Editor’s Note: Today I bring you installment #4 of Sounding Out!‘s blog forum on gender and voice! Last week Regina Bradley put the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with race and gender. The week before I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, “loud.” That post was preceded by Christine Ehrick‘s selections from her forthcoming book, on the gendered soundscape. We have two more left! In the next few weeks we’ll have A.O. Roberts with synthesized voices and gender, and lastly Robin James with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy.

This week guest writer and professor Art Blake shares with us a personal essay. He talks about how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage. So, lean in…

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…