Name: Diane Barbé
Occupation: Producer, sound artist, composer, field recordist
Nationality: French
Recent release: Diane Barbé's A Conference of Critters is out via Forms of Minutiae.

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Diane Barbéand would like to find out more about her work, visit her official website. She is also on Soundcloud.



When did you first start getting interested in field recordings?

I took a workshop in the South of France in 2017, led by the field recordist Felix Blume. At that moment, I knew I wanted to reconnect with sound and music, but didn’t know how, and spontaneously signed up for this workshop that took us all over the city to record trains, creaking doors, pigeons flying, and showed us a bit of editing techniques too.

The following year, I took another workshop organised by the same association, Phonurgia Nova, with an ornithologist and composer called Bernard Fort. Every day, we would wake up before sunrise to go and record the dawn chorus in the Camargue wetlands. Being in those environments, for hours, at the very magical moment when the day begins, standing still and just listening –that was a really elevated experience for me and transformed everything.

So I think that I got interested in field recording when I started listening deeply. An example from a field recording workshop with Ludovic Landolt in Camargue with Phonurgia Nova (2022).

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using field recordings captured your imagination in the beginning?

In that workshop, Bernard introduced us to one of his favourite composition techniques, which links the size of a “thing” and the kind of timescale that it operates in – he called it “chronobiology”.

Natural sounds (as opposed to recordings played back on a soundsystem) inherently describe the size, volume, material of their source. Through listening, we get a very deep, very ancient, very ineffable knowledge about where we are. With no particular training, anyone will be able to tell if they are standing in a small tight room or a big hall, provided they are familiar with these kinds of spaces already and provided that they bother asking the question.

We also learn about size and mass through sound. There is a direct relationship between the volume of a pipe – or string, or resonant chamber, or vocal chord – and its pitch: doubling the length of pipe brings the sound down by one octave, and vice versa. So manipulating sounds by slowing them down suddenly also expands the size of the emitter, which gets really interesting really quickly.



That’s how a lot of sound effects for films were made; I was told that they slowed down the sounds of a pig having trouble breathing to create the monstrous sounds of the Alien. In the case of birds, who sing too fast for us to fully register all their trills and delicate variations, it is also a way to be able to listen to them more acutely. And of course, as the birds get larger and larger with each deceleration, the forest also gets bigger; the distance between the trees increases, the reverb expands, and suddenly here you are, tiny listener in the middle of an immense woodland. You can be surrounded with giant toads and helicopter - like bumblebees with these new ears!

Slowing down is actually one of the few editing techniques that I used in my last album, along with EQ, and of course a lot of slicing and editing.

That same workshop also changed my perception of gear and the equipment that we think we need to do field recording. There is still a big financial gap if you want to get good microphones and recorders and be “pro”. Of course, Zoom recorders have created a lot of new possibilities and other companies, like LOM in Slovakia, are completely changing the market for reliable and affordable microphones. And yet there were always many ways of building microphones yourself, starting with contact mics and hydrophones.

One really interesting figure is Knud Viktor, a danish painter who lived in a remote sheepfold in the south of France; he built parabolas with washing machine parts, made his own quadraphonic mixer, built his speakers from scratch.



He had cables running all over the farm into rabbit nests and near the tree where lived a tawny owl: his scruffy, meticulous DIY approach was also key to opening new possibilities that are not just focused on a high definition of sound, but rather on a kind of relationship.

Working predominantly with field recordings and sound can be a very incisive step / transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

At the beginning of my practice, I was indeed working predominantly with field recordings, or rather just field listenings. For a long time, I didn’t care so much about the recorded media itself: rather, the practice was an excuse to go into meadows at dawn and to spend hours playing in the mud. When you become an adult, it can be hard to justify these behaviours, isn’t it? Not just to others but also to oneself.

On some field recording trips, sometimes, even if I like the sounds that are passing through the microphones, I don’t record at all: as a way of celebrating the ephemeral. The recorder and the microphones are part of the larger process of listening, and as a technology that extends or sharpens our perception they are good tools to get focused. But in the end, they are just means of achieving an end, for me.

In fact, most of my artistic practice is an excuse to explore the world in this poetic way that is opened by sound; a bridge that allows me to ask people where they like to go, what animals they like, and that will make them fetch a music instrument they hidden somewhere. It is a portal to giving my full attention to the leaves of the reeds by the lakeshore that sound so lovely when the wind blows through.

Eduardo Kohn talks about how every single event in the living world carries meaning; and we could see these processes if we gave our full attention to the dancing of these reed leaves, for instance. When we don’t, he calls that “the little deaths of every day life”.

Listening for me is a way of staying alive in this animated world. A beautiful example comes to mind, which is a text, poem and collection of “small sounds” by my friend and colleague Miki Yui.

What are the spaces/places/sound sources that you find yourself most drawn to?

I think there is always a question of attachment and affect in the moment of recording, in the situation that is being performed while recording. People will behave and sound differently once they know you are recording, and I wonder if other beings also sense the listening.

Pauline Oliveros describes a field that is co-created by the active listener and the sounds around them; she describes underlying forms and meanings that emerge out of the attention given by the listener – they influence the sounds, which in turn influence them, and this feedback loop manifests when there is conscious, active, listening. In her essay Quantum Listening (1999) she mainly discusses human music performance but which of course also applies to all sounds.

[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]

Last spring, a friend took me to a small animal refuge in the Black Forest, which he helps run. He goes there every day to feed mules, peacocks, chickens and hens, goats and sheep, who were all rescued from death in one way or another. With just a pair of omnidirectional microphones mounted on my headphones, it was such a beautiful way to immerse myself into all the interspecies relations that were ongoing, relations of mutual care, really.

All sounds signal some form of energy transfer, whether it’s the lick of a wave onto a pebble beach, or the firm and hairy lips of a mule grabbing dry hay and chewing. These relations tell us stories, they tell us about the world now, sometimes strange and unheard. But I also cherish the familiar, intimate, enchanted and personal.

Can you take me through the process of realising a field recording on the basis of a project or album that's particularly dear to you?

I’m working right now on a series of pieces that were all recorded outside, with brass and wind instruments. One of them was recorded in a train tunnel, which is one of the longest tunnels of central Europe, in the Black Forest. I encountered the space as I was hiking in the little hills in the area, and I had a little Zoom recorder in my backpack, so I took a few recordings of the tunnel empty, of a train passing by, and so on.

Back at home, I was playing around with spectrograms of the recordings and tried to identify the main resonant frequencies of the tunnel, and made a very simple drone score that we could play with Joan Jordi Oliver, on the saxophone, Joe Summers, who made a double harmonic slide flute out of copper, and I would bring my traverse flute.

So after carefully looking at the train schedules we went in there, set up the microphones, and started playing. The idea was that we would do several takes with different sustained tones, and then layer them, to see if overdubbing also works outside of the studio. And it does! This stuff is not released yet but soon will be on Joe’s label First Terrace Records.

Sometimes, field recordings can uncover surprising similarities between "natural sounds" and elements of human music. How do you interpret these and what is your own view on what connects these two realms and what sets them apart?

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on the connexions between some of the oldest sound instruments that we know of, and the origins of language, play, and music. I say sound instruments because they are bone flutes (made from vulture or deer bones) from the Aurignacian period, some 40,000 years ago, that may have actually been game calls: imitation instruments that could be used to call birds and deer. Probably for hunting, but then of course, the line between a strictly functional tool for survival, and a tool for play and entertainment, becomes blurry.

In the liner notes of a recent release of commercial recordings of bird imitators, a popular form of performance art documented in North America and Europe at the turn of the 20th century, the music researcher Ian Nagoski ponders about the implications of this practice: what influence might the imitation of birds, game animals and other forest sound events, have bad onto the shaping of human linguistics?

At what point, he writes in the liner notes of the cassette, “did imitative calls of other species assist our ancestors in hunting? [...] When exactly was it that a person was so adept at producing a call during a hunt that he was asked to do it again for the entertainment of others or taught it to his children as a life- skill?”

His questions are of crucial importance not just for musicology, but also in the evolution of creativity, language and communication as well. So the question for me isn’t about natural sounds resembling human music, but rather the contrary. I don’t think that there’s any form of music that isn’t, in one way or another, a mimic of whatever environment we are, and this includes machines and electronic music –because all of those are still natural.



There is a fine line between cultural exchange and appropriation. What are your thoughts on the limits of using field recordings?

This is a question that actually arose very recently, as one artist claimed that another was “stealing” their work and methodologies – when in fact, they were simply both putting hydrophones in similar-sounding environments.

Something strange happens with the idea of copyrighting when we work with field recording, can we really copyright that stuff? We risk objectifying the sounds as if they existed on their own, in a material and physical plane, removed from whomever or whatever sounded them. Besides, everybody hears and senses different worlds.

So field recording exists in this slippery area where real-world events occur, and they then become fixated onto a medium, be it magnetic tape or digital encoding. That act can’t be a casual thing, and of course this preoccupation is not exclusive to field recording and much has been written on appropriation and the role of the artist. It’s not an issue that I’ve solved, it will (and should) remain an interrogation, a call to question our practices. What are our intentions when going out to record? What relations of affect and exchange actually happen? Working with other humans, it is possible to have a conversation about this.

When I was in Thailand for a residency project, I recorded a lot of the voices of the people from the group, singing, talking, dancing. I tried to work ethically: discussing recording before it happens, discussing possible outcomes; then, as I was preparing a physical release of this album with the label forms of minutiae, I share the editing process, so that everyone involved could listen, give feedback, or ask to be removed. It was also important for me to name and credit all these voices, which is still not done so often and which has a long history of appropriation in the ethnomusicology world. There is a capture in the act of recording which needs to be acknowledged and consented to.

And with non-human agents, this is more difficult, of course. Wouldn’t it make sense to name all the birds and animal voices that appear on field recording albums, in the same way that we credit human musicians? I don’t have an answer to that but it’s a good question.