JO: We have this cultural idea attached to photography, and I think that the idea of phonography inheriting from it—of documentation of soundscapes—has sort of inherited that sense of: ‘this is a document, this is a representation of reality—it’s objective.’ And we have this feeling that photographs can be evidence, field recording can be evidence, these kinds of ideas. And of course, as we’re saying, so many choices, or so many implicit decisions are made—whether intentional or not, whether it’s by the author of the document, or whether it’s just inherent in the technology. So definitely, the technology and how you use it really colors what you end up hearing.

LM: I suppose as a composer you have to learn how to harness it, right? Because it almost seems that if you didn’t know what you were doing—not only with recording technology, but with digital audio workstations, or with Max or these other programs—they could actually impose their affordances on you as opposed to you using them as tools to realize your own intent.

JO: Right, any kind of tool is going to—whether it’s a hard limitation or not—it gives you a starting point and a way of thinking. So, the more that one is aware of those frames, the more that one can decide to take advantage of them, or to try and work around them, or to negotiate between those frames and their own aesthetic frame that they have internally for their artistic project.