The Listening Field — soundscaper

i · listen

Before you record anything, learn to hear the place you live in. This is called a soundwalk.

Walk somewhere outdoors — a park, a street, a courtyard, a field. Don't talk. For ten minutes, only listen. R. Murray Schafer called this ear cleaning: noticing sounds that were always there.

Listen for three kinds of sound:

Keynote — the constant background of this place (wind, traffic, a river). You stop hearing it until it's gone.
Signals — sounds in the foreground that come and go (a bird, a bell, a door).
Soundmarks — sounds that belong to this place only. Its acoustic signature.

The quietest sound I noticed A sound that repeats here A sound only this place makes — its soundmark

ii · record

Now capture the sounds from your listening log. Your phone or laptop microphone is your field recorder.

Get close to the sound. Closer than feels normal.
Hold still — your hands and clothes are the loudest thing near the mic.
Shield the mic from wind with your body.
Record 10–30 seconds. Wait through the boring parts — that's the keynote.

Recordings land on the shelf below. They stay on this device.

iii · gather

Some sounds you can't reach — a glacier, a market across the ocean, a whale. Borrow them, and say where they came from.

Good places to gather from:

freesound.org — huge Creative Commons library
radio aporee — field recordings pinned to a world map
BBC sound effects archive

Download a file, then bring it in:

After importing, open the sound on the shelf and write who recorded it and where in the source line. Borrowed sound is a gift — credit the giver.

iv · compose

This is not a timeline. It's a field, and you are the listener at its centre.

Place a sound from the shelf, then drag it around you. Direction is where you hear it from; distance is how far away it sits (farther = quieter, hazier, more of the field's space).
Give it a life: a keynote flows continuously; a signal recurs on its own rhythm; a soundmark waits until you call it — click it while the field is open.
Work the material like tape: slow it, reverse it, cut a fragment, darken its tone. A sound slowed four times stops being a door and becomes weather.

Switch to ambisonic up top and the field is encoded the way sound engineers capture whole environments — Faust computes it live in your browser.

Field space (reverberance)

v · walk

A soundscape is a place you move through. Pin your sounds to the real map, draw the path you'd walk, and the walk is the piece.

Pin sounds from the shelf onto the map and drag them where they belong. Every sound loops continuously — like the world does. The ring around each pin is its reach: step inside and it grows louder; at the edge it dissolves into reverberance.
Draw the walk — tap ✎ draw path, then click the route your listener takes. The walk's length and your pace decide how long the piece lasts.
The space itself has a voice: choose the biome and distant sounds echo the way that landscape does.

Below the map the piece writes itself as a walking timeline: near sounds swell large in the foreground, far ones drift small and hazy behind — and they slide past the fixed cursor at different speeds, the way a far treeline moves slower than the fence beside you. You never edit down there; drag it only to scrub. To change the music, move the world.

biome (reverb character)

walking pace m/s

vi · score

The field is a place; the score is a journey through it. Time flows down the page, like a poem.

Place sounds from the shelf and drag them up and down to choose when they happen. When sounds overlap, the page lays them side by side by itself — there are no tracks to manage.
Repeat a sound like a refrain — set how many times and the silence between.
Granulate a sound and it melts into a cloud of tiny grains — a door becomes weather, a voice becomes wind. Stretch the cloud as long as you like.
All shaping (cut, speed, reverse, tone) happens on each sound, exactly like on the field.

Think in three movements: how does your place wake, live, and rest?

vii · reflect & share

The piece is finished when it can speak for the place.

What does your soundscape say about your place? What did you hear this week that you had never noticed before? If this place could ask people for one thing, what would it be?

To share it: press ◉ open the field, then ● record the piece, listen through once like an audience would, stop — and you'll get an audio file to give back to your community.