As a listener, reader, social researcher, and citizen, I’m a great fan of good audio recordings and interviews and of field recordings in particular. There’s something about listening to what people have to say, recorded cleanly and fairly in their own voices, that I find stimulating, entertaining and enlightening. I don’t think of audio interviews as short stories, poems or novels, but as documents that are nevertheless akin to literature and, as such, objects that are worthy of cultural appreciation and critique. Audio recordings can also provide valuable data for social and cultural analysis, either on their own or when converted to written transcripts, which can then be annotated, indexed and coded. That makes them well worth attending to as a medium and method of social research.

As both documentary literature and data, audio recordings provide a distinctive way of depicting the interplay of voice, meaning and situation. Audio recordings allow us to feel that we’re listening to another person, for example, not just “encountering a text.” And in some sense we are, just not at the same time and place in which that person spoke.

Audio recordings enable us to discern deliberation, word choices and self-consciousness (or the lack thereof) in how someone speaks. These are reminders that talk is dynamic, flowing and performed, that one word does not follow another until someone uses her or his voice to make that happen. Audio recordings can also offer a leg up on understanding what people mean by what they say. That’s important to social researchers who want to understand what people think and do, not just the words they use, and it’s also important when we want to document forms of narrative and story telling that both illustrate and rely on subtleties of the spoken word.

Realizing the special virtues of audio recordings for both literary-documentary and social scientific purposes depends in part on the technical quality of the recording itself. When recording quality is so poor that there’s no audible difference between one voice and another, for example, we can forget that the words are coming from someone in particular. When a conversation is submerged by unwelcome ambient sounds, phrases become unintelligible and we can lose track of ideas and meaning. When an otherwise clear recording is fractured by bursts of static, or precipitous volume swings, we’re distracted from the flow and cadence of what a person says.

Problematics such as these frame three key challenges in making “good audio recordings”: First is the challenge of fidelity, or the level of acoustic detail and accuracy provided by the audio recording and how well this corresponds to the original sound source. Second is the challenge of integrity, ensuring that no additional or unwanted sounds are introduced by the recording equipment itself. A third challenge is selectivity, or the degree to which recorded sounds are inclusive of what we are interested in and exclusive of everything else.

Thoughtful efforts to address these challenges depend on an appropriate alignment of ideas and purposes with techniques and equipment. If the purpose is to create a set of personal voice memos or a written transcript, for example, trying to achieve broadcast quality standards of fidelity will be wasted effort. On the other hand, for the scientific analysis of audio signals and spectra–-a routine practice among ornithologists–-even broadcasting equipment can fall short of what’s required.

As these last comments suggest, there’s no such thing as a perfect audio recording, and there are different ideas about what’s good enough. These ideas reflect personal preferences for different kinds of equipment or effects, but they also reflect the fact that people make audio recordings for quite different reasons. Rarely are these reasons teased apart in audio recording accounts and guides in precisely the way someone would like to inform their next project (or understand shortcomings of their last). However, as described in the attached document (Recording Interviews), some general principles do apply in matching purposes to equipment, equipment to method, and method to methodology.