Today, after a nice breakfast, I got a message from my new colleague Dominik, asking me and Amelie (the other new colleague) if we want to spend the day in the outskirts of Berlin where he owns a horse together with his wife. We happily agreed and soon found us in the same train, taking us out to the fields.
At first, I had my doubts whether we will be able to work at all but then I had the idea to bring my project on musical instruments for moments of solitude to an improvised first test (fieldwork in the literal sense, as Dominik pointed out).
For this, I brought
- a pair of open, high-quality headphones (Sennheiser HD600),
- a pocket synthesizer (OP-1 with six prepared synthesis presets),
- a field recorder (Marantz PMD 620), and
- a pair of microphones (OKM Soundman).
After a very brief introduction to the synthesizer (they both already had a brief peek at the OP-1 about three weeks ago), I asked my fellow workmates to do a 15 minute personal session with it, sitting alone on a tree trunk next to the staples. I conducted a brief interview afterwards.
Most of the time, though, we spend walking through the forests of Brandenburg, having an extensive picnic and discussing about our plans for the next weeks.
