Social Scientists as Users: Searching for Recorded Sound in its Environment

Accessing complex information on sound production and its environment is crucial to social scientists. They need increasingly data derived from professional recordings that help to support conventional observations. The environment as sounding complex was in long-held opinions of media distributors a disturbing fact that had to be suppressed. In the best/worst case, side sounds were left unchanged to create a “lively” atmosphere for an anthropological sound recording or a sound recording for a special audience to which the place of the performance is of particular interest. The dog barking in the background of a village ensemble became then part of the marketed item.
In an archive, sound reductions do hopefully not take place. Nevertheless, sound environmental inclusions in certain recordings are considered to be side effects of the main recording project undertaken by collectors who did not purposely intended to record those noises. Ideally, they were searching for equipment that avoids it best. Unlike this approach, a project at Universiti Putra Malaysia and its Audiovisual Resource Centre for Performing Arts is running that tries to include purposely all possible sound environment from various distances and directions in which any recorded event is perceived. The paper will focus on the scientific potential of these recordings and the resonance among the users of these recordings in order to achieve more reliable research outcomes. Though small in number, researchers of very different areas in social sciences might become a strong and supportive group of future users.