I just spent four hours straight with Robert Trivers, one of the greatest biological theorists of our time. For two of them, I had a digital voice recorder going, with a new battery carefully inserted and all the old tracks on it deleted, a tricky business without the manual. I checked after a couple of minutes to make sure it wasworking. I watched that the little red light kept blinking … ah, blinking. When I returned to my hotel room, exhaused but triumphant, it turned out that I had somehow switched on the voice operated recording function while deleting the old stuff in a coffee shop before the interview, and it only operated when people spoke very loudly. So I have a record of these two hours 35 minutes long and much of that is laughter. ha ha ha.
I think we go for quote approval on this story.
UPDATE: went back and did another forty minutes, with everything working. Now transcribed, though less funthan the original.
That’s the problem with these new all-singing all-dancing digital recorders. They have far too many options and settings – far too much to go wrong. I spent this afternoon in a field with three poets and a relatively lo-tech minidisk, being rained on steadily whilst they meditated upon the local wizard’s tower (what’s left of it) but thanks be to Beelzebub, all was safely gathered in.
I’ve never met a digital voice recorder I trusted. Some which have turned up for review could lay claim to be the most unusable, least reliable and most utterly misimagined devices to cross our desks since the C5 (and try getting one of those across a desk). But even my Pearlcorder dictaphone (the last analogue storage system in use here) has a mess of tiny switches that are easy to knock and overlook. The humiliation of journalists seems to be hard-wired into the universe.
Of course, even my phone has a voice memo system now – up to an hour at surprisingly good quality – and the iPod can be cajoled into recording. So I could deploy a multiply-redundant recording matrix at interview, in an attempt to defeat the proportional relationship to the expense, difficulty and importance of the interview with the chances of it going bumblechops.
It won’t help, of course. The Oh Jesus Fuck moments still await – as Louise found out when discovering a certain lack on a field recording trip earlier this week. Her reaction — “Shit in a bucket, some bugger’s got the adaptor” — on a train crossing the beauteous Firth of Forth caused some prim arse to chide her for polluting the ears of his precious toddlers. Her membership application for the King Herod Appreciation Society is in the post.
…and what, might I ask, is wrong with a recording of Laughter? I’d keep it, and would treasure it.
I’ll keep it and treasure it OK. But I can’t publish it. I mean, an interview which consists of fragments like “How the hell did that motherfucker survive for 4.5bn years? [prolonged laughter]” is not going to fill two pages of the Guardian.
I do travel with the insturciton manual for this thing. But I had left it in my room this morning, and onlty had the instruction manual fro the phone withme (which won’t, it turns out, work as a proper voice recorder).
Eek. That sounds so painful. But yeah it happens. You’ve just reminded me of the last time it happened to me: an interview with an asylum seeker, in very broken English. The only plus point (if that) was that we went over the same ground for hours because his English was so bad, just so I could actually understand, so by the end of it I knew his story off by heart. But that was no help with the quotes. Aaargh!
“I’ll keep it and treasure it OK. But I can’t publish it. I mean, an interview which consists of fragments like “How the hell did that motherfucker survive for 4.5bn years? [prolonged laughter]” is not going to fill two pages of the Guardian.”
Depends on the font.
R