The Temple Bell and the Leaf-Blower
A few things from a recent interview.
Hello from Kyoto! It’s been a full few weeks here and things are only going to get busier. The city itself is busy at this time of year, and so am I. It’s all good stuff though!
Paul Virostek from the website Creative Field Recording got in touch a while back about doing an interview for his website, and it went live last week. He runs one of the more thoughtful sites out there for people who care about this kind of work, and the questions he asked were genuinely good ones. I wanted to share the link here, along with a couple of moments from it that I think might interest you specifically.
Paul asked me about the idea of the “perfect” sound recording and I shared a story about a temple I take guests to, Shoren-in. The temple has this large bell in the garden there, and guests love to record the sound of it ringing. The instinct is always to capture just that: the clean resonance of the bell, nothing else disturbing it. But funnily enough, as fate would have it of course, occasionally there’s a leaf-blower running in one of the nearby gardens behind the temple.
For a long time that kind of thing would have really bothered me. But now I’ve learnt to lean into it. The recording with both the bell and the leaf-blower is the real one. That’s actually what that place sounds like. The background sound ties it to exactly when and where it happened, in a way that a clean recording can’t.
I also talked about a moment at the end of a sound walk last year. We’d just finished and were heading back to the bus stop when one of the guests spotted a man walking toward us wearing a big pair of those Apple over-the-ear headphones. He turned to me and said: “that guy is missing out on so many beautiful sounds!” He’d arrived at that thought entirely by himself, at the end of two hours of paying attention. I hadn’t said anything to prompt it. I think about that one a lot!
And I talked a little bit about one of my favourite recordings a guest has ever captured; the monks chanting at Chion-in Temple. The recording is up on the Kyoto, in Sound website if you’d like to to take a listen: kyotoinsound.com/audio-postcards/chion-in
The full interview has a lot more in it: how I ended up here, why I started taking other people out on these walks rather than going alone, what I actually think a good field recording is. If you’d like to have a read:
The full interview at Creative Field Recording →
Thank you for being here,
SJF
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