As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been experimenting with posting brief field recordings (audio and video) on Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Part of this is just a matter of feeding the algorithm. There’s some value to making the sort of social media you want to see in the world. Part of this is just social engineering — you’ll attract and disinterest the parties you’d want to, respectively. Part of it is functionally algorithmic: to some degree, the systems will send you material related to what you yourself do. By putting out field recordings, the boomerang that is the algorithm may send some back. Part of it is just getting a sense for how such material functions in social media: how does relative silence, the quiet noise of daily life, as expressed in field recordings, sit within the largely exaggerated modes of Instagram and TikTok? How do captions, hashtags, and location IDs — not to mention the decision-making inherent in framing and editing — shape the otherwise mundane material?
I’ve been doing these for 30 seconds each. That is long enough to encourage spending the time, and short enough — especially for people not accustomed to listening to everyday sound — to not discourage engagement. It’s long enough to allow for some variation, and short enough to allow for choosing start and end points that isolate the underlying tone of a given space and time.