doing, field recording, through Francisco López, Annea Lockwood, Bernie Krause, and KMRU, who built an international career starting exactly where you start this week: one person with a recorder, listening to their own place.It ends where it began, with that fake voice, and why telling a true record of the real world from a convincing synthetic one is not a small skill.Your work this week is simple: go outside, record your actual place, and keep a piece of it. What does where you live sound like?Pairs with the Module 3 pages and screencasts.