My name is Cathy Lane and I am one of the directors of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) a group of researchers based at the University of the Arts London. CRiSAP emerged out a growing department of Sound Arts based at London College of Communication in order to undertake research into sound as an artistic practice. Our main aim is to extend the development of the emerging disciplinary field of sound arts and to encourage the broadening and deepening of the discursive context in which sound arts is practiced. Much of our research is through individual and collaborative artistic practice. We currently have about 150 students studying at BA, MA and PhD level and field recording, the investigation of place, sound and the environment and what it means to record sound are among the core ongoing activities and interests of many of our students and staff.

Individual CRiSAP members  Angus Carlyle, John Wynne, Peter Cusack, Salome Voegelin, Ximena Alarcón and myself  and current PhD students Mark Peter Wright and Dan Scott are all in some way researching into and through the act of field recording. We all have different methods of and motivations for recording which informs our aesthetic choices of what to record and creative use of their recordings.

As a group CRiSAP has developed and disseminated thinking about field recording through books such as Autumn Leaves  and public events such as the  body, environment and human sound making an international  conference on sound and anthropology in collaboration with the department of social anthropology, University of St Andrews, Scotland;  The Uses and Abuses of Field Recording and the UK Field Fest  event as part of the launch of the Sounds of Europe project as well as  and numerous individual papers and presentations.

Over the next few weeks I will try and  give some kind of idea of the range of practices and types of activities, concerns and issues around field recording all over  the UK at the moment. This will include investigations into  places where sound arts are  heard and discussed including websites, blogs, collections, labels, sound maps, galleries, conferences and presentations as well as interviews with UK artists, curators and theorists.

The new sound of the week is a rather late welcome to 2012 and a reminder that the UK is an island. I grew up in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. A strong memory from my childhood is of the wind carrying the sounds of ships horns and hooters drifting up from all the ships in Cardiff docks on New Years Eve. Bill Thompson has kindly supplied this  recording of boats at midnight, New Years Eve on the North Sea near the village of Footdee. They are blowing their horns in celebration of the New Year and the Scottish tradition of Hogmanay.