Last month marked the beginning of the second phase of the PhD research: the fieldwork. Voice recording is central to my research design as it forms part of the interviews, observations and focus groups methods. The challenge for the latter two of these is to be able to clearly record a number of different people who are sat some distance apart.

My main recorder is an Olympus WS-311M
http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/2581_ws-311m.htm
which costs around ?70:

It’s easy to use (i.e. not many controls), is powered by a single AAA battery and can, claims the blurb, store up to 138 hours of digital recording. I won’t be testing this claim as I don’t want to risk losing a stack of recordings when I leave it on the bus (or leave them unsecured for that matter as there is no PIN-protection). The good news is that the Olympus makes transferring the file to your computer super-easy with it’s concealed memory stick design. Once you’ve recorded, pull the stick apart and voila, put it in your USB socket and transfer the WMA file to your computer:

The in-built mic is good and was road-tested last year in interview and small meeting (less than 10 participants) settings with acceptable results. Now into the PhD proper, I’ve erred on the side of caution and invested in a stereo mic which improves results with sources a distance from the recorder, and helps in the identification of voices with their position in the stereo field (i.e. whether they appear on the left or right channel).

In the field, the recorder has an easy-to-read display; useful as I neurotically checked it was still recording every five minutes. After three hours recording, the battery meter hadn’t dropped (I’ll report back later as to how long I can squeeze out of one Duracell).

I also used my iPhone as a back-up recorder, buying a relatively cheap (but well reviewed) mic from Amazon and using Apple’s own Voice Memos app. The backup failed. There appear to be two problems: firstly, when the phone goes into sleep mode, the recording does not continue in the background (unlike, say, using the iPod app). Secondly, the Voice Memos app seems to shut off after about an hour even if its not in sleep mode. A bit curious so will experiment with other non-Apple apps (eg iTalk, Recorder). Fortunately the Olympus hasn’t let me down as yet.

What I did capture was usable quality, albeit with a bassy hum in the background. It’s very much a second option, but as the phone is the one thing I never leave home without, it’s useful to have an option on hand at all times.

So some room for improvement, but the set-up passed the test of getting the job done in the field. Next tech-y post will be on tools to help with the glorious task of transcribing…