Welcome to the 2025 version of Field Noise, the newsletter and website. As of this summer, I have owned this domain for 15 years, and over the course of that time, it has been a playground for a whole bunch of ideas and platforms. "Field Noise" started out as the working title of my dissertation, which was about the history of recording environmental sounds. It was a riff on Field Notes, of course, but it also pointed to the issues of sound, nature, and technology that I was really interested in then—and am still interested in now.
Even though I ended up going with a different diss title, the name stuck around for my website. The first iteration was a pretty straightforward WordPress blog, then it was a prototype for a sound studies "knowledge commons." At one point, it was a landing page for my Tumblr. It was a static Jekyll site for a while, and then it was the home of the Field Noise podcast, 1.0: an extremely short-lived show that had exactly one episode. I moved my Substack newsletter archive over here in 2022, but since then, it has just been sitting around.
Now it's a blog again. I mean, that word doesn't actually appear anywhere on the new site, but that's the spirit of it. It's a place where I just want to post stuff: audio pieces I'm working on, thoughts about old records and cool sounds, workflows and practices that I have developed over the years. If you are reading this in your email, then it's a newsletter. But it also exists on the open web. And if everything goes according to plan, this will also be where the new episodes of the Field Noise podcast will live.
Why now? Well, over the past year or so, as my kids have grown up (they are now 6 and 3, which feels insane), I have been able to find some more time to make work outside of Song Exploder. This summer, I had two new short little audio pieces come out (more on those in a future newsletter), and I also had some time to work on new ideas for the Field Noise podcast. Plus, I just plain ol' miss having a place to share what I'm working on, listening to, and thinking about.
This newsletter and website are hosted on a domain that I own using an open-source platform called Ghost. Because I can host Ghost myself, I can worry a little less about all of the nonsense that all-time great music blogger Wayne Marshall called "platform politricks" back in 2010. It is well documented that Substack has a Nazi problem, for example, and more generally it is hard to not feel fatigued with endless algorithmic feeds, recommendations, and cross-posts. Running Ghost on a domain and server that I (mostly) control is my attempt to reclaim some of that mental and digital space.
Of course, taking that position is not possible without an investment of time, energy, and money — things that I recognize are not available to everyone. I also leaned heavily on the expertise my friend and neighbor Marcus Trapp, web developer extraordinaire, who helped me get this site to look the way it looks. I gave him a very specific assignment: to riff on no-style-please, the greatest Jekyll theme ever. Would you guess that it takes a ton of work to make a website in the year 2025 look super basic? If you said yes, you guessed right. Marcus is a hero. Hire him for your web needs immediately.
All of the past iterations of Field Noise have fizzled, faded, or petered out. That used to bring me down, but now that I'm in my 40s and still struggling to balance work, parenting, partnering, and having a creative life, that just feels like the way it goes.
I still believe that the internet can foster positive shared-affinity communities, online and offline, so thank you for being a part of this one. If you like sounds, science, music, technology, or, I dunno, me as a person—you are in the right place. Who knows how long this will last, but I'm so glad to have you along for the ride.
To celebrate, here's a characteristically moody playlist for these early fall days.