Field recordings and soundscapes do much more than reflect the sounds of nature.  They also delve into local culture and artificial sound environments; they serve as travelogues, historical statements, and calls to political action.  An environment once captured is never the same, and some are disappearing.

An exemplary field recording captures a specific place lodged in a fragment of time.  An exemplary soundscape edits sources to tell a larger story, opening a window to let the light in.  Each sub-genre serves as reflection and metaphor.  When combined, the ten releases on this list offer a fine cross-section of sound that is available in the outer world as well, if only we would listen.

And now, in alphabetical order, A Closer Listen presents the Top Ten Field Recording and Soundscape Releases of 2014.

Chris Silver T ~ Salty Spots (Impulsive Habitat)
A simple idea becomes an elegant meditation on memory as…

Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist, musician and critic. He is currently a full-time visiting artist at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has presented artworks at venues spanning the cultural spectrum from CBGBs to Tate Modern. His writing has been published in magazines, newspapers, and journals in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. He is the author of In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, Continuum, 2009 and One Reason To Live: Conversations About Music, Errant Bodies, 2006. His latest book, Against Ambience is published by Bloomsbury. He also blogs at Voice of Broken Neck. For comprehensive info visit: www.kim-cohen.com
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ER. We’re here primarily to talk about your new book Against Ambience, can you briefly outline some of its main themes/topics.

SKC. Against Ambience is an example of an endangered species – a book of good…

Editor’s Note: Here’s installment #3 of Sounding Out!‘s blog forum on gender and voice! Last week I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, “loud.” The week before that we hosted Christine Ehrick‘s selections from her forthcoming book; she introduced us to the idea of the gendered soundscape, which she uses in her analysis on women’s radio speech from the 1930s to the 1950s.  In the next few weeks we’ll have A.O. Roberts with synthesized voices and gender, Art Blake with his reflections on how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage, and lastly Robin James with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy.

This week regular writer Regina Bradley puts the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with the agency of…